Sunday, November 10, 2002

This morning, Oeufs Brouilles, also known as scrambled eggs.  Only this was not like any scrambled eggs I ever made before.  First of all there’s nothing in them.  No milk or cream, no cheese or hot sauce or chorizo or nothin’.  Just eggs, and a little salt and pepper.  And butter, of course, but that goes without saying, doesn’t it?  What JC had me do was slowly stir beaten eggs over low heat in a saucepan small enough that the eggs were almost an inch deep.  I stirred and stirred and stirred, until the eggs started to thicken into a custard, taking it off heat occasionally to make sure it thickened evenly, and I wasn’t to cook them very hard.  Once they were just set I stirred in some softened butter to stop the cooking and served them.  They were very good, but at two eggs a person, it didn’t seem like there was very much on the plate.  That was when I made the mistake of making seconds. My husband and I have now eaten four eggs each.  This cannot be good for a person.  I now have an ache that feels like a heart attack in my back, and I’m sure it’s related. We were going to go out and do grocery shopping, maybe catch an actual movie in an actual theatre.  Then we remembered we have no money.  So, just for a change of pace, I think I’ll cook.  Tonight we’re having braised beef with foie gras.  I get to use the left over foie gras from the Tournedos Rossini, which is good.  The recipe also calls for six truffles, but that is when I say, “Julia, enough.”  We’re just going to have to go truffle-less.  Again.  Anyway, I’ll let you know how it turns out.  In the meantime, here is the requested recipe for my mom’s delicioso cheese biscuits: 1 cup butter 2 cups flour 8 oz. Sharp cheddar, grated 1 tsp cayenne ½ tsp salt 2 cups Rice Krispies Cut butter into flour.  Add cheese and seasonings.  Fold in cereal.  Drop rounds onto ungreased cookie sheet, mash down with spoon.  Bake at 350° for 15 minutes.  Do Not Overbake! Excellent for appetizers, especially for Thanksgiving, especially when you’re going to be family-less and sad in Long Island City for said holiday. 11:57:53 AM    comment []

Dinner Saturday, while very satisfying, was so uneventful that I’m going to have to do a bit of creative post-padding.  So – first of all, concerned animal-lovers should note that Cooper the Cat is no longer getting lost in the ceiling, as we have sealed off access.  But, ever since I fed the outside cats some lobster last week, they have become singularly devoted to the master plan of gaining entrance to our abode, and Saturday, after a smoky oven episode necessitated the opening of the kitchen window, the plan at last succeeded, resulting much tense sniffing and hissing among my indoor kitties. Such are the daily traumas of a cat owner, I suppose. The oven was smoking because I was roasting beef bones and shins for Fonds Brun, or brown stock.  I have rarely made my own beef stock, and have never roasted the bones beforehand, so I’d begun the process a little fearfully, but it isn’t so bad.  Aside from the smoke that is.  I just roasted the bones with some onions and carrots for half an hour, or so, then dumped them in a soup kettle with water to cover, and simmered it for, oh, 5 hours or so.  Piece of cake.  Of course, next I’ll be making it into jelly for the poached eggs in aspic – does that sound disgusting or what?  The jelly making process entails both pig skin and calf’s feet.  I’ll keep you posted. Dinner was Gratin de Pommes de Terre Aux Anchois, Gratin of Potatoes, Onions and Anchovies.  Hey guys, I’m eating anchovies!  Though I will cop to some lingering reticence.  All the gratin is diced, briefly boiled potatoes layered with sautéed, minced onions and anchovy filets – due to aforementioned reticence, I didn’t use all eight that JC suggests, just five or six – with a mixture of eggs and cream poured over, and cheese sprinkled on top.  Then I just put it in the oven and cooked it for half an hour.  Voila!  Puffy brown gratin with anchovies in it!  As I had suspected, I like gratins with diced potatoes better than gratins with grated potatoes.  The texture is just more dinner-like and satisfying.  And though I got some bites that overwhelmed me a bit, overall the anchovies were a definite asset.  As Eric so perceptively pointed out, “it’s like eating potatoes and fish at the same time!”  Exactly so.  For the anchovy-phobic, it would probably be better to mince them up so each bite lightly suffused, rather than running into big chunks at a time.  Good stuff. After dinner, we re-watched the end of “High Noon”, which I shamefully fell asleep during on Friday night, and which is one hell of a fantastic movie.  Add Gary Cooper to my ever-burgeoning list of sexiest men alive at some point in time. Speaking of, we got tickets for Tuesday to a reading of Oscar Wilde’s “Salome” with god of my idolatry David Strathairn (sorry, Eric.)  Oh, Al Pacino’s in it, too.  Whatever.  David’s a big fan of my baking creations, perhaps I’ll have to whip him up a MtAoFC tidbit. 11:42:04 AM    comment []

Fricassee de Poulet a l’Indienne, (Fricasseed Chicken with Curry Sauce.) I had to work ludicrously late on Friday.  Really, is rebuilding lower Manhattan so important it can’t wait until next week?  TGI fucking F, man!  Anyway, as is usual these days, I didn’t much want to cook when I got home, but I was comforted by the knowledge that this would be an easy dinner.  Fricassee de Poulet a l’Indienne is precisely the fricasseed chicken I did last week, but with curry powder stirred in.  So I went about my business confidently.  I was going to cut corners here and there – using sliced onions softened in butter rather than whole small braised onions would cut at least half an hour off my prep time – but I felt good about it.  So I softened sliced onion, carrots and celery in butter, then turned chicken pieces in it until it had stiffened and gotten slightly yellow, then sprinkled on flour and salt and pepper, cooked a bit more, poured in stock and vermouth to cover, simmered.  I stewed some mushrooms, and softened some thick-sliced onion in butter.  It was all going perfectly, until I realized that I’d almost finished cooking the chicken, and I’d never added the curry. Bad Julie, Bad Bad! I had a bit of a meltdown – it was out of proportion to the crisis, I’ll admit.  The time pressure of the Julie/Julia Project was getting to me I think, I hadn’t gotten much accomplished that week, and now, here I’d wasted a precious evening of cooking, this was just the same old fricassee as last week, what a stinking waste of time, I was a useless specimen of humanity, etcetera etcetera.  Eric suggested that this could be catalogued under the “amusing failures” file, but I found nothing amusing about failure by sheer forgetful dumbassedness.  So, in a desperate attempt to at least make the failure spectacular and blog-worthy, I dumped the tablespoon of curry sauce into the chicken at the last minute, and let it cook a little longer.  I took out the chicken, overcooked now due to my freak-out and subsequent curry addition, then cooked down the cooking liquid.  Beat some egg yolks with cream.  Beat the cooked-down sauce in.  Put it back into the pot, boiled it briefly, squeezed in some lemon juice.  Put the chicken back in the pot with the mushrooms and onions and heated it up again.  Fricassee de Poulet a l’Indienne.  And it wasn’t a disaster at all.  It was damned good, in fact.  I guess this would have been more entertaining if something truly awful had happened.  But to get your extra kicks you can just amuse yourself imagining my teary emotional breakdown over curry powder.  That’s kind of funny. I guess. 11:07:08 AM    comment []