Friday, September 20, 2002

Everything was going so well.  Or rather, most things were going very very badly, but the Project was moving right along.  I was cooking nightly, dramatically, and no matter what trials we went through, at the end of our very long days, we were eating beautiful things.   You know how it is that you’re really a brilliant parallel parker, you have style and confidence and ease, but whenever you find a space that happens to be watched over by an elderly Brooklyn octogenarian in a wife beater and black socks, you start too far out and cut too deep, and the space seems determined to evade your boat of a car’s advances, and the more the old guy yells at you about your tire being on the curb and asks whether or not this is a commercial vehicle or not, because they’re really cracking down around here with the tickets, the more you know you’ve lost the battle, and eventually you have to either leave the car shamefully kattywompus or drive away with your tail between your legs?   Well, that’s like me and cooking.   Saturday was Eric’s birthday.  We were to have Eric’s parents and the alleged Helen over for dinner.  I figured, no sweat, we’ll clean the house all day, then whip something up.  The menu was challenging, but not insane: Poulet au Porto (Roast Chicken Steeped with Port Wine, Cream & Mushrooms), Risotto, Oignons Glaces a Blanc (White-braised Onions), and a dessert of Crème Plombieres au Chocolat (Chocolate Cream.)  I had even made the very mature decision not to make the chocolate almond cake, birthday or no, because that would be stretching myself a little thin.  I would make the Celeri-Rave Remoulade (Celery Root in Mustard Sauce) if I could find the celery root, but I would not stress out about it.   Around midday we went shopping.  It was my first Long Island grocery experience, and I have to say it was not particularly encouraging.  We went to Western Beef first, which of course I liked right off the bat just because of the name, and it does have parking out front, as well as convenient recycling vending machines which will come in particularly handy if I lose my job and have to start collecting cans for a living.  The place definitely has his advantages.  The produce section is relatively extensive.  There’s an emphasis on Latin American ingredients which in normal times would make me kick up my heels in joy, but I’m not going to be needing poblanos and tomatillos much in the near future.  Also a bizarre and fascinating section of West Indian herbs, including some fleshy pinkish seaweed looking stuff that, according to the package, is called “Virility.”  And there’s a walk-in refrigerated unit.  This is not Fairway – for one thing you don’t get the nifty coats – but they’ve got eighteen eggs for less than two dollars, and cartons of cream the size of milk cartons, so I got no complaints.  This is not the place to go to for celeriac, however.  Nor, evidently, semisweet chocolate.    No problem.  We head over to the Pathmark, which I hate right off the bat for some obscure reason I can’t put my finger on until Eric makes the observation, as we wend our way down a hallway looking for the place where the food is, that it’s eerily like a concentration camp.  “Please, right this way, take a cart, the food is just through here.”  We are not herded into a gas chamber, however, just into a godawful supermarket the size of a stadium, lit by horrific fluorescents not unlike the one in my kitchen.  We find Arborio rice there, though, and one box of semisweet chocolate, after much digging.  The lines are the worst part, the only good thing about them being that they lend an appreciation for how much worse our lives could be.  People with two carts full of RC cola and generic cheese doodles.  The guy ahead of us buys three dozen ramen noodles and four cartons of no-pulp orange juice.    I’m still in a pretty good mood at this point.  We get back to the house before noon, and we’ll have plenty of time to get the house into some kind of shape before 4, when Eric will go pick up his folks in Bay Ridge and I’ll begin to cook.   The cleaning is arduous, rewarding but slow-going.  I don’t need to go into details here, but the previous tenant was a bit of a dirty bird.  By 4 o’clock we’re still not done mopping, so Eric stays until 4:30 to finish up, while I try to get the kitchen into some kind of order.  The kitchen light won’t come on; it just flickers ominously.  Not much light gets in through the window abutting the brick wall next door; the room is dim as dishwater.  Ha ha, I think, forcibly merry, what great copy this will make.  I bring in a couple of clip on lights and begin to make the Crème Plombieres.    I am immediately confronted with that obscure direction of Julia’s to beat the eggs yolks until they “form the ribbon.”  I give it my best shot.  Okay, when I stop beating and let the beaters drip, the drips kind of form a sort of long ribbony thing on the surface before sinking back in.  That’s the ribbon, probably, right?   Something else sinks in as I glance at the book again.  I hadn’t gotten the coffee that was going to have to get beaten in, and we didn’t yet have a coffee maker at the apartment.  No worries; I’d run downstairs to Papa Johnny’s.   Papa Johnny’s isn’t open at 5 on Saturdays.  You telling me sweat shop workers don’t need coffee and eggs on rolls on Saturdays?!   Okay, I’ll use espresso powder.   Only the espresso powder’s still in Bay Ridge.   Fuck it, I’ll just use the rum we bought and vanilla.    Rum, rum, who’s got the rum….  Not here.  I know in a flash that we left it in the car.  I try calling Bay Ridge, but no one answers.  Somebody’s online, I’d bet a dime to a donut.    I take some deep breaths.  I can’t continue with the dessert until I get rum and/or coffee.  I call Bay Ridge again.  And again.  And again.  At last, by the grace of God, I get through.  I tensely ask Eric to look in the goddamned car for the goddamned rum, please.   It’s okay.  I can prepare the onions; they can be peeled and cooked ahead of time.    Okay, now where are the goddamned onions!  I can’t find them anywhere.  All of a sudden the house seems to be nothing but piles of boxes and identical bags.  I begin looking in very stupid places.  The bathroom.  In packed boxes.  I call Bay Ridge again; no answer.    After a good deal of wandering the apartment hopelessly, some savage muttering and a scream or two of frustration, I decide that since I can’t do anything I’ll take a shower.   Eric and his folks get in as I’m drying off.  Both Paul and Joanne sigh their approval of all we’ve done with the place since last they saw it, which clearly translates as, “this is really not quite as awful a hellhole as it was a few days ago.”    “Did you get the rum?”   “It was in the car.  Here you go.”   “It’s really too late now anyway.  At this rate the dessert won’t be ready until midnight.  Did you find the onions?”   “Onions?”   “I can’t find the fucking onions!”   This is how I reward my sainted husband.  In front of his parents, no less, I throw this fit.   Joanne seems very discomfited that she can’t find anything to compliment.  No sooner have I put on a pot of water for the onions and turned on the oven to roast the chickens than she volunteers that “everything smells wonderful.”  She offers to peel the onions.  They’re little baby ones, and once she’s gotten about halfway through them she has the good sense I’d not had to look up in the Book to see if there was an easier way.  Turns out we should have parboiled them first to make the peeling easier.  Perhaps if we’d done it that way it wouldn’t have taken an hour to get the chore done.  The chickens, at least, smell alright, though again they’re not browning very well.    Eric and his father have gone to get liquor.  Helen has not shown up yet which makes me very nervous, since we have not phone line yet, and our mobile is no great shakes.   I manage to burn the chocolate for the dessert in a double boiler.  Twice.  Three times.  I’m more or less out of chocolate.  We decide to mix some of the burned chocolate in and see what happens.  The dessert gets composed and thrown in the fridge to chill.  Whatever.  Eric’s birthday, and I’m going to be serving him dessert soup, I know it.  Again.   I chop onions.  I try to breathe.  Helen comes at last – the seven train was shut down for repairs – poor Helen, she’ll never come back.  She is sensitive to our every need, though, and brings Eric more alcohol for a present.    I do all the things I have to do – stick the risotto in the oven, braise the onions, roast the chickens and cut them up, make the cream mushroom sauce, the port reduction.  I pour cognac over the chicken and set in on fire.  Everyone gathers around to watch as I shake the pan and the flames gradually die out.  Very impressive and all that, but by now I’m far too far gone to enjoy it.  The cream mushroom sauce goes over that and simmers, I pull the risotto that I’ve totally forgotten out of the oven and rewarm the onions and we’re done.   Everyone is very kind, but I know it’s no good.  The risotto, which is just rice with butter baked, is overdone and sticky.  The cognac didn’t properly cook off the chicken, and the dish tastes too much of alcohol.  The onions are pretty good, actually, but there aren’t enough of them.  And it’s damned near ten o’clock, again, on Eric’s birthday.  I am having a very hard time warding off the conviction that I ruin more or less everything I touch.  Helen performs her greatest gift and eases everyone’s mind with good conversation.  We open Eric’s birthday presents – he gets, in addition to Helen’s alcohol, some academic books and a CD player.  The dessert is not soup, but it is granular – either I beat the eggs too long, or I let them sit too long, or that’s just the burned chocolate making itself known.  And it tastes too rummy; coffee really was necessary.   I am tired, discouraged, and guilt-ridden.  We walk our guests to the subway, then turn back home, walking in silence down an empty Jackson Avenue.  Eric is obscurely upset, I can only imagine because of my insanity and ineptness.    These dark vales are part of what the Julie/Julia Project is all about.  But it is not easy.            8:18:07 AM    comment []