Sunday, December 08, 2002

Sunday means Piperade. It’s the last of the egg dishes.  One of Julia’s chapters, finished, gone, kaput.  It’s a bittersweet moment, let me tell you.  I think with fond nostalgia of my first poached egg, of the lovely Oeufs en Croustades a la Bearnaise, of my afternoon flipping beans in a pan on the sidewalk, and even of the troublesome Oeufs a la Bourguignonne.  And I look ahead to future goals – the perfect omelette, for instance, still out of my reach.  Piperade is delicious, and not so unlike the migas and huevos rancheros of my youth.  (Not that I ate them, you understand.  But I knew people who did.)  Start by browning some ham in olive oil.  Take that out, then throw into the same pan some thinly sliced onion and red bell pepper.  Cook covered until tender but not browned.  Add a mashed garlic clove, a “speck” of cayenne, and tomatoes that have been peeled (urgh), seeded and sliced.  Cook that covered, on low heat, then uncovered, on higher heat until the liquid from the tomatoes evaporates.  Set aside. Beat eight eggs and pour them into a hot pan with olive oil.  Stir around with a fork until “the eggs have just set into a creamy mass.”  This is Julia’s way with eggs, and it results in something halfway between an omelette and scrambled eggs – not really a single piece, but set together, kind off.  Take off the heat and put the tomato onion pepper mixture on top, sort of mixing it a little into the egg.  Then lay the ham on top.  If you’ve been timing it all brilliantly everything’s is still warm or has been rewarmed.  That’s it.  Good stuff – like a Texas breakfast. In other news: We are now going to play a round of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?”  This Wednesday, I am going to be playing host to a distinguished guest.  Guess who it is, and you can win my admiration, and a T-shirt, if I ever get around to designing T-shirts.  Clue number 1: the degree of separation between Julie and Julia is about to shrink by a factor of about a thousand. 12:07:48 PM    comment []

Casandra was coming over, and all was right with the world.  I was preparing a feast – Piece de Boeuf a la Cuillere, Minced Braised Beef Served in a Beef Shell, or Beef Box as I will refer to it herein, for the sake of brevity and because it sounds dirty.  Also Petits Oignons Persilles, Parslied Onions, and Carottes aux Fines Herbes, Braised Carrots with Herbs – two of those recipes that are such a boon to the Project, because they’re just the previous recipe, tossed with butter and parsley.  And little olive-shaped potatoes. I had marinated the beef – a lovely rump roast I got from Ottamanelli’s, a butcher on Bleecker Street I love, but that I never get to go to anymore because they close at 6:30 and I can never get there in time from my stinking job – overnight in red wine, onions, carrots, celery, bay leaf, garlic and thyme.  The same marinade from the Boeuf a la Mode last week.  At six in the morning I got out of bed, crawling over my husband to do so, wrapped myself in a blanket against the frigidity of my apartment, and went into the kitchen.  I took the beef out of the marinade and dried it off with paper towels, and left it on a rack to air dry.  I also preheated the oven.  Then I went back to bed.  Eric thought my feet were cold. Half an hour later I got up again.  I heated up some oil in a pot to smoking, then put the beef in it to brown.  I browned it about five minutes on each side.  Between turnings I sat near the stove, wrapped in my blanket, reading Samuel Pepys, who I really like because he likes food, and understands the importance of three square meals a day, regardless of the state of the nation.  When it was finished browning, I poured in the marinade plus some beef stock and went back to be to torture Eric with my feet while it boiled down awhile.  Then I got up again, nestled into the pot some veal’s knuckles – also from Ottamanelli’s; I’m very pleased with them -- and stuck it in the oven.  After that I could just lie in bed for forty-five minutes at a time, getting up for just long enough to turn the meat, and by 10:30 it was cooked, and I had gotten a pot roast done while lazing around in bed like the lard-ass I am.  I was pretty proud.  While the beef cooled I straightened the house, Eric went down the block to get lumber for a house-improvement project – Long Island City may not have coffee shops or grocery stores, but construction supplies it’s got – and then we both went down to breakfast at the diner.  When we came back up, I set about cutting the middle of the roast.  As usual, a terse Julia is a sign of trouble.  “Hollow out the center,” she says.  “Leave an open-topped rectangular trough or shell of meat [the aforementioned “beef box”] with sides and bottom half an inch thick,” she says.  Okay.  This is not as easy as it sounds, especially because the roast really isn’t cool enough yet, so I keep grabbing on to pieces, sawing at them until I have to rip my fingers away with a yelp, then starting over again.  But I do get it done, sort of.  One side sort of rips and collapses onto itself, and the top is sort of canted to one side, but I definitely wind up with something you could call a “trough.”  I tie the box together with some twine so it will hold its shape, then smear on some beaten egg, and pat on a layer of breadcrumbs mixed with parmesan.  Then I put it on a rack and stick it in the fridge.  The meat from the middle I chop up as best I can – I killed my big knife on the halibut skin the other day, and it’s serrated so I can’t sharpen it and it’s more or less useless now, so the chopping’s pretty slow going.  Then I stick that in the oven too, and we go out and try to Christmas shop.  Christmas shopping doesn’t work out all that well, but while at the Union Square green market I find some perfectly olive shaped little potatoes.  Huzzah! When I get home, I start by making the filling for the beef box.  First I brown some quartered mushrooms in butter and oil, and toss them with shallots.  Then I add the minced beef and ¾ cup of minced ham, and a cup and a half of strained sauce from the braising of the beef.  That cooks for twenty minutes or so.  All this could have been done up to a day in advance, FYI, and so is a nice dinner party dish.  Then I peeled the little white onions and stuck them in another pot with butter, a bit of vermouth, and a little herb bouquet, and let them simmer, covered, for forty-five minutes.  Lastly, I chopped the carrots Eric had peeled for me into quarters and put them into yet another pot with some water, sugar, salt and butter, and set them to simmering for about thirty minutes. It was nearly six by this time.  Casandra was coming between six and seven.  I jumped into the shower, washed my hair in lukewarm water, because we were expecting a guest! When I got out I remembered I needed to drizzle the beef box with butter (dirtier and dirtier!), so I did.  And I heated up the goose fat I’d rendered at Thanksgiving to fry the potatoes in.  I was feeling very devil-may-care – I wasn’t even going to peel the potatoes.  Ha HA!  By a little after seven, everything was done except assembling everything, the work of perhaps ten minutes.  But no Casandra.  I sat down, relaxed.  No Casandra.  At seven thirty I called her.  She answered sounding very scratchy and pathetic. “I didn’t have your phone number,” she said. “I feel terrible,” she said. “I can’t come,” she said. Yeah, right.  She just doesn’t want to hang out with us because we’re white.  Pretty much the whitest people I know, in fact. Fair enough. Well, the upside was that we could go ahead and eat.  I stuck the buttered beef box in the oven to crisp, heated up the onions and carrots and potatoes and beef filling.  When the vegetables were hot I drained them, then stuck them back in their pots and tossed them with parsley and softened butter.  I took the beef box out and put it on my big fancy white Calvin Klein platter which we got when we were married and which I still very very cool every time I use it.  I heaped the filling into it, sprinkled parsley on top.  I spooned the parslied onions on one side of it, parslied carrots on another, and the potatoes on another.  It looked great – cuisine moderne by way of King Arthur’s court.  And then me and my husband ate it, all by our lonesomes.  It was good, though not really all I was hoping for.  The beef box, didn’t get really crisp, and there wasn’t that much difference, texturally or tastewise, between the shell and the filling.  The onions and the carrots were good, but not any different than carrots and onions I’d already made.  The potatoes were good.  Nice and crispy.  They needed lost of salt, though, I found.  They were some kind of heirloom variety – Russian Banana or something like that – and I found them a little floury. The downside was that at the end of the evening there was a small dinner party’s worth of dishes, but no dinner party.  And then we watched Brazil. Ugh. 11:52:38 AM    comment []