The Julie/Julia Project

Thursday, September 19, 2002

You know that bit where the hero ventures behind the forbidding steel door after saying to the winsome little girl "No matter what you hear, don't open it," and then the door slams shut with a thundering sound, and all sorts of horrible shriekings and rippings are heard on the other side, and then a terrible, terrible silence, and at last the hero comes out again, battered but upright, and when the the winsome girl clutches him he winces so you don't know whether or not he's slowly dying of internal injuries?
This is like that.

For a week now the Project has forged on through several circles of hell -- the Moving Hell, the September 11th Anniversary Week at Downtown Development Agency Hell, the Soul-Sucking Dead-End Job Hell. I have eaten Oeufs en Croustades a la Bernaise at midnight, I've dropped peeled potatoes on rotting floorboards then picked them up and thrown them into the soup, I've been begged by my tearful mother to "Stop. Cooking. Please!" I've shrieked and wailed and bled and very nearly given in. But though you, my faithful readers, have not heard from me, the Julie/Julia Project has soldiered on. Verizon says they can't have our phone working until Friday -- we seem to have inadvertently moved to Sarajevo here -- so posting is touch and go, but my plucky webmaster-cum-husband and I will patch together a line of communication and we'll hold out, somehow.

When last I left you, we had already suffered one abortive move and had scheduled another for Tuesday -- September 11th Eve, and also the day Eric's parents were to arrive in town. I had originally planned to take the day off to help with the move, but my boss was aghast at the idea. "After the 11th would be better," was what she said, after she recovered from bugging her eyes out in disbelief. This, in hindsight, was utterly untrue, but at the time it seemed reasonable. So I abandoned Eric to the task of meeting the movers and getting our stuff from one outer borough to another. My boss said I could leave at two, but this also turned out to be a comforting falsehood. I got off work at 6:30. By that time, my scheme to cook a welcome dinner for Eric's folks was beginning to seem a tad farfetched. We had pizza. Then we drove the cats to Long Island City, en route to which one cat threw up all over her carrier, another beshat herself, and the third simply fell into the psychic abyss inhabited by war orphans and the sole survivors of alien invasions. The new apartment, a charming fixer-upper above a Greek diner in a promising patch of industrial wasteland, convenient to the Rikers Island bus, was an adjustment for all of us, that first night. We slept uneasily, smelling of cat shit as we did, listening to the lullaby of freight trucks on Jackson Avenue, and the occasional yowls of the traumatized cat crouching inside the bedsprings.

On September 11th, we ate quiche. Quiche a la Tomate, Nicoise, to be exact.

Still living out of boxes, in a new apartment, a year to the day after the day when we all thought -- underestimating as always the metastatic vitality of good old American capitalism -- that the world as we knew it had gone forever, I tackled not one but two longstanding food phobias -- olives and anchovies. I made the pate brisee on my pastry marble, and took pleasure in the fact that making pate brisee was beginning to not feel like a major undertaking. I rolled it into a ball and stuck it in the freezer, then made the filling. While chopped onions and tomatoes cooked on the stove I opened the jar of anchovies and fished out 8 filets. They had gritty spots on them, and tiny bristly bones, and I didn't know what to do about them. This is what results from food phobias -- ignorance. I did as much as I could see a conscientious pizza parlor chef doing -- ran each filet between my thumb and forefinger to get off anything really egregious. Then I chopped them up and mixed them in with beaten eggs, tomato paste, parsley and cayenne. The tomato mixture went into the egg mixture, then I put that aside because I hadn't rolled out and baked the pastry shell because I was distracted with all the boxes, plus Eric had been futzing with the TV and had found we had actual reception with actual channels, and he was watching some September 11th special, which so far I had been pretty much avoiding, but there it was now and they're like car wrecks, you're disgusted with yourself for watching but watch you do, anyway.

I rolled out the pastry dough. When it tore, I stuck it back together with my fingers. My fingernails still black with move schmutz. Oh well. I baked it for a few minutes, spending the time on the kitchen doorframe watching the horrorshow on the television. Then back to the oven, where I pulled out the pastry shell and poured the filling into it. The olives we had weren't pitted -- because unpitted olive are better, of course, more gourmet or something -- which made slicing them to put on top of the quiche a little annoying. But I did it, arranging olive slivers in "a decorative design", as JC suggested. I sprinkled it with cheese and olive oil and put it back in the oven.

Eric had bought some broccoli rabe to cook with the quiche, but it had gotten suddenly very late, and I couldn't bear the thought of cooking anymore, so I left it in the fridge.

The quiche came out twenty minutes later browned and puffy. The 9/11 special was over and all that was left was a bunch of moronic chattering on Fox Five news, so we turned the TV off and sat down to eat.

This quiche was totally unlike the last two I made. Rather than being smooth and custardy, this was chunky with tomatoes. The anchovies gave it an ever-so-slightly fishy tang. The olives were harder for me -- though obviously the flavors complemented one another, it didn't completely get me over my dislike of the sal srong olive taste.

We each had seconds, though. My eyes were drooping shut. The freight trucks rolled by, flashing their lights like Christmas. As long as I was cooking, and eating, I could banish thoughts of the looming days ahead.

Next on the Julie/Julia Project... The Egg Poaches at Midnight.

Serving poached eggs for dinner strikes my American bourgeois soul as ad hoc and a tad pathetic, and therefore perversely romantic. So it seemed like the perfect choice for dinner on the 12^th, which had turned out to be perhaps the second worst work day of my life, right below that one when I was working my first day as a waitress at Three Amigos restaurant and my elderly customer wound up marching into the kitchen to demand his tortilla basket. I had this notion, God knows why, that Oeufs en Croustades a la Bearnaise would be a simple, soul-nourishing dish. What was the hurry? It was just poached eggs in homemade pastry cups with mushroom sautéed in cream and a tomato béarnaise sauce – it’d be a snap!

I started cooking at probably 8:30 or so. First I made the pate brisee for the pastry cups, which has gotten pretty easy, but the problem is it has to sit in the freezer for an hour. So that alone would put us at 9:40 already. While it was chilling, I got to work on the eggs.

I had his idea that since I’d been poaching eggs every week, I was beginning to get really good at it, and that night I’d start turning out perfect ovular gems like a champ. It turned out, thought, that the magical transformation did not occur. We had six eggs in the refrigerator. Three eggs each, that would be plenty. Well, that plan was rapidly shot to hell when the yolks of the first eggs I tried to poach broke up immediately in to horrid yellow rags. Well, two would be enough for me. The second egg shredded as well. It looked like I was making egg drop soup. I scooped out the mess and started over, and on the second try managed to get them to hold together, kind of. Four eggs. It seemed a sad little amount, so this was when I began apologizing to my sainted husband. It was 9:15.

The eggs sat in a bowl of cold water while I got to work cleaning and chopping the mushrooms. Oh, sorry, did I say chopping? I meant mincing. Mincing 2 pounds of mushrooms. Mushrooms, as I’m sure you are aware, are very lightweight items. I minced for approximately an hour. 10:15. I sautéed them with butter and shallots – also minced, of course – then simmered them in cream and port (Australian port, whoever heard of such a thing, but it was recommended at Union Square Wines, and it was pretty good, actually – good enough for a second glass, I soon discovered.) Mushrooms done. It’s ten thirty.

Then it’s time to make the béarnaise, only crap, I forgot about the pate brisee, so that comes out of the freezer, hard as a rock, I have to hammer at it for a good little while with the rolling pin to soften it up, then I divide it in quarters and roll each one into a little circle, then lay each of them into a muffin tin. It’s taking me a long time to get this done, and the dough has gone from frozen solid to mushy, these will not be croustades at their flaky best. Fuck it. I throw them in the oven to bake without weighing them down like I should. Anyone who wants to donate some pie weights to the Julie/Julia Project should contact me asap.

Sauce Choron next. It’s béarnaise with tomato paste stirred into it. I will say that making these sauces is tremendously rewarding. It is when I am making a French sauce that I most feel like the most recent in an unbroken line of cooks, making something timeless. Julia is everywhere, of course, but when I am making béarnaise I can feel her beside me. I boil down vinegar and vermouth with shallots and tarragon. (Have I mentioned I’m going through a liter and a half bottle of vermouth every two weeks?) I stir in beaten egg yolks and tablespoon after tablespoon of butter – as much butter as the sauce can hold. I beat it constantly over a very low heat, and it thickens. I beat in the tomato paste. It’s a gorgeous warm red color, and I had never much like tarragon before, but this tastes lovely, fresh and rich at the same time.

Fuck! The pastry cups!

I manage to yank them out of the oven just before they go over to burned. Now all I have to do is reheat the eggs and the mushroom sauce, and we’re done.

“Eric, have I mentioned how much I really, really appreciate that you haven’t divorced me yet?”

“Where’s the corkscrew? Let’s get this damned wine open.”

The time is eleven forty-five. I heat everything without incident. I put two pastry cups on two plates. I spoon some mushroom sauce into each cup, then an egg, then a large spoonful of sauce Choron. They are things to behold – gaspingly lovely, very impressive. It is midnight on the dot, and my husband and I are eating Oeufs en Croustades a la Bernaise.

They are as lovely to eat as to look at. The runny yolks break open and meld with the sauce and the mushrooms, but the flavor of each element remains distinct. The pastry cup, though not flaky like it should be, is buttery and crisp and holds the whole thing together.

Two, as it turns out, is entirely too much.

By one am we are in bed, French eggs churning in our bellies, due to awake in five and a half hours. I’m fucking exhausted. But happy. Those eggs are what the Julie/Julia Project is all about. I daresay they’re the one thing in my life lately that has worked out just perfectly.

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