Monday, November 11, 2002

Just when you think the old government job grind has got to stop, along comes Veterans Day!  Aaah, yes, I do love a veteran.  I think they should all have days. So last night I made what turned out to be the most expensive pot roast on earth.  I say last night.  Actually, I was in the kitchen from about 2:30 on.  God, I sure as hell do spend a lot of time cooking.  The first problem was that I had had a failure of nerve on the beef-buying front, and had bought a roast of some kind because I didn’t know what a whole filet of beef was, exactly.  I found a whole filet mignon at Western beef, but it was eight pounds, thirty-eight bucks, and the last time I got filet mignon at Western Beef, it rather sucked.  So random roast it was.  I cut a big hole in it, stuffed it with a mixture of foie gras, Madeira wine, sautéed shallots, allspice and thyme.  Then I tied it shut, laying strips of (blanched) bacon on top of the slit first.  Oh, and I stuffed in their the bits of truffle I was able to dig out of the foie gras.  This recipe calls for, as I think I’ve mentioned in previous posts, six truffles.  What kind of bullshit is that, I ask you?  Anyway, then I browned the roast on all sides, poured out the cooking fat, and spread over it a mixture of carrots, celery, onions and ham that had been sautéed in butter and cooked down with some Madeira. Then I made the brown sauce.  The brown sauce is optional, I could have just used beef broth, but I figured, what the hell, it’s Sunday, I’ve got no truffles, I might as well.  For the brown sauce I sautéed some more onions, carrots, celery and ham, in clarified butter, then tossed in some flour (I threw in some truffle flour, just to mix things up.  Truffle flour is an amazing thing, I urge you all to try it, I guess it’s flour that truffles have been stored in, it’s pretty intense stuff.)  Anyway, I stirred the flour and vegetables around for a bit, then poured in the brown stock I’d made Saturday, with some tomato paste and an “herb bouquet”, then let that simmer for two hours.  While that was happening, I amused myself tiling the kitchen sink backsplash area.  When the sauce was done I strained it and poured it in with the roast.  The roast went in the oven – for 45 to 55 minutes, JC said.  “Okay,” said I.  I amused myself shaving my legs while the roast cooked.  That was a mistake, because when I came back into the kitchen I all of a sudden was pressed for time making the potatoes.  I started doing the whole whittling-the-potatoes-into-olive-shapes routine, but after not too long I was making disturbing ape-like grunts of frustration, and my husband made me stop.  Cutting them up like a normal person was deemed good e-fucking-nough.  I knew as soon as I took the meat out of the oven that this, my friends, was pot-roast, plain and simple.  Overdone pot-roast, at that.  Not, in any case, “a magnificent recipe for an important dinner.”  A failure, in other words. It wasn’t at all bad.  The sauce was rich and meaty, and overcame the dryness of the meat.  The foie gras in the middle was good.  The potatoes, which I’d just sautéed in butter, were good.  Eric had made good old regular salad, and that was very, very refreshing and good.  It was Sunday night dinner.  Not important, not even very special, but satisfying. So far this morning I have both boiled calves’ feet and simmered pork skin.  Neither of these jobs is excessively pleasant, thought they’re still both better than work.  I am determined to make poached eggs in aspic today, though I’m not at all sure I’ll succeed in eating them.  Originally we were meant to have lobster tonight, but we are frighteningly poor, so I’m putting that off.  I see economic constraints becoming more and more of a factor.  Which is a shame, because the Julie/Julia Project was always supposed to be, at least in part, an experiment in the art of eating well while poverty-stricken.  We’ll make it, though. In parting let me say this – Thanks be to the pumpkin bread makers, who have fed us well through many a morning. Thanks be to the tostada chip senders, who had sustained us in our Yankee expatriation. 10:03:37 AM    comment []