Monday, November 04, 2002

So where was I?  Ah, yes, eviscerated lobster…. Once I had finished preparing those, I got to work on the Artichauts Braises a la Provençale – artichokes braised with wine, garlic and herbs.  This entailed trimming the tops of the artichokes, and the spiny end of the remaining leaves, then quartering them lengthwise and cutting out the chokes.  I love cutting out a choke, and not only because it sounds like some kind of S&M jargon.  It’s also just fun to scrape out all that nasty hairiness, especially now that I’ve come to love and appreciate the yummy soft stuff underneath.  Anyway, all the artichoke trimming takes a little while, and then I boiled them for ten minutes or so.  While that was happening I sautéed in olive oil (hence the “provençale”…) some onions and garlic, and turned on the oven. It was around this time that Bekkah and Jeff showed up.  I would like to point out that I have never yet lost a friend en route to my place.  Rat- and drug-dealer-infested it may be, but at least it ain’t hard to find…. I would also like to point out that I am particularly fond of friends who come bearing gifts, such as the oh-so-appropriate mix of froggy music, and most especially the makings for extra-fancy Bloody Marys.  My husband perhaps is not so fond, but he’s a wimp.  (Heroic lobster episode notwithstanding.)  One of the great things about friends who bring booze is that they have brought their own entertainment with them, in the event that dinner gets served oh, say, an hour later than was intended.  The artichoke quarters got turned into the casserole with the onions and garlic.  I poured in some wine vinegar and the ever-present vermouth, boiled that down, then poured in some beef broth and got that simmering for a moment before putting in an herb “bouquet” ( I have GOT to get myself some cheesecloth one of these days) and laying on top of it one of those rounds of waxed paper I still TO THIS DAY have not gotten over how much I love making.  I stuck it in the oven.  And that, basically, was that. It’s so nice to have everything in the oven and nothing to do but get drunk with your friends…  We shot the shat.  I apologized profusely for not letting Bekkah and Jeff in on the murder of the lobsters; Jeff asked perspicacious questions about the kind of vermouth I use (I use the cheap kind, sadly); Bekkah talked about the apartment they’re getting ready to buy, just to make us feel all envious and sad; all drank many Jeff-made Bloody Marys, complete with honest-to-goodness horse radish and Stoli pepper vodka.  I broke out the foie gras for putting onto bread, much to the wonderment of all.  (Typically perspicacious Jeff question: “Now when you mentioned in the blog ‘fifty dollars worth of foie gras’, was that before or after the part you used for the tournedos?”) Dinner was served well before midnight.  I got all fancy and served things in courses.  We ate the artichokes first.  I warned my guests that Julia does not approve of serving wine with artichokes, but they could not be dissuaded.  I personally took the high road and drank a vodka tonic.  The artichokes were very, very good, though you can get a little annoyed after awhile with all the waste that eating artichokes produces.  It’s so Roman, somehow.  When we were done, all of us had mountainous piles of artichoke leaves on our plates.  I have oh-so efficiently put the lobsters in the oven to warm when I served the artichokes, (along with some leftover chicken fricassee for the icthy-phobic Bekkah), so I was so all over serving the main course. The main course, I gotta say, was pretty goddamned good.  Mostly, it tasted like cream and cognac.  It also tasted like lobster.  There wasn’t that much of it, which was a very good thing.  We had bread to go along.  Bread with creamy lobster is a Good Thing.  Even Bekkah ate a bite, and was very polite about it all. For dessert, we had Bavarian au Chocolat, along with some vodka tonics.  Actually, Eric had a pepper vodka tonic by mistake.  That might have been his downfall, and it certainly couldn’t have gone very well with the Bavarian.  The Bavarian tasted like chocolate pudding with whipped cream on top, which is exactly what it was.  I had forgotten to stir in the rum before it set, and I’m sure the rum would have made it more complex or something.  Also, though, I am guessing Julia was writing at a time before mainstream America had gotten a taste for dark chocolate.  It tasted a bit like a candy bar.  I am far from complaining. A very civilized evening in Long Island City was had by all. And you know the very best thing about the Julie/Julia Project?  I never have to wash the dishes. 8:07:20 PM    comment []

Homard Thermidor. (also Artichauts Braises a la Provencale and Bavarois au Chocolat.) (With some Bloody Marys, vodka tonics and red wine mixed in.  Also some foie gras.) I dreamed about it at night.  Our sleep machine, the one we have by our bed to drown out the freight trucks rumbling past our apartment, was speaking to me: “Lobster killer, lobster killer, lobster killer….”  I was fully awake by dawn, worrying.  It was Sunday in Long Island City – where would I get lobster, for God’s sake?  How much would it cost?  How would I get it home?  And then of course, we were having Bekkah and Jeff over to eat lobster and lend moral support, and I had lounged all the day before, and the house was a wreck.  My husband, dear that he is, wanted to read the paper.  I was very nearly going crazy.  Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!  I imagined this lobster hunt going on for hours….  But Eric got out the yellow pages, and the first place he called was open!  Shit is never that easy for me.  We walked to the car, it miraculously started, we drove into Astoria for fish.  We didn’t even have to go all the way to the place we’d called; we found another one on the way.  It was clean, it didn’t smell fishy, and they had lobsters in a nasty-looking cloudy tank.  I ordered two. I had been imagining lugging them home in a bucket, so when I saw the guy just stick the suckers in a paper bag, I was a little appalled.  He said just to keep them in the refrigerator.  He said they’d be good until Thursday.  Ugh.  I brought them back to the car.  I’d have expected them to thrash around a little, but they just sat there.  I guess suffocating will do that to a body.  On the way home, Eric suggested we stop by this Bosnian place he knows to pick up some lunch.  He went in while I babysat the lobsters in the car.  He was gone for a very long time.  I was trying not to worry about the dying crustaceans, worrying anyway.  He came back the car with “mixed meat for two,” which looked to be a football wrapped in foil, but when unwrapped turned out to be a few sausages and a whole lot of gizzards in a loaf of bread. Once the lobsters were ensconced in the fridge, I tried to concentrate on cleaning the house.  Eric vaccumed, I mopped the bolon and made the chocolate Bavarian.  But the lobsters kept nagging at me.  I peeked into the bag once and saw black eyes, lazily moving arms.  Hm. Julia gets very terse in her description of Homard Thermidor – always a bad sign.  No reference to how to keep live lobsters.  It was making me worried.  I ended by looking in “Joy of Cooking.”  “Joy of Cooking” says that lobsters should be lively and thrashing when they come out of the tank.  Hey.  My lobsters didn’t thrash.  It said if they were limp, they might die before you cooked them.  It seemed to think that was a bad thing. Shit. So, after all the stressing, all the kind advice of my kind readers and Bekkah and Jeff’s offer of help, we wound up facing the killing of the crustaceans alone.  I didn’t cut their spinal cords.  I didn’t put them in the freezer.  I just dumped them out of the paper bag into a pot with some boiling water and vermouth and vegetable.  And then freaked the fuck out. The pot wasn’t big enough, I couldn’t get the lid down, and though the lobsters weren’t thrashing in horror, they’d start any second, once the sensation of the boiling water got through their tough hides.  It was just too horrible.  My heroic husband had to take things in hand.  I’d have thought he’d have collapsed just like me, but no, he was really very brave and manly and in control of the situation.  The lobsters didn’t make much of a racket in the pot, or maybe they did – I tried to spend the next 20 minutes very far away.  When I came back and took off the lid, they were very red, and not making any racket at all.  Poor boiled lobsters.  I took them out, cooked down their juices with some juices from some mushrooms I’d stewed.  This I strained through a sieve, and then beat into a roux of butter and flour.  By the time I came to the part where I split the lobsters, Eric had conveniently vacated the premises.  Julia was in prime form here – “split the lobsters in half lengthwise, keeping the shell halves intact.”  Ah.  Surely, thought I, that cannot be that easy.  Suprisingly, though, it was.  The knife crunched right through.  It was true that all within was not as clear-cut as you might think.  She told me to “discard sand sacks in the heads, and the intestinal tubes.”  The intestinal tubes were easy enough – they looked pretty much like the veins in shrimp, only bigger.  The sand sacks I guessed on, figuring they were the parts up at the front kind of full of gritty unappetizing looking junk.  I was meant to “rub the lobster coral and green matter through a fine sieve.”  Well, there certainly was green matter, but I didn’t find anything that much looked like coral.  One lobster did have some orangey looking stuff, but it was filling the intestine, so I decided not to risk it.  Then I pulled out all the meat, cracking open the claws to get at the meat there, and chopped it up. All in all, cutting a lobster in half proved pretty satisfying.  My husband fear that by the end of this I’ll be comfortable filleting puppies.  I myself was put in mind of a line from one of my favorite movies of all time:  “The first time is the worst…the second time’s no picnic, either.  Now I do it just to watch their expression change.”  (Okay, that was a paraphrase.  Anyone who can work through my mangled quotation to name the actor and the movie gets a prize, just as soon as I figure what I’m giving out for prizes….) After that, it was a piece of cake.  The “green matter” – what is green matter, and why won’t Julia tell me? – got beaten into some egg yolks, cream, mustard and cayenne, and poured into the lobster broth/roux sauce, and boiled.  I sautéed the meat in some butter, then poured in some cognac and let it boil down.  Then I stirred in the stewed mushrooms and two-thirds of the sauce.  I heaped the mixture into the four lobster halves, poured the rest of the sauce over, sprinkled with parmesan and dotted with butter.  Now they were ready for final cooking.  I put them in the fridge to wait. Shit, guys, I’m late for work.  Tell you what – rather than giving short shrift to the meal, and to Bekkah and Jeff’s contributions of booze and company, I’ll end this tonight.  For the moment, ta ta…. 8:04:59 AM    comment []

Friday night, Eric and I went out with some of my co-workers for a drink after work.  A few blowsily intellectual Yalie planners, some sweet man-child interns and a lawyer or two in a loud bar drinking cheap beer.  When we did get home, the very last thing I wanted to do was cook.  But I had ground beef in the fridge (leftover from Eric’s Wolfman Jack’s), and we were planning on going to a high-falutin’ Halloween party the next night, so I made myself do it – Bitokes a la Russe, Champignons Sautes a la Bordelaise and rice.  The Julie/Julia Project doesn’t get much more straightforward.  Basically, I was making sautéed burgers with cream sauce, mushrooms sautéed with shallots and bread crumbs, and Uncle Ben’s.  But little things kept going wrong.  Or not so much that as I just didn’t have the stomach for the little things.  Mincing onions for the hamburgers, mixing the meat with eggs and the onions and butter, slicing mushrooms; it all just seemed like too much work.  I was in a foul mood, I snapped at my dear husband, and made the hamburgers too thick, so they wouldn’t cook through.  Julia can withstand the ups and downs of neurotic cooks, and the food turned out good, filling and rich as usual, though severely underdone.  But all I wanted to do was go to bed.  Which I did. The next day, Eric went off to attend some glamorous symposium on Turkey.  (The country, not the bird.  I think.)  I did house things.  Or rather, I intended to do house things.  A lot of what I did was lounge.  Which is good, I suppose – it was Saturday, after all – but I’m turning into my mother, I fear, and an afternoon of lounging got my stress juices flowing.  The house is a wreck, there’s so much to be done, blah blah blah….  And of course there was the central apprehension that lay lurking behind all others – tomorrow was Lobster Day. Upshot being, the last thing I could imagine myself doing was pulling together a fabulous costume out of the whole cloth and going to a fabulous Halloween party in Brooklyn.  Any who read this and wonder where Eric was, and why he and his wife didn’t come, all decked out in their Nick & Nora Fury costumes, it was my fault.  Mea Culpa. Instead of having a good time, I made Fricassee de Poulet a L’Ancienne, “Old-fashioned Chicken Fricasee with Wine-flavored Cream Sauce, Onions, and Mushrooms.” Actually, that’s not fair.  Fricasseeing is rather fun (as well as being a pretty great word to use as a gerundive.)  It was a bit of work, it’s true.  I parboiled little white onions first, and peeled them, and braised them.  I stewed the mushrooms in some water and lemon juice.  Then I sliced an onion, a carrot, and a stalk of celery, and cooked them slowly in butter.  I put in chicken pieces – the grocery story I went to didn’t have cut-up chickens, can you believe that shit?  I had to cut up the chicken all by myself, and I’m not going to lie and tell you it was prettily done.  Anyway – I put in the chicken and turned it back and forth a few times just until the skin got slightly yellow and stiff.  Then I let it cook covered for a few minutes on low heat.  The point here it not to brown the chicken, just to get it started cooking with all the buttery vegetably flavors.  I sprinkled some flour and salt and pepper over the pieces, then poured in some boiling chicken stock, vermouth, some herb-y things, and a little water until the chicken was just covered.  The chicken at this point simmers for 25 minutes or so, covered.  When it’s done, take out the chicken pieces and pour into the pan the juices from the mushrooms and the onions, then boil to reduce.  The flour will make it thicken up.  Then I beat a couple of egg yolks with cream in a mixing bowl.  I added the chicken juice sauce thing in with the yolks in small driblets, beating.  Then the sauce went back in the saucepan and boiled for a minute.  The chicken, in its waiting casserole, is arranged with the onions and the mushrooms.  The sauce is strained through a sieve on top of the chicken, and the whole thing is heated through. This is very, very good stuff, and doesn’t need anything with it but some noodles or rice.  We had noodles. And, as is my wont of an evening, I went to bed – full, getting fatter all the time, and having not put on a fabulous Halloween costume.  Tomorrow, the lobster. 7:21:41 AM    comment []