Sunday, September 22, 2002

You will have to forgive me, and more, Julia will have to.  The week has gone by in a blur, and I must catch up soon, or I will fall hopelessly, utterly behind, and will fall into an impenetrable thicket of ill-remembered meals, never to emerge again.  It is a shame, because there have been some memorable moments, but I am going to quicken my pace here. Monday night Emily A-W came over for dinner.  Emily, dear Emily, one of the few people on the planet we don’t feel we have to clean the house for – this being not at all a reflection of any slovenliness on her part, just on her well of sympathy, good humor and, in this event, slowness to be offended by a basic lack of hospitality.  The menu was Steak au Poivre, Choux de Bruxelles Etuves a la Crème and Pommes de Terre Sautees.   I had told her to come between six & six-thirty.  I myself got home around eight, after the very worst so far in a series of very, very bad days.  I don’t remember too much of the evening, thanks to some vodka in the fridge.  I’m afraid I wasn’t terribly good company.  I know that Emily helped with peeling the Brussels sprouts, that I for some reason decided that it was crucial that I again cut the potatoes into rounded olive shapes, and that I didn’t read the direction about leaving the steak to marinate for at least an hour with the peppercorns until about two minutes before I had planned to put the steaks in the pan.  I know that dinner got on the table some time after ten, that after dinner someone had the bright idea to watch an episode of The Sopranos afterwards.  I know that when I awoke in time for the end credits and to walk Emily back through our industrial wasteland home to the subway, my contacts had decided to adhere permanently to my eyeballs. Oh.  I remember that Brussels sprouts in cream are a good thing.  And that I managed to get the steak, which was a big London Broil affair because I bought it at the Food Emporium on Union Square, where the selection sucks and the rib steaks are $16 a pound, to a pretty perfect medium rare.  And the peppercorns were fine, but I bet they’d be better if they’d sat for an hour.  And the potatoes were shaped like olives.  Again. 9:12:16 PM    comment []

Guilt has reached the saturation point.  There is no time when I am not neglecting something important – my job, my husband, my family, my Project.  I awake Sunday morning to the twin burdens my disastrous new apartment and the disastrous job awaiting me on the far side of working on it.  On top of that, I have spent the early morning hours dreaming fitfully of my pet snake (I know, I know, I have a pet snake – I am very aware of the bad impression that kind of thing makes on people.)  The poor creature has been over at the old place in Bay Ridge with Eric’s parents all this time, silently wasting away.  Today is the day that we retrieve her, and hopefully feed her (him?) as well.  I cannot sleep with so much hanging over me.  I leap out of bed and take a shower in our ominous black bathtub.  That day we run around, not so much like chickens with their heads cut off as like relatively level-headed chickens nonetheless spooked by the specter of a hatchet somewhere just out of sight.  We pack up another load of stuff from Bay Ridge.  The dirt and broken things in that apartment make me horribly nervous, and we get out of there as soon as possible rather than having to think about cleaning it.  We load Zuzu Marlene into the car, which is, was and always will be a bit of an ordeal.  Since my junior year in college I have spent holiday cross-country drives loading Zuzu in and out of the car, sneaking her into cheap motels late at night, treks across Tennessee with her curled in her boot, on my lap.  (She sleeps in a cowboy boot, okay?  Any more stupid questions?)  Now, with the back door of the Bronco rusted and to untrustworthy to open, it’s a bit more challenging than it used to be.  The cage rides in the back.  Zuzu rides up front with me, in her boot. And then, as always, there’s the inevitable trip to the store.  To the Park Slope supermarket today, to pick up what we couldn’t find yesterday in LIC.  Fresh fish, this time, for the Filets de Poisson Gratines, a la Parisienne. I feel guilty every time we go to a grocery store.  What a time suck this is – and for what, this cockamamey project I’ve cooked up for the selfish purpose of staving off musings on hopelessness and uselessness?  We pick up Zuzu food from the pet store next door, to help rationalize the stop, but then of course we’ve got the tiny scrabblings of innocent white mice in a cardboard box to keep us company all the way home.  And then, of course, Zuzu won’t eat.  Instead she leaves the mouse in its box and crawls up into the crawlspace under the ominous black tub, forcing dear Eric to get out a screwdriver and pull up one of the (thankfully shabby) plywood faces so I can creep under there and grab her.  For dinner that night, along with the fish, we have that old standby Vichysoisse.  With these dishes I’m at the end of two course in the art of French cooking.  For nearly a month I have been making soups based on potatoes and leeks, and fish poached in vermouth and then run quickly under the broiler with a creamy sauce.  The soups have been variously embellished; the sauces for the fish have varied slightly – tonight’s Sauce Parisienne is enriched with eggs yolks, and is more or less pure fat – no celery, mushrooms or other distractions.  The vichysoisse is just the original potato leek soup served cold, with a bit more cream and some salt to up the taste ante.  They are both good, nourishing dishes, and I have become very comfortable with the techniques involved.  I whip out the soup in no time, though I started late and so have to jump-start the chilling by putting it in the freezer.  The fish I finally know to cook almost not at all to keep it from become a flaky mess.  But it is Sunday, the house is a wreck still, I am tired unto death, and tomorrow I have a guest coming dinner and a most assuredly awful work day to look forward to.  I find myself throwing myself into the cooking to avoid taking into consideration why I have chosen to cook.  Why Julie?  Why Julia, and why now? The fish is rich and creamy, and bites of it melt in my mouth without flaking off my fork.  I have done more or less the same recipe for three weeks running, and I’ve gotten things down – boil down the poaching liquid, beat it in with a white roux and boiling milk, thicken with the yolks and cream, pour it over the fish, run it under the broiler. The Vichysoisse is soothing, uncomplicated, and too easy even to talk about.  The idea of cold soup has always seemed pointless, and maybe just the slightest bit repulsive, but the day was hotter than it ought to have been, and the soup slides down my throat like a caress to ease my jangled nerves.   The food is good enough that for awhile it answers my questions.  But lingering at the edge of the warm glow cast around our table, like the yellow eyes of stalking animals, is the rest of my life.  We huddle over our cold soup bowls and try not to notice. 8:52:33 PM    comment []