Wednesday, October 23, 2002

Possible headlines for today’s blog: “DISASTER!” “GOT MILK – AND LOOK WHERE IT GOT ME” “CREAMLESS QUICHE + FLOURLESS SOUP = FLAVORLESS MESS!!” Let’s just say there were some problems with the Quiche aux Champignons and Soupe Gratinee des Trois Gourmandes. It was all meant to be so simple.  I would just whip up a quiche, just as I’ve been doing every weeks for the past two months.  I was looking forward to this one, figured mushroom quiche would be particularly delicious, particularly now that the days were chilly.  The onion soup was the same onion soup I’d already made once before, and I knew it to be pretty simple.  I had homemade beef stock that I’d made over the weekend, to make it extra special good.  What could go wrong? Ho ho. I first suspected things would go badly for me that evening after work when, as I was unlocking the padlock at the front door of my industrial wasteland apartment, I remembered – I’d run out of cream.  The cardinal sin of JC followers everywhere.  How could I have been so stupid?  Well, I thought uncomfortably, as I locked myself carefully back into my apartment, at least I have milk.  It sounded false and hollow even to me, but I committed myself. I started by slicing onions in the food processor and slowly caramelizing them on the stove-top.  This is a leisurely, simple task, though of course once 8 o’clock rolled around, there was the whole Buffy factor to take into account, and I did manage to slightly singe some of the onions around the edges.  I sat in front of the TV and sliced mushrooms for the quiche.  There was a pound of them, so it took awhile.  During commercials I got up and stirred the onions.  Then they were nice and brown I – poured in the wine and cooking liquid.  Skipping the oh-so-crucial adding-of-flour step.  Which, now that I think about it, I probably skipped the first time I made this, which is probably why the soup wound up sort of thin and boring.  Doh!  The problem is this.  The recipe has two small paragraphs of instructions at this point, with one one-liner in the middle – “Sprinkle in the flour and stir for three minutes.”  For some reason, that line keeps disappearing on the page for me.  And now I’m past onion soup, never to return – at least for a year or so – and I never manage to make the thing right.  I desperately threw some flour into the soup and beat it in, hoping against hope that it would make some kind of difference. The mushrooms I cooked with vermouth and butter and shallots until the liquid was evaporated.  I had rolled out and partially baked a crust, using some frozen dough I had in the fridge.  The dough looked like it was going to turn out well, but there wasn’t quite enough of it, so had to cut and paste a bit.  I was to mix the mushrooms, once they were done, in with “cream” and eggs.  I beat together the eggs and milk.  The stuff was thin; it made me uneasy, but I went ahead and blended in the mushrooms. It turned out there was too much filling for the pie crust, which has happened to me before.  No big deal, I thought, when the stuff leaked out the bottom of my removable-bottom tart pan on to the cookie sheet it was resting on.  I just over filled it, and it’s seeping out a tad.  It’ll make a mess, but whatever.  I’m not washing the dishes. But by the time I got the quiche in the oven, it was obvious that this was more than seepage.  There was some serious internal rupture going on.  I decided to pretend I wasn’t seeing the way the level of the filling in the pie crust was falling. The soup I scooped out into bowls and topped with a couple of slices of French bread that I’d toasted and rubbed with garlic and olive oil.  The slices weren’t nearly big enough to completely cover the surface of the soup, and when I sprinkled cheese on top, a lot of it sank into the soup.  I stuck the bowls in the oven beside the dying quiche and ignored them both for twenty minutes. When I took out the quiche, it was as I had feared.  A layer of custardy filling spread gruesomely all over the cookie sheet.  The quiche itself was pale and sunken, mushrooms stuck in a cheesy muck at the bottom of the crust. The soup looked alright, I guess.  Kind of ball-less.  I stuck it under the broiler to brown while I mixed up the “final fillip.”  (“Fillip.”  Now there’s a word you don’t hear often enough.  Thanks, JC.)  This fillip is an egg yolk, cornstarch, cognac and Worcestershire sauce beaten together.  This is what JC tells me to do:             Just before serving the soup, lift up an edge of the crust with a fork and remove a         ladleful of soup.  In a thin stream of droplets, beat the soup into the egg yolk mixture with a fork.  Gradually beat in two more ladlefuls, which may be added more rapidly. Again lifting up the crust, pour the mixture back into the soup.  Then reach in under the crust with the ladle and stir gently to blend the mixture into the rest of the soup. Notice how “the crust” keeps coming up as an important factor?  See, that was a problem. I mixed in ladlefuls from the leftover soup still on the stovetop.  I poured some into each bowl and, you know, stirred it in without unduly disturbing the pathetic little rounds of French bread floating in the middle. Dinner was served. “Care for a dollop of the quiche shit scraped off the cookie sheet, Mr. Powell?” “Why thank you, Mrs. Powell.  But no.” You know, it wasn’t going to kill anybody or anything.  The mushrooms still tasted like mushrooms, and the crust was actually pretty damned good and flakey, except for the parts where it had been rendered sodden by leaking milk.  The soup was, you know, fine.  Thin, as I had suspected it would be.  And of course my husband, the crouton-phobe, added insult to injury by refusing to eat the pathetic rounds of French bread floating in the middle of his bowl, which I’d put in there despite my knowledge of his issues in a vain attempt to make a “crust” under which to slip a final “fillip.” 7:40:44 AM    comment []