Friday, September 27, 2002

Well, well, well.  Here I am, almost caught up.  Tuesday it is in Long Island City, also known as Day of the Buffy Premiere.  I wake up feeling quite ill.  (Actually, if you must know -- and I can say this in relative safety knowing that no one at my workplace except the lovely Casandra reads or otherwise gives a flying fuck about this little extracurricular project of mine -- mostly what I felt was a bit of a red-wine headache and the longterm effects of too much butter.)  I called in sick, then spent the entire day working from home.  How I’ve become, by the age of almost thirty, the kind of  person who takes off sick days in order to get more work done, I cannot say. I am not such a Buffy fan that I have known for weeks that this was the Day of the Premiere, but I am enough of one that as soon as I got the email from Eric that today was in fact the day, I began making preparations to get dinner finished in time for me to be able to sit down and watch it.  It was a pretty low-key menu: Potage Crème de Cresson and Salade Nicoise (Cream of Watercress Soup and Salad Nicoise.)  I would just get all the prep done before I left the house at 5:30 to meet my husband for a little errand-running in Astoria.  Work took a lot longer than I had thought it would, though, and then I had a sinking spell.  You know, one of those sinking spells where you’ve called in sick to work for no very good reason and it’s three thirty in the afternoon and would you look at that bed just sitting there unused and wasting away?  So long story short, the hour and a half nap left me a little tight for time.  But I got up, washed the lettuce and the watercress, chopped the onions for the soup, boiled the green beans and the eggs (okay, confession: I had to call my mom to figure out how to boil an egg.)  When Eric and I got back from our errands – which took longer than expected, because doesn’t everything in the outer boroughs? – it was seven-fifteen.  Should have been plenty of time.  I got the soup started – sautéed the onions in butter, stirred in the watercress to wilt, boiled homemade chicken stock in another pan.  Once the watercress was wilted I stirred in some flour, let that cook a bit, then poured in the stock, whisking.  That simmered a bit, then I pureed it with my handy-dandy cuisinart wand.  (Have I mentioned to you that I love love love my handy-dandy cuisinart wand?  I love it the way other women love their vibrators.  It’s shaped a bit like a vibrator, actually, one of those big ones sold as back massagers, and it buzzes powerfully as it works, and man does it get the job done on that soup.) So that was the soup done except for the final enrichment of egg yolks and cream.  Piece of cake.  Only, cripes where does the time go, here it was almost 7:45, and Buffy was in fifteen minutes!  It’s one of the strange things about the Julie/Julia Project, you start to think of certain dishes or techniques as not time-consuming, because they’re familiar and essentially simple, but just because you’re not freaking out doesn’t mean that time isn’t passing.  I thought I’d be fine though because all I had to do was put together the salad.  But you know, it’s a myth that salad’s are the easiest thing in the world to make.  True, there’s no cooking involved – well, except for the egg and bean boiling – but there’s an awful lot of niggeldy shit.  I mixed up the French dressing, just olive oil and vinegar whisked up together.  I chopped up the tomatoes and the green beans and tossed them with some of the vinaigrette.  I tossed the lettuce in the bowl with some more vinaigrette.  I pushed the lettuce leaves around to the edges of the bowl, then “arranged” some leftover French potato salad in the bottom.  I “decorated” (read: dumped on top of) the potatoes with the beans and tomatoes.  JC then tells me to “intersperse them with a design of tuna chunks, olives, eggs and anchovies,” so yeah, okay, I interspersed.  What do you want – Buffy had started!  Strange mysterious things were happening on the television and I was stuck laying down anchovy filets that I didn’t even want onto a salad.  And the soup!  Running back and forth from kitchen to living room, I heated the soup back up, stirred together some egg yolks and cream, and poured them into the soup, stirring.  I’m in a pretty foul mood by this point.  This is so typical, I thought, with the classic irrationality of the self-martyred.  “Can I do anything?” asked my husband, from his perch on the sofa, watching Buffy.  A little late in the day for that, Buster! So, long story short, I manage to fuck up the soup.  JC says to “stir over moderate heat for a minute or two to poach the egg yolks, but do not bring the soup to a simmer.”  Simple enough.  But then the floor in the school bathroom collapsed, and then there was the handsome new principal who may or may not be evil, and long story short, I simmered the soup.  The soup tasted good, but the texture was all fucked up – it had separated.  The salad was fine I guess, except I’m not all that fond of hard boiled eggs, olives or anchovies.  And for this I had missed half of Buffy. 7:53:45 AM    comment []