Monday, December 02, 2002

Saturday I made the penultimate chicken fricassee, Fondue de Poelet a la Crème, or chicken simmered with cream and onions.  My kind of dish.  JC suggests serving it with baked cucumbers.  Only problem being, I’ve already made baked cucumbers, so I was forced by the parameters of The Project into making creamed cucumbers instead. Too – much – cream---… Good stuff all around.  The fricassee followed the master recipe for fricassee, with a couple of changes.  Basically, instead of simmering the chicken in stock and wine, I simmered it in cream and wine, but then to make up for it I didn’t add the egg yolk-cream liaison at the end.  It was flavored with the onions – just regular sliced ones, not pearl onions braised for an hour, which I much appreciated – the Madeira I simmered it in, and a touch of curry.  No mushrooms either, and though I like mushrooms, I also appreciated skipping that step.  Then once the chicken was done, all I needed to do was cook down the cream sauce by half or so and refresh it with some lemon juice.  Actually, though, before I did all this, I prepared the Concombres a la Creme.  My dear husband peeled them while I took a shower, the lover.  Then we sliced them in half, lengthwise, scooped out the seeds – which is sort of a fun procedure – and chopped them into big matchsticks.  These got soaked for half an hour with some vinegar, salt and sugar.  Then I tossed them with melted butter, basil and minced green onions, and stuck them in the oven.  For an hour.  I can’t get over the insanity of the notion of cooking cucumbers for an hour.  But they have not disappeared into a sour puddle when I take them out.  Then even still have some bite to them.  It is remarkable.  Then I toss them with some hot cream that I’ve reduced to half on the stovetop, and I have Concombres a la Crème. “Concombres?  We don’t need no stinking concombres!” Sorry.  You know, I have not yet ceased to be amazed by the fact that I really, really like baked cucumbers.  I was thinking Saturday this is actually something I would serve to my kids, should I ever have any.  Would like baked cucumbers make them unbearably weird? Anyway, so the only thing that was sort of a pain in the ass was the rice.  Julia and her goddamned rice.  Making Riz a l’Anglaise is just like making her regular steamed rice, only you toss it with butter at the end.  A waste of goddamned time, is what it is.  Boil the rice for ten minutes in a large kettle of water.  Drain.  Rinse with hot water, fluffing with a fork.  It must be a fork; do not attempt to use anything else.  Wrap the rice up in a towel or cheesecloth and place it in a steamer unit over simmering water.  Steam for twenty minutes. Irritates the hell out of me. I will say that the rice turns out pretty well, and the nice thing is that you can’t really get it over done.  Or maybe you could, if it wasn’t always the last thing to get done, and everything else was waiting, because who knew you’d have to give yourself an hour to make rice, for God’s sake! On Sunday we went out with some family in town.  Tonight I probably won’t cook either, since my bitch of a job is going to be particularly godforsaken today.  Going two days without cooking makes me very anxious.  That’s probably a bad sign, isn’t it? 6:44:59 AM    comment []