Metaphysics of Food: Ratatouille for Rat zodiac lady

The comedy animation movie: Ratatouille (about a talented Rat guiding a novice cook in the fine art of French cuisine to revive the ailing business of a once famous Parisian restaurant by touching the heart of a cold food critic with the taste of the Ratatouille dish. The Ratatouille, sincerely cooked by the rat, brought back cherished childhood memories of the food critic’s mother preparing this dish lovingly for him. It was a taste that converted the food critic to a fan.)

Fantasy aside, the Ratatouille, which is a vegetable stew hailing from Provence, south of France, is indeed a labour-intensive dish which I opted to prepare for my mother on her birthday. There are two reasons why I chose to attempt this dish: firstly, my mother had to take vegetarian food on her birthday and the vegetables in this dish represent her lucky element based on her Chinese Astrology chart: the Wood element. Secondly, the name Ratatouille & the animation movie are linked to a talented Rat chef; my mother was born in the Rat year and she is a popular cook of mainly Asian cuisine among her relatives of chefs and my father’s business partners and clients. Thirdly, I am trying to convince her that French food can be healthy too! Among my French recipes resources including my modern Cordon Bleu cookbooks, the cookbook entitled Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, has the most similar method of preparing the Ratatouille (page 535) like how it was shown in the animation movie. Each type of vegetable is sautéed separately and then layered one on top of the other so one could enjoy the individual texture of each vegetable of the wholesome dish. When a dish is prepared with loving care, it has healing benefits to the people who eat that dish. This is why many children are ardent fans of their mothers’ cooking as the mothers prepare the food with the intention to nourish their children and the resulting positive energies from the loving thoughts are transmuted into the dish itself. Additionally, I prepared a starchy dish from the same book. The name of this dish is Gratin Dauphinois (page 555). It is simply Potatoes baked with cheese and milk. When translated in each language, potatoes in French (Pommes de Terre) literally means Apples of the Earth while in Mandarin (土豆 read in hanyu pinyin as tu dou) literally means Beans of the Earth. The Chinese metaphysical significance of preparing this dish for my mother stems from the fact that she was born on an Earth day thus making her an Earth person (potatoes are earth element root vegetables). The milk for enriching this dish is metal element as it comes from the cow and the cow/ox is the storage of Metal. Moreover, ox zodiac is brings friendly energies to her rat zodiac. Metal element for an Earth person represents his/her creativity. In this case, metal is my mother’s favorable element. Therefore this dish is metaphysically good for her energies. In this way, I am also honoring her creative talents in cooking. This dish is one of my favorites during my studies in Vichy, France many years ago. My kind French lady host prepared it for me daily and the good taste helped me avoid missing too much of my mother’s cooking. Bon Appetit.