Saturday, October 12, 2002

Dearie me. So we had some folks over for dinner last night. I got home from work and grocery shopping at around seven o’clock.  (I estimate that the groceries I carried home from Zeytuna weighed about 40 pounds.  And have I mentioned it was raining?  And that I fucking HATE the New York subway system?!)  I spent a little time freaking out about the house, and screaming at my sainted husband for not freaking out with me.  But our poor, noble, dear friend Emily AW appeared at that moment – sorry, Emily – so I pulled myself out of my freak-out and started cooking while Em and Eric went for some tonic to complement the gin.  The first thing to do was to chop the chunk of bacon I’d bought into lardons, also known as smaller chunks. (Zeytuna has chunks of bacon.  They also have good, if expensive, produce and a nice cheese selection.  I bought some goat milk brie there, and some French butter.  I felt like a twit foodie, but sometime you gotta treat yourself.)  Julia wanted me to boil the bacon, again, and I’d decided to go ahead with it this time, but the timing was tricky here, because earlier, in the wine shop, I’d had one of those obnoxious wine-shop cell-phone conversations with the alleged Helen in which I had probed her eating restrictions whilst purchasing cheap Cote du Rhone, and she had said she didn’t mind my putting bacon in the chicken (which made me very happy) but she was worried about the whole boiling thing.  So I was hoping to do it while she wasn’t around, and pull the wool over her eyes.  And in fact she did arrive in the midst of lardon-chopping.  Luckily for me, though, she wanted to back out to get some ice cream for dessert, so I was given the ten minutes I needed for that secret chore.  At the same time I got some water boiling for the tiny little white onions.  Julia says the trick to peeling those fuckers is to plunge them in boiling water for a few seconds, then rinse them with cold water, then cut off their end and remove the skin and first onion layer.  And that probably is the way to do it.  But I think maybe I boiled them too long, because they began to fall apart as I peeled them.  Or maybe peeling tiny white onions, is just sort of a pain in the ass.  Em and Eric and Helen were all back by this time, so this is about when we started with the cocktails.  Helen was making radish butter for the bread (this is something I turned her on to – just grated radishes with butter and salt and pepper, very addictive stuff), Emily and Eric were peeling potatoes (Eric with a cheese plane, and if there’s any more pathetic sight than your husband huddled over a trash can with a cheese plane and a baby new potato, I don’t want to see it), and I was taking the skins off tiny white onions.  It took about an age and a half.  We got a call from Konrad and Lisa, toward the beginning of all this, saying they were just leaving Brooklyn to come to us, which made me feel a little better about time, but sweet jesus this onion-peeling thing took for fucking ever.  I had only just finished when they got to our place.  By this time it was probably nine-thirty.  Who knows.  Time, in the Julie/Julia Project, rapidly loses its meaning. The bacon I sautéed in two pans (have I mentioned I was doubling the recipe for Poulet en Cocotte Bonne Femme, Casserole-Roasted Chicken with Bacon, Onions, and Potatoes?  Well I was.  Pound of bacon, three pounds of potatoes, untold tiny white onions.)  Then I took out the lardons and browned the chickens – HUGE chickens by the way, scary hormonal chickens – on all sides in the bacon fat.  That part took a while.    Then I took the chickens out of the pans and poured out the fat, into a jar Lisa had brought that originally contained the sauce for her lovely pear gingerbread.  Lovely Lisa and Konrad came bearing many gifts, including egg poachers, French dessert wine, schnapps, and the aforementioned homemade, very yummy dark dense gingerbread.  The jar, desperately need for my bacon fat, was only the least of it.  (Well maybe the second least.  The jug of Citra, while very much appreciated at the time, has left me feeling none too charitable about it.) It was too late to even think about by this time.  I melted butter into the two pans and tossed the potatoes in them to lightly brown.  I wonder why Julia didn’t want me to brown the potatoes in the bacon fat.  Once again I try to comprehend Julia’s apparent shying from the full bacon experience. I have just this moment realized I missed a step with the potatoes.  I was supposed to briefly boil them.  Ah well.  They turned out fine anyway. I pushed the potatoes to the edge of the pans and put the chickens back in, then put the onions and the bacon over the potatoes, and stuck the pans in the oven, covered. Then I had an hour to socialize.  It was a strange experience.  Helen was worried about the movers, which were actually the whole reason this dinner had come about.  She had hired movers to come get the couch, which was (is) standing upended in our downstairs stairway, blocking about an acre of unpacked crap.  The movers were from Boston as it turns out – that part I don’t really understand – and Helen thought they were probably on crank.  At any rate, they seemed to be not showing up.  But on the upside, Helen and Em seemed to be getting along famously, which makes me very very very happy.  I had another couple of gin and tonics.  I rather lost track of time. The chicken, when I finally served it – I think I managed to sneak it onto the table just before midnight – was certainly bacony, and the potatoes and onions tasted good to me.  But I was too a) exhausted b) hungry and c) drunk to really tell if the food was really any good at all.  I had roasted some tomatoes alongside, and those I could tell I’d overcooked, even in my sad state.  The chicken, I notice in my morning nibblings, is dry – who knows how long I cooked the fuckers.  But it was a fun evening anyway, even if it got a tad sloppy toward the end.  Emily bought cigarettes for us two sinners, and Lisa served her fantastic gingerbread over the ice cream Helen bought.  We had good conversation, punctuated by the dump trucks rumbling down Jackson Avenue, and threatened to play dominoes, until everyone was ready to keel over.  Helen and Em started back to the upper west side, Helen carrying the air mattress we lent her because she had friends coming into town that night who had to sleep on something, that something not being the couch, since the couch clearly is going to spend the rest of its days wedged in our foyer.  Lisa and Konrad raised themselves for the trek back to Brooklyn (and their new fixer-upper house they’ve bought in Boerum Hill, which can I mention in passing how like a useless lump it makes me feel to talk to friends who are actually buying apartments) and sainted Eric washed the dishes while I collapsed in a lump. The movers never showed.  Natch. 10:51:11 AM    comment []