Tuesday, December 31, 2002

Repetition was built into the Julie/Julia Project from the beginning.  Repetition is what the Julie/Julia Project is about.  I intended to send myself to boot camp.  To military school.  To stamp out bone-laziness and the self-laceration which served it.  And to some extent the regimen worked.  They didn't just pull that "practice makes perfect" stuff out of their asses.  I can make a quiche like a champ.  I can poach a fish, fricassee a chicken, and suck the marrow out of life, or at least beef shanks.  I'll put things in my mouth I would not have dreamed of even a year ago.  And of course I've got that whole slaughtering thing under my belt. But in past weeks I have felt the Project weighing on me.  The routine of it has been beginning to pall.  Was I growing tired of the Julie/Julia Project?  Was the Julie/Julia Project growing tired of me?  It would have been all well and good for me to quit if I had some life outside of the Project, but this was it.  Without it, I am nothing but a secretary on a road to nowhere, drifting towards frosted hair and menthol addiction.  Well, this is what Texas is for.  For a week I neither cooked nor grocery shopped, though of eating and drinking I did a-plenty.  I tore asunder the last remains of my girlish figure, as promised.  When I got back to New York – och, oy, ai, alas alack – I found myself in despair about a lot of things, but cooking was not one of them.  I am ready, man.  No more delaying on the dreaded aspic for weeks on end.  No more of this half-assed crap.  I am taking the bull by the horns.  I am getting over it.  Monday was the day of Julie’s resurrection.  The menu: Suprêmes de Volaille a Blanc, Riz Etuve au Beurre and, er, Frozen Artichokes.  Okay, so it’s not sweetbreads or anything.  But it was three recipes from MtAoFC, my first on road to renewed glory.  So I did my shopping at the FoodTown or whatever the hell it is on Union Square, because – hell, I don’t know why I did.  My own damn fault, I guess.  All I can say is, there oughta be a fucking law.  For one lemon, I paid ninety-nine cents.  For a bunch of parsley, $1.69.  For less than a pound and a half of chicken breasts, ten bucks.  Mother-fuckers.  I was wandering the store like a mad woman, making horrible faces and muttering to myself.  I kid you not, people thought I was a fucking lunatic.  But then, who were they to judge?  They were paying six dollars for a pound of tomatoes!  Morons!  All would have been lost had I not had a very nice conversation with a woman behind me in the checkout line who was buying ingredients for a pie for a party that evening.  She had run out while her turkey was in the oven, and even this woman who had the money to live by Union Square thought we were being robbed.  And she apologized to me for buying pre-made pie crusts.  I apologized in return for buying frozen artichokes.  It made me believe in people again.  At home….  As usual, it was Julia’s stinking rice that caused the most problems.  I was to blanch the rice in boiling water for ten minutes, while melting some butter with salt and pepper in another saucepan over the boiling water.  Then drain the rice, toss it into the other saucepan with the melted butter, cover it with wax paper and with the saucepan lid, then put it back – oof – over the pot of boiling water the rice had blanched in.  You know the pot of water I mean, the one I just poured out while draining the rice.  Well, despite my long kindling resentment of Julia’s rice techniques, I put some water back in the pot, got it to boiling again, stuck the saucepan inside it, and stuck the whole contraption in the oven.  Then I started boiling a bit of water with some shallots and butter and salt in a saucepan, and tossed the half-frozen artichokes in, covering and letting simmer for ten minutes or so.  (Forgive me – I got all bent out of shape thinking about the grocery store, and now I’m running late for work.  So here I am rushing, when I’d promised I wouldn’t….) The Suprêmes de Volaille a Blanc was no problem at all, and a very nice way to cook chicken breasts.  Just squeeze some lemon juice over the meat, then season with salt and pepper.  Melt some butter in a casserole, roll the chicken breasts briefly in the butter, cover with one of those lovely rounds of wax paper and then with the casserole lid, and stick it in the oven beside the rice.  It should be done in seven or eight minutes.  Julia insists you can press on it with your finger to detect whether it’s done, but so far, that’s a little subtle for me.  I just look to see if it looks obviously raw anywhere. When everything’s done, the artichokes and the rice and the chicken, take the chicken out of the casserole and put on a plate over the pilot light, covered.  Pour some beef stock and Madeira (or port or vermouth) into the casserole and boil down rapidly to almost nothing.  Pour in a cup of cream and boil down again.  Season to taste with lemon juice, salt and pepper.  Spoon it over the chicken.  Sprinkle everything with parsley to make it all pretty. Cooking chicken breasts this way is very nice – I managed not to dry them out at all.  Though even if I had, the cream sauce would have taken up the slack.  And I do love Madeira in sauces – it gives such a lovely smoky-sweet taste.  The rice was, once again, rice.  Whatever.  I’m almost done with the silly rice recipes.  Julia says that if I’m “using the rice in hors d’oeuvres or salads” I can just boil it.  Thanks, Julia.  Think I will.  And the artichokes.  Well, I’ve never eaten frozen artichokes before, at least not knowingly, so it’s hard to say if they’re better the Julia way.  Probably they are.  They weren’t as good as fresh ones.  But they were a hell of a lot less trouble.  So there you go. So for New Years, my Eric and I are going to stay home, eat French food, and watch a movie, because we want to cherish our love together as we usher in the New Year, and because we forgot to get dinner reservations.  But this weekend – Saturday, January 4th – I am having what I’m sure will turn out to be an annual “Get Over It” Bash.  I’m going to jump into the project with abandon.  I’m going to go totally insane.  It’s gonna be aspic and bouillabaisse and Frenchiness all over the damn place.  And you are all invited.  Seriously.  To paraphrase the immortal Janis Joplin – I wanna invite you all over to my place for dinner.  If you can find it, you can have dinner. Just bring some hootch, 'kay? 8:08:57 AM    comment []