Monday, October 07, 2002

Poulet Poêlé avec Farce Duxelles, Gratin Dauphinois et Asperges au Naturel; or, Back in the Saddle. Last week we had in town my parents, Eric’s parents, my brother and his girlfriend and an old high school chum, James.  We moved forever out of our Bay Ridge apartment, a nightmare I will go into shortly, and made a concerted, if largely hopeless, attempt to make our new place into something other than a hellhole.  Not an ideal week for Mastering the Art of French Cooking.  But after a complete washout of a week for the Julie/Julia Project, I have returned. My first cooking stint in almost a week was all about modern conveniences.  If you are one of my faithful readers (hallo there, James!), you will remember that once upon a time I spent most of an evening mincing two pounds of mushrooms by hand.  No more!  Cuisinart!  My loving husband gave me a heavy duty mandoline – the kitchen appliance, not the instrument -- for our anniversary this spring, but I had never really gotten used to using it.  But I pulled it out this time, and was rewarded with seven cups of perfectly sliced potatoes in about a minute and a half.  Convenience, to make an awkward segue, was all about what this weekend was not.  Let me relate to you, as an example, the Very Final (Because Even If I Left Something Behind, Nothing on God’s Green Earth Could Induce Me To Do This One More Time) Moving Day.  It started off about like it ended, only not quite so awful.  The car had died for the second time in less than a week the day before, so Eric began his day bright and early by taking it to a mechanic, who said it was the alternator and he could have it replaced by eleven am.  No problem, thought I.  I was in an improbably decent mood, probably because I was moving out of Bay Ridge forever, plus my family was in town, and the night before we’d gone to Peter Luger for my father’s sixtieth birthday, and if you’re not in a good mood after going to Peter Luger, you need to just put an end to your misery and shoot yourself.  While Eric was dealing with car issues, I got the U-Haul, which I had reserved online and never gotten a confirmation for.  After a bit of bizarro early-morning phone wrangling – as my brother points out, only in New York would a U-Haul rep have an inexplicable nervous breakdown and slam the phone down on a client and his regional manager during a routine pick-up scheduling – I managed to pin down a van, and I went to pick it up with brother Jordan, which proved an eerily easy procedure.  That should have put me on guard.  Everybody was moving a little slowly due to Post-PL Syndrome, but by ten-thirty or so the folks had joined us in Long Island City, and we ate a little breakfast at Papa Johnny’s before heading out to Bay Ridge.  We kept trying to reach the alleged Helen, because she had said she wanted to take our sofa bed, but she was MIA.  There was a creepy story about five random shootings in her parents’ Maryland suburb, which was making me a little nervous.  Plus, there was more stuff in the Bay Ridge apartment than I recalled – how in God’s name did we wind up with so much stuff?! – so I didn’t know what we were going to do about the sofa if we didn’t get in touch with her.  Since my landlady had been so freaky about the apartment, we spent a good deal of time making everything was nice and clean.  My sainted mother even cleaned the drip pan under the fridge, which I am ashamed to say I had never even known existed.  After several hours we’d gotten everything packed except the sofa.  Still no sign of Helen.  So – and this is where things start to get really bad – we decide to load it into the U-Haul and take it to the Goodwill.  It is now o’clock.  Have I mentioned we had play tickets?  Well we do – “Frankie & Johnny.”  No sweat.  The boys – Eric, Jordan, and my father – go off to do that chore while Mom and I take the Bronco back to Long Island City. Or rather, we take the Bronco to the Brooklyn Queens Expressway.  Where, at a convenient two-lane, shoulder-less entry ramp, it promptly dies.  When a tow truck comes along within fifteen minutes we think, Oh, this’ll be fine.  When the tow guy dumps us at the first Shell station off the BQE, we’re still not too terribly worried.  When the Shell guys, who don’t speak all that much English, keep asking us if we have Triple A, which we don’t, we do begin to worry, just a little.  They tell us the alternator – the brand-new, $160 alternator – has blown.  When they say they can get us a tow back to LIC and the no-goodnik mechanic who’s going to replace our alternator or be strangled just as soon as their night-shift guys come on, in two hours, we kiss our play tickets forever goodbye.  Long story short, I spent two precious hours of my life on Atlantic Avenue waiting for a tow, and didn’t get to the play.  But after finally returning to Bay Ridge and unloading the car back into the U-Haul, and after unloading the U-Haul back into the apartment, and returning the U-Haul, Eric and I did go into town and have the best eleven-dollar gimlets ever at the Blue Bar, and we did meet my father and Jordan and Alice after they came out of the play, and we did eat the best Indian food I’ve ever had at the Bukhara Grill in east midtown, so life is not a completely unadulterated hell. Poulet Poêlé avec Farce Duxelles is casserole-roasted chicken, just like the chicken I did last time I did chicken, stuffed with a mushroom stuffing.  The mushrooms are sautéed in butter with shallots, then mixed with sautéed gizzard (only my chicken didn’t have a gizzard, so I used the heart) and liver, cooked-down Madeira, breadcrumbs, butter, cream cheese and parsley.  That mixture is stuffed up into the chicken.  I bothered with trussing the chicken this time – having not yet managed to pick up a trussing needle, I again had to resort to the easy Joy of Cooking method – and also pinned up it’s bum.  Then I browned it on all sides in a casserole before sticking it in the oven.  I put together the Gratin Dauphinois, which turns out to be a snap when you have a mandoline.  Just arrange the potato slices in a casserole you’ve rubbed with a cut garlic clove, layered with butter and grated Swiss cheese, then pour some boiling milk over it and put it in the oven next to the chicken.  And then I did the Asperges au Naturel, which proved to be the only sort of pain in the ass part, because I figured with plain boiled asparagus I should really follow Julia’s advice, or else it’s just boiled asparagus, and Julia’s advice is to peel the stalks – with a knife, not a vegetable peeler – and tie them into bundles, and then boil them.  This was as annoying to do as it sounds. But it was nice to eat at home again, and a relief to be cooking again.  The chicken was moist, the stuffing rich and creamy, the potatoes super-yummery, and the asparagus was asparagus.  Which is good.  Everyone except my brother had gone home, back to places much less annoying than the outer boroughs of Manhattan.  Jordan, Eric and I ate dinner and watched Joe vs. the Volcano, one of the most under-appreciated movies of all time.  Then I passed out. 7:42:54 AM    comment []