Monday, September 23, 2002

Continuing on fast forward… on Tuesday night, after a day I don’t like to talk about, I made Quiche au Fruits de Mer.  Circumstances dictated that I had to buy my shrimp from Dean & DeLuca.  A quarter of a pound for six dollars.  Listen to me, people.  Do as I stay, not as I do, and stay away from that evil place.  Every time you step in there for a sushi plate or a bottle of designer water you are losing a piece of your soul.  It isn’t worth it! Anyway, I got home around eight and made the pate brisee, able to move quickly with it by this time.  I peeled and briefly boiled the shrimp, chopped it up once it was cool enough to handle, then sautéed it with shallots and butter, and cooked it down a bit with vermouth.  It is all so very familiar, I thought as I rolled out and baked the pastry shell, beat the eggs and cream, folded in the shrimp mixture.  It is nice that it is familiar, thank God it is familiar given my present circumstances what with the move and the hellish job, but where’s the challenge?  Perhaps, I thought, as we sat down to slices of our creamy, shrimpy quiche, I’ve Mastered the Art of French Cooking.  What ever will I do now? I needn’t have worried.  On Thursday night, after a Wednesday off  (well, sort of.  I did make Chou-Fleur a la Mornay, Gratine, which is cauliflower blanched and baked, with Mornay Sauce poured over it – Mornay being a béchamel sauce with swiss cheese stirred into it.  Given the practice I’ve been having in recent weeks make béchamel sauces, it was a piece of cake, and Eric made us some ground beef patties.  We watched the Sopranos) I tackled, Oeufs a la Bourguignonne, or Eggs Poached in Red Wine. As I continue to tell myself, this blog is not about the drudgery of working life, so I won’t go into my day here except to say that I was already fairly near a breakdown by the time I got home.  The idea of cooking anything at all seemed beyond the pale, but I was cheered by the hardy fantasy I had been maintaining that poached eggs were easy, that I had mastered the technique and any dish that called for them was by definition a snap to make. I poured a cup of our (one bottle of) wine into a sauce pan, along with a cup of beef broth.  I set it over a medium low flame, and when it was just at the simmer I gently cracked an egg into it.  I carefully encouraged the white up over the yolk.  Like I said, a snap.  In three minutes I had the most perfectly egg-shaped poached egg I had every made, stained a strange and lovely purplish-blue by the wine.  I cracked the second egg.  I encouraged the white a bit too enthusiastically this time, and bits of it, small bits and then larger ones, broke off into the poaching liquid.  Spoiled.  Ah well, everyone is entitled to a mistake.  I scooped it out and started over.  The same thing happened to the next try.  Damn.  The yolk of the next egg broke upon contact with the liquid.  The wine had now boiled down, and was lousy with shreds of egg white.  I started over with the poaching liquid, wasting another cup of the wine that was becoming more precious to me all the time.   By nine o’clock I had worked my way down from eight eggs to three, and I still have only one wine-poached egg to show for it.  I would like to say that in this moment of crisis I maintained that stiff upper lip I’m so famous for, but that would be disingenuous.  The fact is, I was a sweaty, moaning mess.  I was throwing the spoiled eggs into the garbage with excessive force.  Tears were blurring my vision, groans and, yes, occasional screams of frustration had made me hoarse, and I whispered desperate incantations over the simmering pot – “please work.  Please, please please work.  Please….”  I finally got an egg to work.  Now there were two.  Two eggs for two people, and the thought of making some kind of side-dish to go with it sent me into a hiccup-fit of despair.  I thought of all those earlier eggs I’d declared ruined and thrown blithely away.  Now we would starve.  My dear husband was, no joke, thinking seriously about having me committed, as I moaned over and over, “I can’t feed my husband, I’m a failure, I can’t do this anymore….”  He poached the final egg.  His didn’t turn out all that well either, but at least that wasn’t my fault.  I made the canapés the eggs were to go on in a blind hurry, rounds of bread fried up in butter I didn’t let get hot enough, so the bread got totally soaked in butter before they browned.  I cooked down the poaching liquid, added cornstarch for thickener, and butter.  The eggs had gone as blue as the lips of corpses – the sauce was an unsettling mauve.  I served the pathetic things  -- an egg atop each canapé, draped with the purple sauce. Eric insists to this day that it was good, and I suppose it was.  It certainly tasted French.  But so weird.  So very winey, so incredibly, incredibly rich.  Wine sauce, egg, buttery bread.  I longed for salad.  But more than that even, I longed for bed and a lottery win.     7:48:46 AM    comment []