In a couple of months, when tomatoes and zucchini and eggplant are in season, go out and buy a couple pounds of each. Make sure they’re ripe. Back in your kitchen, throw some minced onions and garlic in a pot with a bunch of good olive oil. Puree some red pepper, and throw that in after the onions and garlic have been chilling for a while. Puree those perfectly ripe tomatoes too, pour those in and let everything sit while you roast that zucchini and eggplant in a hot oven. Mix all that good stuff together, add a mess of chopped basil and thyme and baby, you got a ratatouille goin’!

But don’t just dig into your ratatouille just yet, nooo. Throw it into the fridge, let all those flavors get real cozy with each other. Take it out the next day (or the day after that), let it come to room temp (or heat it further, up to you) then go crazy with it. Time makes it that much better.

Kind of like memories. We remember our pasts fondly, seeing past events through rose-tinted glasses (not rosé tinted, although you’d probably remember events just as fondly). The more time that passes, the easier it is to forget the annoying things about that one friend, why you decided to end the night early, how spicy those chicken wings actually were and what a bad idea it would be to eat them again.

Pictures and videos make this even easier, of course — who takes pictures of the bad moments? No, in the pictures you post on Facebook of that one road trip where you managed to get two flats and it rained four out of the five days and one person decided that was the weekend to start protesting animal testing by forgoing deodorant, you’re all smiling, the sun’s shining and there are even rainbows in the background from all that rain. Then when you go back and look at those photos, of course you think that it was the greatest trip ever and want to call everyone up to go again.

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about my summer after freshman year, puttering around China with the Stanford Symphony Orchestra. I keep thinking about it, because I’ve been running into a lot of friends from that trip the past couple of weeks, and when we reminisce about the tour, the unanimous feeling seems to be that it was a pretty bomb trip, one of the highlights of Stanford.

And it absolutely was, don’t get me wrong. We got to ride down the Li River on our way to Guilin and see mountains and scenery that are on Chinese money. We got to play in some amazing venues, like the Great Hall of the People and the National Center for the Performing Arts (the Egg), that gorgeous new opera house in Beijing. I had my first xiaolongbao, and I ate steamer basket after steamer basket of them for what I would pay for a value meal at McDonald’s here.

But if I really think hard about it, I can start to remember what we were actually feeling at the time. That Li River cruise was great, for sure, but it was also hot, muggy and so long. Those venues were probably the coolest places many of us will ever play in, but by the time we got to Beijing, we were all just so tired that we didn’t appreciate it as much as we could have. Those xiaolongbao were delicious, but…okay, no, I’m definitely remembering those correctly, those were just bangin’.

But even if we can fight our self-inflicted brainwashing and remember things as they actually were (or think they actually were), why? Maybe you want to remember the bad things so that you don’t accidentally repeat them? Not a bad idea, but I feel like you’re going to remember anything that’s really bad anyway, and maybe it means something that you forget about the other not-so-great things.

Besides, having this ability to remember only the good things or even to remember the bad things fondly? It’s PRETTY COOL. It means you can forget about your sloppy moments and not feel so self-conscious about them going forward. It means you’ll probably have more good memories than bad memories, which should be a good thing. It means you don’t even have to worry about trying to make things good, because you’ll remember them as being good! Well, maybe that last one’s pushing it. But point taken, right? Just like you should let those flavors do their thing in your fridge, let your brain do its magic.

And if you really want to, you can eat that ratatouille right after you make it. You’ll probably remember it as being awesome anyway.

 

Tim knows you want to make ratatouille when tomatoes are in season. He’ll send you a recipe if you ask nicely, [email protected].