Thursday, January 02, 2003

Two days into the brave new year of 2003, and already I’m running behind.  We’ve got lots to catch up on: New Year’s Eve. Worked until sometime after two.  The office closed officially at one, but our legal department scheduled a 12:30 meeting regarding voicemail messages, which ran long if you can believe it.  (Insert low growl indicative of animalistic frustration and rage boiling just beneath the surface here….)  Then off to shop.  The stores were massively crowded, with people buying either cocktail party nibbles or actual food.  Am I sensing a cultural trend?  Are people across the nation taking the Julie/Julia cue and sitting at home eating French food to usher in the new year?  Only time will tell.  At my Turkish grocery I got approximately twenty pounds of stuff, two great big bags, for the same amount of money I paid for a chicken breast and a lemon at the Food Emporium at Union Square.  Listen people – rise up!  Boycott Food Emporium!!! Sorry, I haven’t quite gotten over that yet. Anyway, what they didn’t have was glacéed fruit.  Or, more accurately, I couldn’t find any glacéed fruit, which may very well have been the result of my having next to know idea what glacéed fruit is.  All I know is that it’s supposed to go into the New Year’s Day dessert, and cherries may be involved.  The butcher was next – Ottomanelli’s, which is in the West Village and which I am faithful to, although these days, what with my move and work location, it’s a bitch to get to.  I had called them ahead: “Ottomanelli’s” “Hi, I just wanted to know how late you’re open today.” “Four” “Four?  Great.  Um, and do you have duck” “Long Island  Yeah  Duck” “Oh.  Great.  And I can just come pick one up?  I don’t need to --?” “Yeah  Come In” “Great.” So I come in.  Line out the door.  A professorial guy in front of me is buying a crown roast and asking how to cook it, at three o’clock on New Year’s Eve, which I find kind of charming.  Then there’s the guy who winds up helping me, who always remembers me when I come in, though for the past few years I’ve only managed to get over there maybe three times a year, and whose picture is hanging on the back wall, a snapshot of him when he was about nineteen, with this mop of Beatles hair.  All very warm and charming and happy.  Only problem is: “Can I help ya?” “Yeah, thanks, I’d like to get a duck.” Stricken look from guy behind counter.  Looks to the left of him.  Looks to the right of him. “No more duck?” “NOO??!!!” (I cry in a desperate, humorous howl that I hope conveys that I am only just a little bit crazy, but not at all bitchy or anything…) “I got here as quick as I could!  I called and they said ‘Long Island’!” “A goose maybe?” “Oh, I don’t think I’ll have time to cook a goose.” “Three and a half hours.” “Plus, I have to carry it home to Long Island City!” Thanks be to god, another of the guys finds the very last Long Island Duck, in the display window up front.  So I don’t have to go postal at the butcher’s, which is good, because I really like that butcher shop, even if it is damned inconvenient. While I’m there I buy a five-pound chuck roast. Which is great only, as I pick up that back and the bag of groceries, I realize I really am going to have to carry the fucking things home.  And I still need lard.  Stop by the pork store on Bleecker, which I like just because it’s called a pork store, and take a number to buy a tub of lard.  Out again, when I realize I have to stop by the video store, because we’ve forgotten to mail in our Netflix and we have no DVDs, and what’s a pathetic New Year’s at home without DVDs?  I walk to the DVD place.  Heavy.  Bags.  Cutting into.  Hands.  Somewhere on this walk I manage to make this whole fiasco Eric’s fault.  I rent “Final Destination” and “Cat’s Meow”, and I don’t have to make any excuses. I go home. I call Eric and ask him to get a few things on the way home.  I ask him, even, to look for glacéed fruit.  I am not optimistic about the results. The menu is: Caneton Rôti (Roast Duck), Puree de Navets Parmentier (Turnip and Potato Puree), and Petits Pois Etuves au Beurre (Buttered Peas, which I’ve made before and so doesn’t count as a new recipe, but which is the recommended accompaniment to the duck.) I “prepare” the duck -- pull the neck and giblets out of its bum, rinse it out, dry it, salt and pepper it and stuff it with some sliced onions, then tie it up and put it in a roasting pan.  Prick it with a knife all over.  Throw some slice onions and carrots around it.  Then I let it sit while the oven heats up.  I brown the giblets and the chopped-up neck (Duck neck being much easier to chop up than, say, beef marrow bones or lobster heads or goose necks, even) with some more onions and carrots in a saucepan, in some lard, then pour in chicken stock and water and throw in some parsley and a bay leaf.  Let that simmer awhile for duck stock.  I put on some water to boil for turnips and potatoes, and start snapping peas.  Snapping two and a half pounds of peas takes a very, very long time.  Eric comes in at around six.  He’d smashed the bottle vodka he’d bought for our celebratory gimlets on subway, and had gone back for more, so I forgave him for being so late and for the whole DVD fiasco.  He also had managed to get glacéed fruit, hero-husband that he is.  Glacéed cherries.  I could kiss him.  And I can, so I do. We both snap peas for awhile.  Then I leave off that and start peeling potatoes and onions while Eric keeps on.  We are also, I am embarrassed to admit, playing a round of “Civilization III: Play the World” while we do this.  Eric’s reviewing the game for his magazine, so it’s research.  Leave us alone. At some point I stick the duck in the oven. I blanch the turnips in the boiling water, then scoop them out, but them into another pan, and put the potatoes in.  The turnips I cover with beef stock and a bit of melted butter, season with salt and pepper, and braise for twenty minutes or so.  The potatoes I boil until soft, and mash.  At some point Eric makes us each a gimlet. The peas get boiled, then drained, then cooked on low heat with butter, sugar, salt and pepper for a few minutes.  The turnips get pureed into the mashed potatoes, and mixed with butter.  The duck gets, well, roasted.  I suck the accumulated fat out of the pan with a bulb baster occasionally.  When the duck is done I make a little sauce out of the pan juices, the duck stock, and some butter.  The duck is Fan-fucking-Tastic, and really, I can’t take any credit for it.  All I did was not screw it up.  Stick it in the oven and take it back out again.  And Eric is still talking about it, moaning in his sleep about duck.  Man.  Man-oh-man.  Good stuff.  The potato and turnip puree, also good.  I do love turnips.  But if you don’t like turnips, if you find them too bitter, this is a good recipe, because the potato cuts that.  Also, the rich duck juice is just right with it. The peas were peas.  I remain not a great pea fan, have to say. For dessert, Ben & Jerry’s.  We watch our DVDs, stare agog at the miserable specimens of humanity at Times Square for just long enough to count down with the ball drop, and manage to drink some champagne before crashing.  These are the days of our youth.  (Countdown to Thirty: 110 days….) New Years Day. We stupidly attempt to see a movie.  “Chicago.”  The Zeigfield Theatre.  Much rain.  No comment. When we get home, I start on dinner.  Dessert first.  Riz a l’Imperatrice.  Rice Pudding, basically.  Very much like the Bavarians that came before, but with rice in it.  And glacéed fruit.  Which I dice -- glacéed fruit being, I notice, particularly nasty stuff to handle – mix with kirsch, and sprinkle with gelatin.  I boil some rice, then mix the rice in with boiling milk, sugar, butter and vanilla.  I lay a round of waxed paper over, and stick it in the oven for thirty minutes.  While that’s doing I beat together egg yolks and sugar.  I add cornstarch, then beat in some more, different, boiling milk, slowly.  I pour it all into a saucepan and heat over moderate heat, stirring, until it thickens a bit.  I take it off heat.  Stir in the glacéed fruit mixture, then some vanilla and apricot preserves(okay, peach, I couldn’t find apricot at the Spanish deli under the train tracks), which I’ve pushed through a sieve but didn’t mention, because who needs to hear more about pushing things through sieves?  Then I stir in the rice and stick the mess into the refrigerator to cool.  I slice the chuck roast into slices for the Carbonnades a la Flamande, Beef and Onions Braised in Beer.  I brown them in lard and set them aside.  Cook sliced onions in the same pot for ten minutes, set them aside, mix them with four cloves of crushed garlic and salt and pepper.  Put half the beef in the casserole, salt and pepper, scoop half the onions on top, the rest of the beef on top of that, salt and pepper, the last of the onions.  This smells very, very good.  I pour in some beef stock and beer to cover.  A couple of tablespoons of brown sugar.  An herb bouquet – parsley, bay leaf, thyme (okay, I used oregano, I’m all out of thyme, and can’t seem to remember to get it when I’m at the store.)  Then I stick it in the oven for 2 hours. I’ve managed to leave the Riz a l’Imperatrice in the fridge too long, and it’s gone and set.  I take it out while I whip some cream.  I stir the cream in – it seems to combine okay.  I pour it into a mold, lay a round of waxed paper over it, and stick it back in the fridge.  I make the strawberry sauce.  More pushing of things through sieves.  You don’t really want to hear about that, do you?  Sugar and kirsch is involved, and it’s really too simple to even talk about. The beef comes out, smelling heavenly.  I strain the cooking juices into a saucepan, mix in some cornstarch mixed with wine vinegar, and let that simmer a few minutes before pouring it back over the meat, which I then heat through.  Dinner is served at approximately 10pm, which is perfect, because that’s when Emily – Emily! – shows up.  I’ve made some potatoes, just boiled them, quartered them, and rolled them in butter, but I must be having some kind of hormonal issues, because they taste awful to me, like mildew, though no one else seems to mind.  The beef is fantastic.  Just a bit sweet – perhaps I put just a pinch too much brown sugar in, though it’s obvious the sugar is necessary to cut the bitter taste from the beer.  Meltingly tender.  Oniony.  We have a salad.  Well.  We had lettuce with a tomato, and olive oil and basalmic vinegar.  Dessert is good.  Very.  Very.  Sweet.  And probably the rice isn’t quite tender enough.  What do I know about rice puddings, which is what this basically is, but I would think, yes, the rice could have been a bit more tender.  And it’s sort of unfashionably pink, like something your maiden aunt would put on the table at Thankgiving, something with marshmallows in it and fruit out of cans.  But good. Whew.  Okay.  Going to work now.  See ya. And don’t forget – dinner at my house Saturday. 8:23:39 AM    comment []