Tuesday, October 15, 2002

I know, I know, you my faithful readers have been waiting with bated breath to see how I made it through the long holiday weekend.  “What has Julie been up to?” you ask.  “What crazy shenanigans and brilliant reflections has her Columbus Day been full of?”  I am sorry to disappoint, but there has been too much cooking and too little blogging of late, so today must be only about the food.  The fascinating private life of Julie must for the moment remain shrouded in mystery.  To start where I left off – Saturday.  Pissaladiere Niçoise et Soupe a l’Oignon Gratinee.  I think I’ve been avoiding my quiche chapter lately, and I think it’s because of Pissaladiere Niçoise.  Much as I like to think I’m growing as an eater of food, the anchovy-olive combination still gives me pause.  Also, the name, is a little less than unequivocally inviting.  What can I say, I’m a wimp.  But no more avoidance.  On Saturday I minced 2 pounds (7 cups) of onions in the blessed Cuisinart, and slow cooked them in olive oil with olive, salt, and an herb bouquet of bay, thyme and parsley.  (Okay, so I don’t have cheesecloth, or fresh thyme, so it wasn’t so much a bouquet as it was thyme, bay leaf and parsley sprigs thrown into the pan.)  I also made up some pate brisee.  I hadn’t made any in a while, and I guess I was feeling a little less than totally calm about it, because for some reason it seemed to take longer than it should.  But I did it.  I rolled it into a ball and chilled it, then took it back out again, rolled it out, and laid into the quiche pan.  I prebaked it, making sure this time to weight it with some rice on greased wax paper.  The soup was just the Soupe a l’Oignon I made earlier in the week, with a gratinee of swiss cheese on top of toasted bread rounds. (sorry, Eric.)  I toasted the rounds of French bread in the oven.  I poured the leftover soup into three bowls, floated two rounds in each bowl, and sprinkled a nice healthy pile of cheese on top of that.  I stuck that in the oven to warm, then turned out the onions into the prebaked crust, and topped them with anchovies and olives.  We had bought the only anchovies the Long Island City grocery had had in stock, tinned ones that were wrapped around capers, so I had to unwrap them again, which was a pain.  And, I’ve been having trouble finding decent olives that are pitted, and since I’d forgotten to pit the olives before hand, I was reduced to sort of pathetically slivering off bits here at the end, and as a result I think got frustrated and stopped before I’d gotten enough olives on top.  (Or was that my olive-phobia kicking in?)  Then I stuck that in the oven beside the soup. My brother was a little appalled by the whole anchovy thing, but he’s a man now, and I could see he was steeling himself for whatever was to come.  Both he and Eric had their doubts about a meal consisting of onion soup and onion pie, but the Julie/Julia Project sometimes results in unconventional mealfellows.  While the soup and tart cooked, we watched a little TV.  No need to go into what we watched – let’s just say that in the week and a half my brother had been staying at our place, he, who had never watched more than one or two Buffy episodes in his life, has torn through the first season and most of the second.  I don’t know if I should feel proud or very, very afraid.  Just before we ate, I took out the tart, and moved the soup bowls under the broiler to brown. The meal turned out, mostly, oniony.  The soup was good, though you know, I have this nagging feeling I missed a step with the soup the first time out, because it’s a little thin.  Maybe it’s just that I didn’t use homemade delicioso beef stock.  And of course, Eric has his soggy bread problem.  The tart, I don’t know, I think I overdid it, either that or I screwed up making the pate brisee, because it was a little tough.  It was very oniony, but I should have been patient and strong and put in all the olives, because the flavor was lacking something.  Maybe it’s just that “this is not a quiche, properly speaking, because it contains no eggs,” and I miss the custard-like smoothness of the earlier dishes.  Well, next week is leek quiche, so we’ll get back to that. The next morning I woke up smelling of onion.  The next morning was meant to be a House Day, and we got up and went to the Home Depot for a drill, while Jordan went off again to sell Italian goats milk soap at the Javits Center.  When we got back, Eric set to work while I started on the Bavarois a l’Orange, or Orange Bavarian Cream, that I wanted to make for Jordan before he left town on Monday.  The first thing Julia directs you to do for the Bavarois a l’Orange is rub a sugar cube on a orange, “until all sides of each lump are impregnated with orange oil.”  I find “impregnated” to be a rather food-porny phrase for Julia, but it’s a fun thing to do. But then everything goes to hell.  What happens is this.  I’m already working with not enough ingredients, because I forgot to stock up on gelatin, silly me, and now I only have enough for half a Bavarian cream.  Ah well, think I.  But then I fuck up the directions, and mix the gelatin and orange juice mixture with the orange sugar and zest.  This is like the third direction in the recipe, and I’m irrevocably screwed.  No need to go into the hysteria that follows.  Let’s just say that Bavarois a l’Orange was shelved for the day.  Instead, Eric and I hung blinds in our front room, and I boiled beets for Salade a la d’Argenson, a salad of beets and potatoes that would wind up needing to sit overnight, and which I thought I’d go ahead and start on because the beets had been bought nearly a week ago, and were looking a little worse for wear.  I boiled some potatoes too, and then I peeled the potatoes and the beets and diced them all together in a bowl with some green onions and a French vinaigrette, which is just vinegar and oil beaten together with a little salt and pepper and mustard.  That was done for the day, then – one thing I could forget about.  I had thought I was being all smart, I started getting ready to cook for the big Pot-au-feu I was making at about four.  Boy was I wrong.  I had bought the smallest size of everything for the recipe, which I had wanted to half, since the recipe says it feed 12, and we are but three.  But there aren’t a lot of two pound pork roasts out there, at least not at Western Beef.  I had wound up with a  4 ½ pound beef top round roast, a 7 pound, bone-in, pork shoulder, and a 4 pound chicken.  So I commenced to hacking away at these things to carve out the amount of animal flesh I needed.  The pork was the worst.  I spent the better part of half an hour working the pig skin off the joint; when I got it off it looked like I was planning to make a woman suit.  Then followed the nearly unsuccessful and very much not pretty attempt to hack the shoulder into two pieces, one for the freezer (pork stew on spicy Thursday?) on for the pot.  Once I’d finally wrestled a piece free, I tied it up with kitchen twine until it vaguely approximated something that had not been torn to pieces by rabid dogs.  The chicken I cut oh-so-neatly down the middle, and put one half in the freezer.  The second half I rigged a sad little trussing for, ankle to wing.  As usual with trussed chickens, it looked a little naughty, only more so since it was cut in half too.  (Speaking of naughty, I know I said no personal info, but y’all oughta see “Secretary.”  It’s the first movie Eric and I have seen in donkeys’ years, and it’s great – the sweetest movie about S&M you’re ever likely to see.) The great thing about Pot-au-feu is that, although it takes donkeys’ years to cook, there’s nothing much to it.  I stuck the beef, all tied up with string into my biggest pot with beef and chicken broths and soup vegetables, and brought it up to a simmer.  Julia has this sort of unnervingly Martha-esque suggestion of tying a long piece of string to each piece of meat, and tying the other end to the handle of the kettle, so you can easily check the doneness of the meat.  I did it but I felt dirty.  Anyway, once the pot is simmering you just let it do its business for an hour or so.  All you do is skim it every now and then.  My brother and I got to spend some quality time playing Civilization II, while Eric watched the football game.  After a little over an hour, I dumped in the pork roast and the chicken; and hour after that the vegetables – carrots, turnips, onions and leeks.  (These Julia wanted me to tie up into bundles with cheesecloth, again to aid with checking their doneness, but have I mentioned I don’t have cheesecloth?  I think I have.)  Half an hour before it was done, I dumped in some sliced Polish sausage. To serve, I tried to be neat.  I put some of each vegetable in each corner of a big tray, and heaped the beef, pork, chicken and sausage in the middle.  It ended up looking like a medieval pile of meat.  Quite yummery though.  There is something so unappealing about a “boiled dinner”, but boy it hits the spot on one of the first really chilly fall days.  Nights I should say, as we yet again didn’t eat until nine-thirty or so.  Oh well, we’ll just pretend we’re in Barcelona.  At a French bistro in Barcelona.  Eating pot-au-feu and getting meat dribbles all down our fronts. This brings me to yesterday.  Columbus Day.  God love the murdering speaking-of-Spanish twerp, I do love a government holiday.  It was cooking central around here in the morning.  Eric got up and went for more gelatin and oranges while I made Sauce au Cari, which is basically a béchamel made with an onion-curry based.  Mine wound up awful thick; the roux was basically roux lumps, and I had to thin it with a ton of cream, pour me.  But it tasted like curry, which was I guess the point.  When Eric got back I shirred some eggs.  Shirring eggs was another recipe I’d been rather avoiding, making the excuse that I didn’t have shirring cups.  I had decided whilst lying in bed at some point recently that I would use my handy pyrex mise en place dishes, but I had forgotten that they had to go on the stove top first before being run under the broiler, so for a moment I was flummoxed.  What I wound up doing was putting a skillet with a little water on the stove, and putting the pyrex bowls in it.  I simmered the water, and melted some butter in each dish.  This made me a little nervous; I kept expecting the hollow crack of overheated glass, but it didn’t come. Then I cracked an egg into each dish.  I was supposed to cook them until a film of white on the bottom set.  It took more like a couple of minutes with my method, but it did happen.  Then I moved them to the broiler and broiled them for another minute or so.  And it worked!  They were actually really very good – tender.  With curry sauce on top – even better. Then I made the Bavarois a l’Orange.  Again I rubbed the sugar cubes over the oranges.  I grated the orange zest into a bowl with the sugar, which I mashed with a fork.  (Two asides here – 1) sugar cubes are oddly difficult to mash; and 2) sugar cubes are oddly difficult to obtain.  Weird.)  In another bowl I strained the juice from the oranges, and sprinkled the gelatin on top.  Back to bowl #1, I beat in seven egg yolks, and then gradually beat in the sugar.  The eggs got to the “Pale Ribbon” stage (roll of eyes here at annoying culinary jargon) before I’d even beat in all the sugar, which had me worried.  Then I beat in some boiling milk, and poured the mixture into a sauce pan, which I was supposed to heat to 170 degrees.  No candy thermometer owner, I, so I guessed.  God forbid I overheat it, “or the egg yolks will scramble.”  I may have not cooked it enough.  Anyway, I took it off the heat and stirred in the orange juice with gelatin.  I beat some egg whites up to stiff peaks, and folded that in to the egg yolk-orange juice-gelatin mixture, along with some kirsh and rum – I was supposed to use orange liqueur, but one does what one must.  I was having my doubts about all this; I suspected we were in for dessert soup again.  I went to take a shower, and I know I said no personal detail, but there was no hot water, and if Bavarois a l’Orange was a foul mood, I could tell you absolutely the best way to set it, like a rock – a cold shower on a cold day.  When you have to wash your hair.  Right before we left, I folded in some whipped cream.  It was really too early to do that, but we had to go.  Ah well, a little dessert soup never hurt anybody. The rest of the day we spent being more or less useless, and spending a lot of money we don’t have.  We went into town (don’t you like all the quaint terms we outer-boroughs folks employ?) and Eric bought CDs – the Pogues, the Replacements, the new Kelly Willis.  I bought lipstick.  We watched the aforementioned “Secretary.”  I had a glamour-maintenance appointment and Eric carried home three bottles of wine from Astor Place.  Jordan’s friend Adam was coming over for dinner.  No sweat.  I was making Poulet Saute, plain old sautéed chicken – we’ve moved out of roasted now, making progress.  It really is too simple a recipe to talk about much – brown the chicken in butter, turn down the heat and cook it through, covered, take it out of the pan and cook down the juices in a wine reduction, enrich the sauce before serving with some butter and parsley.  Ditto with the green beans.  Blanch some green beans, toss them in a hot skillet to evaporate the water, toss with several tablespoons of butter, sprinkle with parsley.  Eric did that part.  For the beet potato salad, I had to make a mayonnaise, and that was the tricky bit, because I decided to beat it by hand, and I don’t know that it ever really thickened the way it was meant to.  Certainly it wasn’t Hellman’s.  I beat and beat and beat, drop of oil at a time, for the most part, except when I jerked and poured in too much.  Just when I’d gotten it sort of thick, I beat in the hot water like Julia said, as an “anti-curdling agent”, and it thinned out again.  I don’t know.  Anyway, it tasted fine – like olive oil, mostly.  I mixed it in with the beets and potatoes that had been sitting in the fridge for the last 24 hours and were violently pink.  Then the mayonnaise was violently pink as well.  I mixed in some chopped pork from yesterday’s pot-au-feu (aren’t I the good little cook with the leftovers?) and that was it. I think man was not made to eat pink foods – it’s a little scary putting something that color into your mouth.  But, good?  Beets, as we discussed over dinner, are one of those great mythic “blech” foods, like Brussels sprouts and liver, but they are unlikely, beautiful things, really.  And of course a little extra pork never hurt anybody.  The green beans were nummy too….mmm, butter.  And the chicken was chicken.  Good.  The Bavarois a l’Orange turned out pretty decently.  Certainly not soup.  It had rather separated into layers – one light and spongy, one a deeper orange and more jello-like.  But both layers were good, and it actually made for a not-unattractive effect.  It tasted very very much like orange.  A good time was had by all. An excellent day for the Project over all.  On the downside, however, my finger had developed an arthritic pain which I notice particularly when trying to hold open Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and I spent almost no quality time with my brother while he was in town.  Next time, Jordan, I promise, we’ll play You Don’t Know Jack while munching cheese puffs. 7:54:58 AM    comment []