Thursday, November 21, 2002

I went to the grocery store thinking I was going to buy makings for a salad, goddammit.  Lettuce, vegetables of various crunchy sorts, some good balsamic.  So what did I walk out of there with?  Balsamic vinegar and an avocado.  Here we are, languishing in Long Island City, slowly expiring of fat poisoning and the early stages of scurvy, and I can’t make myself make a salad.  Old habits die hard, I guess. The dish of the evening was Gratin aux Fruits de Mer, Gratin of Creamed Salmon, which sounded good, and looked good as I was making it.  I started by sautéing some mushrooms and setting them aside, then sautéing minced onions in a saucepan with butter.  Once they were soft, I threw in flour for a roux.  Thinking of my previous attempts at roux-making, I put in about a third less flour than JC suggested, and I was right:  What resulted was much more what I think of as “roux” – still basically a liquid, stirrable.  Once that had cooked a couple of minutes I beat in a cup of boiling milk, some vermouth, a bit of oregano, and juices I’d drained from the can of salmon.  (You thought, mayhap, I was using fresh salmon steaks?  Pshaw….)  I boiled that to let it thicken up good. While it was boiling, I broke up the salmon, picking out the bones and gross skin.  I don’t use canned salmon all that often, and I always forget what a pain in the ass it is to deal with.  I was not as assiduous as I might have been about the picking, I must admit. I more or less decided that so long as I got the knotty vertebrae out of there, the skinny tiny little bones would melt away.  Right?  Once the sauce was boiled down I “thinned it out” with some cream.  Organic cream, I might add.  I usually don’t go in for that sort of thing, but I gotta tell you, this cream is amazing – it’s like not even the same product.  When Eric puts it in his coffee, it’s so thick it makes snaky fat ribbons in the liquid.  It’s like milk syrup.  It’s nuts!  Anyway, once the sauce was thinned out, I dumped in the salmon and the mushrooms, stirred it all up, and poured it into a baking dish.  Okay, it was like a little metal cake pan.  It was all I had in the right size.  I sprinkled it with grated cheese and dotted it with butter, then stuck it in a 425° oven.  15 minutes, Julia said. Well, 15 minutes later, the top was bubbly and brown, like Julia said it would be, but the gratin hadn’t solidified at all.  Hm.  I maybe hadn’t let the oven preheat for long enough.  I stuck it back in. After ten more minutes, the thing still hadn’t set.  It occurred to me suddenly that this recipe, unlike the last couple of gratins, hadn’t had any eggs in it, and I had a moment of blind panic that I’d skipped a step.  But no, I reviewed MtAoFC, and no eggs.  Hm. Well, fuck it.  I went ahead and served it.  The taste was very good, rich and buttery and mushroomy and fishy.  But it was, let’s be honest here, salmon stew.  Or salmon gruel.  Not salmon gratin, by any stretch. With the gratin I served the avocado, cut in half, with balsamic vinegar in the hole.  This is a dish, I will confess without [much] shame, that I bilked off Martha.  And it is indeed A Good Thing, so simple, and gorgeous to look at, very elegant.  But dude, the avocado sucked.  I’d chosen the best one, I thought, the only one that wasn’t either rock hard or liquefied, but inside the flesh was pale and fibrous and just not at all good.  Quite a disappointment.  Next time I’ll buy the goddammned salad. Tonight, I think I’m doing lobster, because just as I don’t save omelettes for brunch, I don’t save the torture of invertebrates until the weekend.  I may feed Zuzu while I’m at it, just to get all the murder out of the way at once. A couple of unrelated food comments: There’s an article in this month’s Vanity Fair about Nigella Lawson, in which the author snarkily writes: “Sex and domesticity.  This is the inspired coupling that is Nigella’s invention, a world far removed from the dithering, high-pitched admonitions of Julia Child.” Whoa there, buddy.  First of all, this article is written by a woman with a ropy neck who’s had too many glamour treatments, and who wouldn’t know a good beef bourguignon if it was dropped on her head, and only someone like that would think that sex and domesticity were mutually exclusive.  Second, while I have no objection to Nigella Lawson – I use her method for spaghette carbonara on a regular basis, or did before the J/J Project precluded me – Nigella is about sex like Marilyn Monroe was, which is to say she is more about a celluloid fantasy, in her case of the sensual “domestic goddess”, than she is about sex itself.  Finally, and most importantly, c’mon with the random Julia-baiting.  She was never a beauty, perhaps, but Julia is earthy, funny, and essentially sensual.  She plays with her food, she eats it with relish.  And of course, there’s her great line about “the three Fs in a good marriage – food and flattery.”  Even more, I object to the word “admonitions.”  Julia Child, madam, does not admonish.  She encourages, she teaches, she revels. And the moral for the day comes from Amanda Hesser, who wrote in her NY Times article yesterday about Turducken, the turkey recipe of the moment, which involves stuffing a boned chicken into a boned duck into a boned turkey: “Mr. Lobel has been a butcher for 55 years.  It took him 15 minutes to bone the duck.  Get a butcher to bone the birds.” 7:55:41 AM    comment []