Tuesday, September 03, 2002

My Eric and I had a bona-fide yuppie experience yesterday. We went over to our new Long Island City loft apartment to tear up the tile in the kitchen, as I have been promising in previous posts we would do. After an hour and a half on our hands and knees with a chisel, we'd mostly gotten up the piece-of-shit beige linoleum and uncovered some older piece-of-shit-green tiling beneath. We were feeling a little depressed, but we went ahead and attacked the older tile after determining from my interior designer mother that there was only just a small chance that it was asbestos. And in moments, we hit wood! Not only that, but between the vinyl and the wood was some gorgeous, maybe 30s handpainted stuff with flowers and deco designs! Most of it was covered with tar and unsalvageable, but hey! Pretty exciting! We felt like really terrible archaeologists! We got the whole floor down to the baseboards, and then we found that over the acoustic tile, we have tin ceilings! Geez! Now if only the apartment was in the east village and I was making 200,000 a year, we'd be set! We were filthy and exhausted and I had to go back to my job as office grunt the next day. The Julie/Julia Project is all about extreme cuisine, but we'd eaten uninspired cheese burgers that afternoon at our downstairs diner (one of those joints that gets your hopes up asking how you like your burger, as if they care....) and if I had to eat roast chicken with cream sauce or steak with butter and bone marrow after that burger after that day, I'd simply drop dead. I'm no good to the Julie/Julia project dead. So we opted for the Potage au Cresson (Watercress Soup) and Quiche au Roquefort (Roquefort Cheese Quiche.) Light, satisfying, etcetera. Now all we had to do was the shopping. Ugh. The place we usually go for our weekend shopping trips is in Park Slope, some distance from Bay Ridge but easy to get to by car. It's got a pretty good selection, and is right next door to the "mouse store," where we go for our snake Zuzu's dinner. (I know, I know, not a pretty picture. I promise not to dwell....) We've gotten to a point where we've figured out when to go so the place isn't a madhouse, but the tile-ripping had gotten our schedule out of whack, so we got there during the crush. And it's Park Slope, so everyone there is a vegetarian and a parent, and I wind up feeling terribly superior and inferior at once, which interesting, I suppose, existentially, but pretty much crappy in actuality. I suppose I should be feeling at peace with the world standing in a long grocery line standing behind a skinhead mother buying organic fruit leather for her adorably dreadlocked son and in front of a couple with matching blue hair buying soy milk and Rao's marinara sauce, but instead I feel mostly like climbing the walls. Anyway we get home, and I start cooking. One thing I noticed while making my shopping list for week two was that there's a lot of repeat. The Potage au Cresson is Potage Parmentier I made on 8/30 with watercress tossed into it. I enriched it with cream instead of butter this time, and courted JC's ire by pureeing the soup with my handy Cuisinart SmartStick instead of squishing it up with a fork, thus risking making "universal pap." I was sparing with the rod, though, and we wound up with a somewhat smooth, grassy green, creamy soup with darker green flecks. The slight bitter bite of the cress seemed to clarify the taste. The quiche also was much the same as last week's Quiche Lorraine. I made the pastry in exactly the same way, and it took me less time and caused me less stress this time around. The filling was made with roquefort, cream cheese, butter, cream and eggs mixed together, seasoned with salt, white pepper, and paprika (meant to be cayenne, but I ran out.) I had to press the mixture through a sieve, which was sort of a pain in the ass but felt very authentic. Then I mixed in some minced green onions and threw it in the oven for half an hour.  It came out golden and set, firmer than the quiche lorraine, more like a cheesecake and less like a custard. I had been a little nervous about the Roquefort, being generally a bit squeamish about eating mold, but the sharp taste was sharpened by the richness of the other ingredients until it was like eating dirty bathtub grout only in the very best sense. Eric said it's the most "Frenchy" thing we've had yet. I'm flattered. I think. 7:26:40 AM    comment []