Wednesday, October 30, 2002

Equation of the day: Crap job => embarrassing teary public meltdown => exhaustion & ennui + too many cocktails = crap blogging This is not to say that I didn’t cook.  Oh no.  I cooked.  All I’m sayin’ is, don’t expect feats of literary derring do on the subject. What I cooked was plain old poached chicken with Sauce Soubise, plain old rice and Carottes a la Crème.  I had intended to bite the bullet and make rice the Julia way, but Zeytuna didn’t have cheesecloth, and what am I saying?  Any rice recipe that calls for cheesecloth is a silly goddamned rice recipe.   Now that I mention it, and of course everyone else’s dreams are always boring as hell, I know, but I did dream last night that I bought a bolt of cheesecloth that was bigger than me.  But enough of that.  I started by putting a pound of sliced onions in a pan with some (read: 6 tablespoons of) butter and cooking them slowly, covered, for half an hour or so, so they got very soft without browning.  The onions I sliced by hand, because you know with the food processor there’s always this delicate balance of which thing I want to do least, chop lots of things or pull out the food processor.  Today I didn’t want to pull out the food processor.  Then I peeled and sliced a pound and a half of carrots, and braised them with water, butter and some sugar.  JC wanted me to do this until the water had evaporated, but after half an hour, fearing the carrots would disintegrate entirely, I gave up and drained them.  The chicken I put in a pot of simmering water with a bay leaf and some peppercorns.  I had some vodka tonics. Also some chips and Religious Experience hot sauce, which Oh My God.  It’s been too long since I had this stuff.  Oh.  My.  God.  Thank you, thank you, thank you, Tim, you have my ever-fucking-lasting gratitude. When the onions were good and soft I stirred in some flour.  After a couple of minutes, I poured in some boiling (read: periodically boiling over) milk from another saucepan.  That I let simmer for fifteen minutes.  I also let simmer, in the pan the carrots had been in, a cup and half of cream.  Egad!  Not enough cream.  A cup of cream, then, and half a cup of half and half.  I dumped the carrots back in, and let that boil slowly for fifteen minutes or so.  At some point in here -- in the middle of pouring a cocktail, most likely -- I remembered I had to make the rice.  Whatever would I have done had I been trying to deal with cheesecloth? So the fun part of the evening happened when the onions were cooked down and I got to break out for the first time my brand spanking new food mill that my mother in law Joann gave me.  I do love a shiny new kitchen appliance.  Once I’d figured out how to put the thing together, I put the food mill over a bowl and put the onions in the food mill.  A few turns of the handle later I had yummery smooth onion sauce.  Huzzah!  I love this thing! I put the sauce back in the pan, brought it back to a simmer, and thinned it out with some half and half.  Seasoned it with salt, pepper, and nutmeg – just a little, because I tend to dislike nutmeg.  The chicken I took out of the poaching liquid.  I carved the meat off, then dumped the bones back into the pot to simmer some more for stock.  I finished up the sauce by stirring in some butter.  I finished the creamed carrots, which were creamy as hell, by stirring in some butter.  Also chopped parsley. God, I do love onions.  The Sauce Soubise was of course not harsh at all, since the onions had been cooked down so long and slowly, and since there was plenty of milk and cream in there.  The chicken and the rice were basically just some stuff to put on the plate to hold Sauce Soubise.  The carrots were good, too, though carrots in cream are sweet, sweet, sweet, and kind of taste like nutmeg or something even though I didn’t put any in.  Also, as per usual with Julia, they’d been cooked down to utter melting softness, which is fine, but a little baby-food-ish. Then I went to sleep.  And woke up this morning with onion breath. So, on the subject of blogging: if you read my comments yesterday, you will know that a suggestion has been made that I hold a contest for a logo.  I've already gotten one sent to me -- thanks, Bekkah!  If anybody else wants to take a crack at it, please do... if I get a few, maybe we can have a little vote.  As for prizes, I'm still working on it.  I'm not very creative, so these things take time.... 7:51:21 AM    comment []