Monday, September 09, 2002

Poulet Roti a la Normande, Champignons Sautes au Beurre, et Pommes de Terre Sautees; Or, How to Master the Art of French Cooking Out of Cardboard Boxes How's this for typical? It's Sunday morning. We arise early, all set to make our big move to Long Island City. The moving guys are set to come at two. Eric peeks out the door of the apartment to grab the paper and, lo, hears the telltale buzzing and elderly hullaballooing of a stuck elevator. Co-op policy rules that one may only move heavy objects in and out of the building through said elevator. The super, Mike, assures us the repair company's been called, and tells us he'll let us know once he's heard something from them. Mike's a nice guy and all, but we're thinking we'd better contact the movers. Only, Lo!, Eric's left the number at work. He tries to go online to find the number for the company, which may or may not be called "UW Movers," and yet again Lo!, our internet's down. This cosmic confluence of ineptness and shit luck is the essential quality of my life. We get word that the elevator won't be fixed until tomorrow. Eventually Eric manages to squeak in five minutes on the server before it comes down like an anvil again, and we get a hold of the movers, who are very nice about it and agree to reschedule for Tuesday. This is not before several transcontinental calls to parents with DSL fail to provide us with the information we seek, and also not before I have a tense conversation with a co-op board member through a cracked door, in which said co-op board member mutters that he can't help me and asks me why I scheduled the move on a Sunday, which the board "frowns on," to which I reply with precious little of the Southern-girl charm my mother taught me, "So I don't lose a day's pay?!", not including the epithets I keep in reserve for people who don't have to work for a living. (Have I mentioned I hate co-op boards?) Upshot being, here we are all packed up with nowhere to go. Last night I had oh-so-presciently packed up all my cooking gear, because I wouldn't be needing it anymore, not in Bay Ridge. Talk about tempting fate. Now I have a three-course meal planned, and nothing readily available to cook it in. The joys of the Project! Huzzah! Throwing the last shreds of my sanity to the winds at around five o'clock, I dig out some utensils and pots -- wasting precious packing tape, but such is life -- and begin on Roast Chicken Basted with Cream, Herb and Giblet Stuffing, Potatoes Sauteed in Butter, and Mushrooms Sauteed in Butter. The stuffing first. I find the giblets this time where they're meant to be, in a paper bag in the chicken's bum. Julia asks me to mince the gizzard, after peeling it. Would you believe I don't know what a gizzard is? I find it strange, myself; it's a word that's been rattling around in my brain pan a long time. I know it isn't the liver. But I have several other objects here before me. We make another long distance call, and after some discussion, Eric's dad clears it up for us. The thing that looks like half a gizzard is the heart. The thing that looks like two hearts stuck together is a gizzard. So I mince the thing like two hearts, and saute it in butter. After two minutes, I add the liver, shallots, and the thing like half a gizzard, chopped. Clearly the gizzard thing and the heart thing are exactly the same, so I don't quite understand the purpose of adding them at different times, but no matter. It smells intensely, more like beef than poultry to my mind. I take it off heat and mix it with bread crumbs, cream cheese, parsley, thyme, and a bit more butter for luck. I stuff it into the chicken and pin up the chicken's cavity with some little metal skewers I have hanging around for some reason. The chicken looks even more than chickens usually do like something out a book of sado-masochist fetish photography. I stick the chicken back in the oven and roast it as usual (I have by now, for better or worse, completely abandoned Julia's turning-the-chicken-and-basting method.) I move on to the potatoes. I know I'm in trouble when Julia says that "the cooking is rather exacting." "If you were living in France," says Julia, "you would buy smooth oval potatoes 2 to 2 1/2 inches long, with yellowish flesh, pommes de terre de Hollande." Well, we're none of us in France. So instead I spend the better part of an hour cutting new potatoes into "elongated olive shapes all the same size." I "cut them smoothly, so they will roll around easily and color evenly when they are sauteed." Julia doesn't mention the bit about the vodka tonic, but I find that it smooths the process a bit. By the time I finish, it's time to start basting the chicken with cream. The chicken is not browning the way it usually does. Eric says I should blame the sorry state of the industrial poultry complex. I'd be happy to, but I think I'm probably just screwing something up. If I could post pictures, you'd at this juncture see an extremely provocative image of me spurting white stuff onto a busty chicken with something that looks like it should be stored in a horse breeding barn. But, all you good people's kind help aside, I haven't gotten quite smart enough for that yet. So you'll just have to trust me when I say it was pretty suggestive. I saute the potatoes in butter. They really do roll around in the pan so nicely, being smooth and olive shaped. They brown very evenly. After all this, sauteing mushrooms in butter doesn't even really bear mentioning. I put butter in the pan. I heated it up. I threw the mushrooms in with some shallots and I cooked them. The chicken, though isn't browning right, and the cream has kind of curdled down to nothing in the pan. It must be because of the stuffing. After awhile, the legs seem done and the juices are clear, so I give up on it, although the breast isn't all that enticingly brown yet. I put the chicken on a plate and boil down the drippings with some beef broth. The cream is disappointingly not in evidence, so I throw in a good bit more than Julia suggests at the end. That does it. The three dishes go together perfectly. The potatoes have been salted and tossed with butter and parsley. They're pretty much the perfect potatoes. Brown and buttery and olive shaped. The chicken's good -- it's roast chicken with cream sauce. The mushrooms are mushrooms. The stuffing though. Wow. Eric wants me to make this stuffing for Thanksgiving from now on. Now I'm a Texas girl, and if I were to abandon cornbread dressing I'd be lynched, but the man's got a point. This is some excellent, excellent shit. Smooth, rich, intensely chicken-y and creamy. Can you put cream cheese in corn bread dressing? This is a point I'll have to consider at length. 7:41:09 AM    comment []