Thursday, December 05, 2002

Wednesday was Soupe de Poisson with Rouille.  JC has a long list of recommendations for what kind of fish to use, and suggests using as much variety as possible.  I had grand exotic visions of going to Chinatown and blithely pointing out strange little sea creatures to drop willy-nilly into the soup pot, but I soon realized that a) Chinatown was way the hell out of my way, b) it was fricking COLD out, and c) fish bought at Chinatown would more than likely have to be scaled, and I don’t know nothin’ about scalin’ no fishies.  So I broke down and bought my fish at the very dear Zeytuna, where bought I the dried orange peel I hadn’t had last night for the tomato sauce, but which I would need again tonight for the soup.  I also bought shrimp, halibut, and clam juice.  I figured Eric could employ the shrimp for Eric’s Spicy Thursday – he’s so resourceful – and I’d use the shells, along with the halibut and the clam juice, for the fish stock.  Of course, if I’d gone to Chinatown, I could have bought shrimp with their heads on, which Paul Prudhomme and lots of other folks will tell you are the key to a supremely rich stock.  Please refer to points a) and b), above. I got home and spent roughly four years cleaning shrimp.  Cleaning shrimp is like childbirth – you can never remember the torture afterwards.  Only with childbirth, what you don’t remember is the excruciating pain, and the reason you don’t remember is so you don’t swear off sex and procreation forever.  With shrimp, you don’t remember the endless fucking tedium, and the reason you don’t remember is because otherwise… you’d buy peeled shrimp?  I dunno, I guess the analogy loses something in the explication.  In any case, I peeled shrimp for much, much longer than it took me to write this post.  At one point – here I go being all domestic and talking about my cats in a most un-hip manner – Cooper got a hold of a shrimp.  The taste of the succulent raw meat triggered some primal psychic response deep in his hypothalamus.  He growled over it, kept carrying it from place to place like a lioness with a cub, and was generally psychotic and feral for the rest of the night.  Anyway, at last I was done with that.  Eric took the shrimp and sautéed it with sliced garlic – the first step for chipotle shrimp tacos, which is what we’re eating tomorrow, heaven be praised.  It smelled glorious.  I, meanwhile, was mincing a cup of onion and ¾ cup leek.  Cleaning, mincing, grrr, argh.  I then sautéed the onions and leeks in olive oil for five minutes to soften.  When that was done I dumped in 4 cloves of mashed garlic and a cup and a half of drained, diced canned tomatoes.  While that simmered for a bit I chopped the big piece of halibut I had into chunks.  It still had the skin on.  Somehow I’d always thought of fish skin as being thin and tissue-y, but it turns out that halibut skin, at least, is some very tough stuff.  I think I ruined my knife on it.  But JC wants me to throw everything in the pot for the richest stock possible, so I leave it on.  Once it’s done chopping I put it, the shrimp shells, the clam juice, and two quarts of water in the pot.  I add parsley, bay, dried basil, fennel, dried orange peel, and salt and pepper.  Oh, and a potato.  That’s for the rouille.  I let it cook, uncovered, over moderate heat, for 40 minutes. I watch a bit of West Wing.  It’s a rerun.  Charlie krazy glues Allison Janney’s phone.  I do love that Allison Janney.  Our entire household is caught up in a torrid obsession with Allison Janney – cats howling at the moon, the whole bit.  I chop up a red bell pepper and a jalapeno, and boil them for a few minutes in salted water.  I put them in the bowl of my little miniature food processor which is so cute and which I hardly ever use.  I am meant to put in four cloves of mashed garlic, but my husband has used the entire head of garlic we just bought today.  Which is great as far as tomorrow goes, but not so great now.  I pick garlic slices out of Eric’s shrimp and put them in.  A teaspoon of dried basil.  I mush it into a paste in the food processor.  Then I beat in some tablespoons of olive oil. When I strain the soup, dawning horror creeps across Eric’s face. “What are you doing with the fish?” “Nothing.” “Aren’t we going to eat it?” “It’s been cooking for 45 minutes.  It’s dried out and tasteless.” “And?” ”It’s all mixed in with shrimp shells and stuff.” “Give me that.” Eric picks out the halibut meat and puts it in a tupperware.  Eric is getting a little desperate for meat.  I strain the soup, and put the liquid back in the pot.  I toss in some broken spaghetti and, realizing I’d forgotten to put it in earlier, some saffron, and let it boil for ten minutes.  Meanwhile, I put in noodles to cook in another pot.  See, my original idea had been to serve the leftover tomato sauce from yesterday on the side.  Soup and pasta – not so weird, right?  Only this is turning into a curiously carb-heavy meal all of a sudden.  I pick the potato out of the strained stuff and mash it into the rouille.  I beat in a few tablespoons of the soup.  When the noodles are done, we toss it with last night’s tomato sauce, which I’ve heated up in yet another pan.  To serve, we ladle the soup into bowls, drop in a big dollop of the rouille, and sprinkle with parmesan.  Pasta goes in another bowl. Failures first.  The pasta is a failure.  I don’t think it’s the sauce’s fault, though.  I think it’s the fault of the pasta we bought the other day at the Dominican bodega under the tracks of the 7 train.  It tastes flour-y or gluey or something, though the texture is not overdone.  It’s bizarre.  A waste of the tomato sauce, which is pretty good, but not good enough to mask the weirdo taste of the pasta. The Soupe de Poisson, on the other hand, is great.  This is supposed to be a Basque dish, and it does taste more “Spanish” than “French.”  Very complex.  The rouille, of course, just melts into the soup, suffusing, not with much heat, but a deep-down hint of spice.  If only I’d made the soup with a dozen different kinds of strange-o fishies.  Okay, I’m now late for work, but before I go, I wanted to link to this article from yesterday’s New York Times about Jeffery Steingarten, because I love Jeffery Steingarten, but more importantly because I hate Alex Witchel.  I mean, God, Alex, shut UP!  Some people I could mention would give their eyeteeth to be well paid for doing things like hanging out with Jeffery Steingarten and eating his homemade pasta, and then getting to write about it.  And what do you?  Refuse the $400 Montrachet he opens for you because it isn’t noon yet, bitch that he isn’t answering your oh-so-perspicacious questions about his family life, and take weeny bites of the wide variety of exotic chocolates he offers.  Get the life you deserve, and let me have yours. Also, true story – I actually applied to be Mr. Steingarten’s assistant, and got a very nice email from him saying thanks but he needed someone with more experience to, if we are to take this article on faith, adjust the volume on his stereo and makes sure he gets out of bed for his interviews.  As Eric says, “dodged a bullet on that one.” 8:17:06 AM    comment []