Sunday, September 01, 2002

Sunday -- Leftovers and Contemplation After a week of the Julie/Julia Project, and a particularly frustrating day of moving preparations, tonight seemed a good opportunity to take stock. Quo Vadimus? Today for brunch I poached egg per JC's instructions -- i.e., without one of those nifty egg poachers that makes the eggs all nicely shaped. Mine were not nicely shaped. But I draped them in a bechamel sauce enriched with butter, and they were good. And here's the kicker. I had never in my nearly thirty years of life eaten an egg, but I ate one today. So that's where I am. In a week of this experiment, I have cooked 14 recipes, but mostly I ate my first egg. At this point, it's one week down, 51 one to go, and that's a pretty intimidating place to be. Tomorrow I have to go pull up tile between exercising, packing and cooking a three-course meal, this on a holiday. I don't know if I'm going to manage this thing, but I feel more than ever that it's something worth trying. Plus, Eric and I lost half a pound each. What's that all about? An aside on food insanity. I just read the article in this week's New York Times Magazine on Raw Foodism, and so this is no amazing observation, but Jesus Christ!! Two things strike me about this unfathomably ignorant trend. The first is, how male it is somehow, how Fast and Furious. "You're a vegan. Big fucking deal -- I don't heat my food. Take that!" And wow, the power of self-righteousness. The guy says he's never felt so good -- well, yeah, because nothing feels better than being better than everybody else. And the third thing is -- yeah, I decided I had three points -- My God, how sad. There is precious little comfort in this world. Why take food, one of the very few simple comforts, and turn it into an obstacle? Why rob yourself of one of the few honest pleasures you'll ever know? Tonight for dinner my Eric made us roast chicken tossed with green beans, red onions, red wine vinegar and olive oil. It wasn't as good as when we do it with tuna, but using the leftovers imaginatively felt virtuous. We're going to watch our Netflix DVD as soon as I finish this, and relax. Tomorrow, we begin again. Isn't that always the way? 9:48:17 PM    comment []

Poulet Roti, Champignons a la Grecque, Carottes a la Concierge, et Creme Brulee. (Roast Chicken, Chilled Mushrooms Cooked in Aromatic Broth, Casserole of Creamed Carrots with Onions and Garlic, and, um, Creme Brulee. Kind of.) Now this is what I'm talking about. It's a gorgeous fall day, albeit one in August. I putter around in the kitchen while my Eric watches football, and the chatter of the pre-game show arouses both irritation and nostalgia. I am making Champignons a la Grecque, which has no butter, and so I'm feeling virtuous. On the stovetop a vegetable broth with olive oil, lemon juice, celery, parsley and spices simmers away. The mushrooms lay quartered and ready on the chopping board. You should know that my Eric and I started our morning by signing a lease on a scary loft apartment, which begs the question of my faithful readers, "Can Julie Master the Art of French Cooking While Moving to Long Island City?!" But I have chosen not to think of that for now. Instead, I am contemplating with a pleasant frisson of anticipatory dread the Creme Brulee. After mushrooms have cooked, while they cool, I make the pralin that will go on top of the creme brulee, which will render the creme brulee not creme brulee at all but Creme Anglaise Pralinee. (This thing with the names touches on a problem with recipes in this book, which I'll go into later.) I make the pralin by carmelizing sugar, stirring some slivered, toasted almonds into it, then pouring out the mess of it onto my greased pastry marble. It is extremely satisfying, quintessential Saturday afternoon cooking. And I have never been so happy to have my marble, which was a wedding gift and has served mostly aesthetic purposes in the going-on-five years since. While it cools, we go to the hardware store to get a tile chisel and some silicone and garbage bags. When we get back, the house smells heavenly. The pralin comes up off the marble like a charm -- it's beautiful thing. I break it up into pieces and run it through the cuisinart, which transforms it into a golden, somewhat moist powder, like coarse brown sugar. Now to the creme brulee. This is one of those scary recipes that involved pouring hot things into cold things in thin streams while beating vigorously but not too much, where milk can curdle, butter separate, egg yolks congeal. Julia's descriptions usually bring me much comfort, but today she only intones obscurely. I'm meant to beat the egg yolks and sugar "until the mixture is pale yellow and forms the ribbon." Granted, she refers me to another page where this enigmatic phrase is expanded upon, but there she only terrifies me by saying that "when a bit is lifted in the beater it will fall back into the bowl forming a slowly dissolving ribon on the surface of the mixture. Do not beat beyond this point or the egg yolks may become granular." Granular?! I heat the egg and hot cream mixture in a saucepan, stirring constantly, until the "sauce" -- sauce? I'm making a sauce? -- "thickens just enough to coat the spoon with a light, creamy layer." I have no idea what this means. Doesn't liquid pretty much always coat a spoon? "Do not," says Julia, "let the custard" -- now it's a custard? -- "come anywhere near the simmer." I'm meant to be using a candy thermometer to assist in this determination, but I lost my candy thermometer in a nasty incident involving mercury-tainted fried chicken some time back, so I have to muddle through without. When the coating looks creamy-ish, I take it off the heat, beat in some vanilla, and set it aside to cool. The distinctly liquid nature of it is leading me to suspect this is not going to be creme brulee as I know it. The dessert illustrates a problem inherent in the Julie/Julia project. Many of the recipes are for base ingredients for more elaborate recipes, and I find myself walking a fuzzy ethical line here, between working through the book in a linear fashion and making thing I can actually eat. I began by making Creme Anglaise, but it soon became clear this was intended more as a sauce than a dessert on its own, so I went to the next recipe, which doesn't have its own ingredient list, and is just Creme Anglaise with a bit less sugar and more cream, and is described as being, when served with pralin, a dessert by itself or with fruit. So what have I made? What recipes can I consider myself to have done? There are no blacks and whites here, only endless shades of gray. Now I move on to the Roast Chicken. I have to say that I find Julia's roast chicken recipe to err on the precious side. First, she wants me to truss it in the French manner, which involves something called a trussing needle. Shockingly, I have gone through my life to this point without obtaining such a tool, and so I must cop to turning to the Joy of Cooking for an alternate method. I most likely would have skipped the step altogether, but Julia wants me to flip the bird this way and that throughout the roasting, and I'm not expert but I imagine a trussed chicken as easier to flip than a non-trussed one. So I hogtie the thing, butter it, throw some chopped carrots and onions around it, and stick it into a 425-degree oven. Five minutes later, I turn it onto its side and baste it. Five minutes after that I turn it onto its other side and baste again. After that I can turn down the heat and quit with the flipping for awhile, though I keep basting. I start chopping the carrots and onions for the Carottes a la Concierge. Most of JC's serving suggestions for roast chicken involve potatoes, but my body has gone into an anti-carb revolt, so I've gone with the carrots. I put them in a pot with some olive oil to cook. Time to baste the chicken. At the halfway mark of the anticipated cooking time for the chicken -- which Julia suggests is 1 hour, 15 to 30 minutes for my 4-pounder -- I turn the thing onto its other side and, yes, baste some more. The carrots in the roasting pan are getting black. The carrots and the onions on the stove top are getting tender. At an hour, I flip the chicken breast up. It smells great, but then all roast chicken does. I'm supposed to know that it's done when I hear "a sudden rain of splutters in the oven." I miss this unmistakeable indication; Eric's watching "King of the Hill," so maybe I got distracted. But at an hour and fifteen minutes the leg is wobbly in its socket, so I take it out and put it on a platter to rest while a cook down the drippings for gravy and finish off the carrots. Into the carrots I stir in egg yolks beaten with cream. I'm supposed to stir over low heat until the cream thickens, but I must be bad at this thickening thing, because it doesn't seem to do much. After awhile I've decided it's probably done and I serve. The chicken is pretty good. It's roast chicken. The breast is a little dry, and the skin seems not quite as crisp as it is when I do roast chicken my way -- i.e., pour some olive oil on it, salt and pepper, and stick it in the oven awhile. Overall, its seems like a lot of work for not much improvement. Though the cats seem to like it just fine. So the moral is this: Julia Child is great and good and knows everything. But nobody know how to roast chicken better than you. Or me. As the case may be. The carrots are good, mostly because they're creamy, and not too sweet -- the onions help with that. Nobody much eats cooked carrots anymore, do they? The mushrooms are delicious on their own, but they don't quite go with the meal. They taste like something that should be tossed on top of a salad. I can tell that this "Cold Buffet" chapter is not going to be an easy fit with my lifestyle. I'm going to have to start throwing a lot of cocktail parties or something. It is some time before we feel up to attacking the creme brulee, or creme anglaise, or whatever it is. I take it out of the fridge. I have read that very well-respected chefs at three-star restaurants serve dessert soups. I sprinkle the pralin top. It mostly sinks to the bottom. I run it under the broiler, which patently does not have a miraculous thickening effect. I eat my soup. It's pretty yummy. I spent the remainder of my evening a groaning mess on the couch, far too nauseous to pay due attention to "Waking Life." 11:11:50 AM    comment []