Thursday, January 09, 2003

Endives Gratinees  (Endives Gratineed with Cheese.) If there’s some better way to serve a vegetable than wrapped in pork and covered with cream sauce, I wish someone would tell me what it is. I bought my endives at my Turkish grocery, that and some French ham.  I know it was French because the little sign stuck into it said, “French Ham.”  And I thought, hey, that’s perfect for me.  Did you know my Turkish grocery charges me six dollars for a pound of butter?  And this ain’t no fancy-ass French butter.  This Hotel Bar.  And they charge $1.79 for a bottle of tonic water.  This is not the place for buying staples.  As butter and tonic water are. Anyway. Home, I trimmed and rinsed the endives and put them in a buttered pot, sprinkled with salt, lemon juice, and dotted with more butter.  I poured in a fourth cup water and let them boil slowly for ten minutes, covered, then another five or six minutes uncovered, until the liquid was reduced to a couple of tablespoons.  Then I covered them with a round of wax paper and the pot lid, and stuck it in a 325° oven.  While the endives were cooking I made the sauce crème, which is béchamel with cream stirred into it, which béchamel, once you get the hang of it, is just about the simplest thing in the world to do, as I believe I’ve mentioned.  Make the white roux with butter and flour.  Beat in the boiling milk.  Boil for a short bit.  Season.  Add some cream.  Sauce Crème.  Thank you very much. JC wanted me to cook the endives for an hour covered, but after forty minutes I just couldn’t hack it anymore.  I took off the pot lid.  Again, I was supposed to cook it uncovered for half an hour, but I only did twenty minutes.  When they came out, they were limp and browned, pretty seriously brown on the bottom.  If I had cooked them for the entire hour and a half Julia asked for they’d have been little blackened endive fritters.  So I took them out and wrapped each one in a slice of “French Ham,”  which sounds kind of scintillating, but I guess lots of things do when you put the word “French” in front of them.  (“French Slipper?”  “French Flautist?”)  I pour a third of the sauce crème into a baking dish, lay in the pork-clothed endives, and pour the rest of the sauce over.  Sprinkle on some cheese and some more butter, because really, if I’m going to buy six-dollar butter I might as well use the stuff.  Then I run it under the broiler until is browned. Aaaaah.  Endives with ham and cream.  Nice.  I made rice too, the better to eat more cream.  Nicer.  This is good good stuff.  Mom would say it’s not really a meal, that there’s not enough meat in it, but I could argue that enough cream and butter, and the meat part kind of takes care of itself.  This is plenty meal enough for me.  Or so say my thighs. 6:33:19 AM    comment []