Writing as Self-Care When Grieving and Grilled Ratatouille
Finding comfort in late summer and early fall
September is teasing me. I am ready for fall. I live in the northeastern United States and some days the air playfully bites at me as I gaze up at bright red maple leaves, and other days it is still hot and summery even though I want to wear a sweater. Farm stands are offering me mums and sugar pumpkins while also trying to move the last of their eggplants and tomatoes. Accordingly, September’s issue of Tender at the Desk and Stove offers you a recipe for Grilled Ratatouille to help you use up the last of your late summer vegetables while cooking by open fire on a crisp autumn night.
This month’s essay is on writing as self-care, as inspired by my upcoming workshop with Lisa Weinert of Narrative Healing— Writing As A Pathway to Self-Care. It is a two-part workshop being offered to our respective alma maters’ alumnae. Please email me at laura@laurakhoudari.com if you would like to learn more about hosting workshops.
And before we jump into the rest of the newsletter, I want to share some cool news with you: I was a runner up in The Audacious’ Book Club essay contest last month! The book I recommend at the end of this newsletter in Until Next Time, is also this month’s book pick over at
Writing As Self-Care When Grieving
Summer is often portrayed as the joyous and bountiful season. It is three months of melted popsicles, sweat on skin and ice-cold beverage cups, and long days with longer vacations. But it is never just those things because life—mine and everyone else’s—unfolds without a care for the calendar. This summer had fun moments; I also experienced remarkable grief. I lost my sweet little Gigi - a tiny tuxedo cat that was my familiar. My ex-husband’s father passed away leaving me to mourn quietly, because I was unsure how to express my love and feelings of loss without a firm footing on the family tree. A knee injury led to canceled trips, as well as a tremendous sense of loss when it comes to moving my body. And by summer’s end I was left cut up that I didn’t have a summer that was without pain beyond sunburns and mosquito bites.
To cope with all of this, I wrote. And I felt a bit better.
Writing can be an act of self-care. Author Jamie Anderson astutely describes grief as just love with no place to go. Writing can give it a place to go. In writing about what happened, I make sense of it, and put some of my displaced love and other big feelings in my journal and in my essays.
Oftentimes, I feel myself resist telling the story directly. That’s when I know I am not ready yet to go right to its center. I still write. I often then write the headline of what happened, for example: Gigi died today. And then I add: and I can’t write about that yet. Once I let myself off the hook of writing the narrative directly, I write around it by chronicling what I did before or after. In the case of Gigi I wrote about the trip I took after and how she kept coming up in my thoughts. Other times I might try to memorialize the details of what I ate that day, or the chair I was still sitting in when I received bad news. I note the quality of light and how maybe it is cutting sharply through blinds or dancing through maple leaves.
And when I feel I have captured the setting or the days’ lists of errands and what I wore to run them, I am more present and grounded than I was when I started because I have told the story safely without taking me back to the moment of upset and overwhelm. This is a technique used in Somatic Experiencing, a body-oriented modality that helps heal trauma and other stress disorders. In Somatic Experiencing you work with the time before and after a trauma long before you process the moment itself. This is also a technique I have heard from a couple of writing instructors because in many cases it makes for better writing.
If you are curious if this might work for you, the next time life kicks you in the shins, I invite you to try writing a bit about it. Set a timer for ten minutes and write the headline of what happened and then your own version of “but I am not writing about that now,” and then capture the details around it from the morning before or the morning after.
Grilled Ratatouille
There’s a reason we don’t grill ratatouille, well maybe there are a lot of reasons, but mostly ratatouille is known for its silky texture having been slow cooked in fat. I forgot this detail when I decided to make grilled ratatouille this summer. And then I remembered after I had already started and I panicked! Oh no! I declared thinking about the eggplant, summer squash, and red bell pepper cooking away on the grill. My veggies will be dried out! But non, non, non, they were not and I was able to bring about that silky consistency.
For folks who don’t know ratatouille beyond Pixar’s Ratatouille, it is a humble looking Nicoise stew of onions, garlic, peppers, summer squash, tomatoes and herbs. Despite appearances, when done right it is a jewel of a dish. It showcases late summer vegetables and each bite initially gives your teeth a little feedback; and then the vegetables, browned in olive oil before stewed, should give way to a creamy moment in your mouth. It is my summertime comfort food.
What I have learned is that the trick to making ratatouille is browning the olive oil soaked vegetables separately before stewing them together. This technique keeps the flavors from being muddy and yields a lovely texture. Traditionally this technique has been done in the pot. Cookbook author Melissa Clark says that a more modern technique is to cook the ratatouille in the oven—browning the vegetables minus the tomatoes and garlic first, and then cooking it all together in a baking pan. Historically I have embraced a hybrid approach, roasting the eggplant and summer squash in the oven, and then layering and finishing the process in a big heavy pot on the stove.
This summer I decided to try the hybrid approach but with the grill. While I didn’t want it to taste like a barbecue, I did want to impart a little grilled flavor on my eggplant, squash, and red pepper. Simultaneously, I wanted to let the onions and garlic slowly soften to keep them sweet before incorporating them with the tomatoes. This approach allows the eggplant, squash, and pepper to maintain their bite and have a little grilled flavor even after being stewed with the rest.
Ingredients
Olive Oil (a generous amount)
1 eggplant cut in ½ inch thick rounds
1 or 2 summer squash or zucchini trimmed and halved lengthwise (I only ever use one)
1 red bell pepper cored and left in large pieces
4 cloves of garlic thinly sliced
1 thinly sliced white, yellow, or sweet onion
herbs de provence or a couple sprigs of fresh thyme
Approximately 5 plum tomatoes worth of tomatoes seeded and diced. (In this version I used two small tomatoes on the vine and two pints of heirloom cherry tomatoes halved and seeded.)
Salt
⅓ cup torn or sliced basil
Generously brush the summer squash, eggplant, and pepper with olive oil and cook on a clean and preheated grill for 4 minutes per side over direct medium heat. Remove from grill to platter.
Cook the 4 cloves of sliced garlic and a thinly sliced onion in a dutch oven or heavy pot on the stove over medium heat. Sprinkle with dried herbs de provence if you are using. I can’t tell you how much because I never measured because I gave up measuring a lot of things this summer, but I will guess 1-2 Tbsp. Cook until the onions are turning clear and soft—maybe 10 minutes.
Chop the grilled vegetables when they are still warm but cool enough to handle, (probably as your onions cook.) Dice the eggplant into ½ inch cubes; slice the squash in ½ inch half moons, and dice the pepper into ½ inch pieces. Drizzle more oil on the still warm, chopped, grilled vegetables if they seem at all dried out.
Add the tomatoes to the pot of onions and garlic. Add thyme if you are using. Add salt to taste. Turn down the heat. Cook for another 10 minutes over medium low.
Add all the grilled veggies to the pot and lower the heat to a simmer. Cook for about 30 minutes. Remove from the heat.
Stir in basil.
While I sometimes serve this as a side, generally I fix myself a bowl of ratatouille and top it with an egg over easy and then drizzle the whole dish with a super rich balsamic.
READ: I just read The Rich People Have Gone Away by Regina Porter — an unputdownable novel that I would not have even picked up if it hadn’t been recommended to me by so many folks online that I respect.
COOK: I often cook this Oven-Roasted Chicken Shawarma at the beginning of the week to ensure plenty of cooked chicken for lunches during the week.
LISTEN: I don’t know what to tell you—I have been stuck in the 90s this month. Listen to A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory.