Monday, December 16, 2002

Timbale D’Asperges.  (Asparagus Mold.) This is one I’ve been wanting to make for a long time.  I love love asparagus, and in the description of the recipe, JC calls this an “asparagus custard,” which sounds fun and fancy.  So when the cognac went missing on a Sunday, putting the kibosh on my lobster, I decided to focus on this. There is a bit of trouble involved, as you might imagine, though actually not as much as I’d thought going in.  I started by trimming and blanching 3 pounds of asparagus, which is a hell of a lot of asparagus, and cutting it into ½ inch pieces.  Then I minced a small onion and sautéed it slowly in butter.  I mixed the onions with dry breadcrumbs, some grated swiss cheese, salt, white pepper, and a bit of nutmeg.  I put on to boil a cup of milk with four tablespoons of butter in it, and while that was heating up I beat into the breadcrumb mixture five eggs.  Once the milk was hot, I beat that in as well, slowly.  I stirred in the asparagus – really, just a very lot of asparagus, I was almost afraid there would be too much for the egg-breadcrumb mixture to coat.  Now, JC says you can at this point leave the custard for hours at a time, which of course makes this a great dinner party dish.  But I was just about ready to eat, so I heated up the oven, smeared my soufflé dish with oil, and coated it with breadcrumbs. What is it with the breadcrumbs these days?  I didn’t use them for months and now all of a sudden I’ve used like six cups in the last three days.  Ah, the small ironies of the Julie/Julia Project. I poured the custard into the soufflé dish, put the dish in a pan, poured boiling water from a kettle into the pan, and set the pan in the oven for thirty-five minutes. Now, JC makes several suggestions about what sauce to serve with this.  I chose to make the hollandaise, because isn’t about time I got down to it and made hollandaise. There’s all this fear in the world about hollandaise, I guess not so much because it’s hard – because it isn’t – but because it’s easy to fuck up.  Although I haven’t yet made a hollandaise, per se, it turns out I’ve made some variations on the form, so the technique was familiar: egg yolks heated with a bit of water, lemon juice and butter over very low heat, then, off heat, another bit of cold butter beaten in, then a shitload more melted butter.  Another squeeze of lemon juice and some salt and white pepper and your done.  The whole thing takes about five minutes.  And so far I’ve been lucky.  JC says hollandaise is meant to be served warm rather than hot, and you can keep it for some time near the pilot light or in a pan of warm water.  I stuck it near the pilot light while I broiled some chicken, and I think perhaps it cooled down just a little too much because it got a tad thick.  Right before I served, I heated it up oh so slightly and beat in a bit of cream, and that seemed to do the trick. Now, I’ve been having this broiler-oven problem again.  I know, I know, you pity the horrors of my life.  But so the asparagus custard had to be taken out and had to sit in it’s pan for five minutes, and JC says (“JC says, JC says…”) it can sit in its pan of water for awhile, so I figure I’ll broil the chicken then.  But I do a few stupid things.  First, to keep the water in the pan hot I turn the heat on low under it, which in retrospect was probably too direct a flame for the custard.  And, I didn’t check the consistency right when it came out of the oven.  By the time I checked, and found it to be too mushy, the chicken was already in, the oven blazing away.  I wound up sticking the custard back in for the last bit with the chicken, the bit when I take the chicken out of the broiler and put in the oven on a lower heat – still too hot for the custard though. Upshot being, the dish was not really “custardy” like I’d been hoping – it was a bit grainy and lumpy.  It was certainly very edible, though.  And with the hollandaise it was great.  The hollandaise was also good for smearing potatoes around in.  (We had potatoes, too.)  I’ll try it again, and try to get the texture right. So, the transit strike looms.  We stayed up watching the news, with no results.  Went to bed around eleven.  I awoke with a start from a horrible dream about a rabid lobster that had gotten under the refrigerator and was trying to eat my cats at 2 a.m., got up to watch the TV, still no word on the strike, and went back to bed, but not back to sleep.  So now to work on three hours sleep before the lobster shopping. Oh, and hey... how's this for a subculture? 7:52:55 AM    comment []