Tuesday, October 08, 2002

I love my parents.  Seriously.  I look forward to their visits, and am sad when they go.  But man, they sure can take a toll on the old GI tract.  They’ve been gone now for a few days, and all the vague queasy symptoms I was attributing to the Julie/Julia Project have faded away.  Turns out they were the symptoms of eating too many expensive restaurant meals and drinking too many gin gimlets.  It seems to me that meals in restaurants, even really fabulous restaurants, are somehow more suspect than home cooking.  (This from a girl who routinely neglects to wash her greens, drops the chicken on the floor, sniffs hopefully at the filet mignon bought at the suspiciously inexpensive Long Island City grocery and winds up shrugging and muttering, “nobody ever died from eating rotten meat.”)  If I hadn’t been in the middle of a move-related nervous breakdown, I’d probably have been chugging along with the Project, and having kept a stricter Julia diet, would be feeling better today.  Ah well, no use crying over spilt milk.  Or heavy cream, as the case may be. Anyway, Julia wouldn’t have been able to help about the gimlets.  Continuing on with my “back in the saddle” mentality, I chose to tackle Tournedos Sautés Aux Champignons and Quartiers de Fonds d’Artichauts au Beurre – filet mignon with mushroom and Madeira sauce, and buttered, quartered artichoke hearts. The artichokes I bought at the insanely over-priced Zeytuna in lower Manhattan.  (I’m all for supporting businesses downtown, but it seems to me that any establishment with the gall to charge 2 dollars for a single artichoke can do without my help.)  I carried them very carefully home on a very crowded subway ride, worried the whole time that I was going to wind up inadvertently stabbing some scary guy with an artichoke – those puppies smart.  When I got home, Eric and brother Jordan were almost through watching the second episode of Buffy.  (Another conversion, huzzah!  Though to be honest, converting Jordan to anything on a television is not exactly Herculean labor.  This is a man who has been known to religiously watch Mr. Ed.)  I went to work on the filet mignon first, which I was worried about because I didn’t know anything about wrapping filet mignons with bacon.  (Julia calls for “strips of pork fat”, and probably would disapprove of my desiccated bacon, but I’m sick of the Julia mandate regarding the boiling of bacon.  I’m a Texan, dammit, and I like my pig smoky!)  But after the aforementioned hopeful sniffing had ended with a positive decision, tying the bacon strips around the filet wound up being not such a difficult feat.  (I just realized that some of you might have the image of me tying strips of bacon into little bows.  A charming thought, but not accurate.  I used kitchen twine.) Then I attacked the artichokes.  The artichokes fought back, but the benefits of evolution could not save these specimens.  I broke off their stems, and their leaves until they were just a sextet of emasculated yellow cones.  Then I sliced off the cones and cut off the bases of the stems and the last of the leaves, until all I had left were some pretty yellow little disks with spiky purple centers like tropical flowers, floating in a bowl of “acidulated” water.  (I wasn’t sure either.  I put in some vinegar.) My brother and husband were appalled by the bag of leaves I tossed into the garbage can.  “Can’t you eat those?” my husband asked, getting back to those Depression-era roots.  “You want to cook them, help yourself.” “You want a drink?” Being in no mood, yet again, to trim potatoes into “elongated olive shapes all the same size,” as Julia suggests for her potatoes sautéed in butter, I decided to go with baked potatoes.  The potatoes from Western Beef are very cute, and oddly small, so I made two for everybody.  This is my method for baking potatoes: rub them with vegetable oil.  Stab them all over with a fork.  Stick them in a 400-degree oven, right onto the rack.  They turn out perfect, with crispy crunchy skins.  I didn’t think this method up out of the whole cloth, I read it somewhere or other, but it’s mine now. The artichokes I put in to boil in water mixed with a flour paste and lemon juice – a blanc, Julia calls it.  It’s supposed to keep the artichokes from discoloring.  I don’t know about that, some of mine discolored anyway, but making the flour paste is kind of fun, like making mud pies.  I’m to simmer the artichokes in this for, Julia says, 30 to 40 minutes, which seems to me excessive, as do most of her cooking times for vegetables.  While they’re simmering, I cut the filet into steaks 2 ½ in diameter and 1 inch thick (that’s a bacon strip thick to you and me.)  I quarter some mushrooms and sauté them with butter and shallots, as per usual, and set them aside.  I think the artichoke hearts are plenty tender enough, though it’s only been twenty minutes or so.  I take them out, let them cool a little, then scrape out the chokes, so all I have left are six drab-colored disks.  Seems like a hell of a lot of effort for that.  I quarter them and toss them in a casserole with some green onions sautéed in half a stick or so of butter, then throw them into the oven by the potatoes. The steaks I cook in a hot skillet with butter and oil.  I realize at around this point that I forgot to buy the bread for the canapés that are supposed to go under the steaks.  I make an executive decision that canapés are not essential to this dish.  When they’re done – what’s done after all?  It’s getting late, and no body ever died from raw meat – I put them on a platter and cut the strings that were holding on the bacon.  I pour the fat out of the pan, which inspires my husband, who always hates it when I pour out the fat, to mutter, “due to the Nakatomi Corporation’s legacy of greed around the world, they are about to be taught a lesson in the real uses of power.”  (My husband is going through a slight, inexplicable fixation on the movie “Die Hard” at the moment.  When this happens, his conversation can get a little hard to follow for the uninitiated.)  I boil down some beef broth mixed with tomato past to a syrupy spoonful or so, then pour in a mixture of Madeira and cornstarch.  When the alcohol evaporates I toss in the mushrooms, sprinkle on some parsley, and that’s it.  The boys put together the baked potatoes with butter and green onions while I put the steaks on the plates and spoon on the mushroom sauce, then dish up the artichokes.  It turns out I’m not such a great fan of filet mignon, or at least Western Beef filet mignon.  It seems to me not to have all that much flavor.  Luckily, bacon does, as does Madeira mushroom sauce.  And artichoke hearts.  Artichoke hearts!  These things are di-loverly.  Can you say butter?  And the fact that I had to put an hour and a half of work into getting them this way somehow makes them more satisfying.  I would now like to take a moment to make examples of two of my lovely readers.  Jarrett Lobell has given me both a bottle of my very favorite vanilla, and an MFK Fisher book I had not read.  And Joe D’Agnese just sent me a huge packet of fresh herbs from his garden.  I cannot thank these kind and generous people enough.  (Sorry for the very random links -- I only had Google and three minutes.)  Now, if anybody’s got a cow or a very fat goose there looking to get off their hands, just let me know. While I’m at it, I’ll mention in brief two dreams that I had the last night.  In the first, I kept eating steak that tasted rotten.  In the second, I got a voicemail message from Julia herself. The Project getting to me. 7:57:38 AM    comment []