Thursday, January 16, 2003

Ah, the good old days!  I remember them well -- French cooking out of packed boxes, the egg that poached at midnight.  Wednesday night was, shall we say, reminiscent. Not that the menu was so very exciting –just Supremes de Volaille a l’Ecossaise, Chicken Breasts with Diced Aromatic Vegetables and Cream, Epinards au Jus, Spinach Braised in Stock, and rice.  But first there was yet another evening meeting to gather yet another group’s opinion on some damn thing or other.  (I ran the powerpoint, on which subject the Eric is quite amusingly violent, calling it “the death of communication.”)  Home by no later than nine – well, maybe a little later – I started dicing a carrot, onion and celery stalk, and set the husband up tearing the stems off spinach.  (Bagged, cleaned spinach – I may be nuts, but I’m not crazy.)  (You will also notice that in recent months, I’ve roped the husband into a good deal more of the sous-chef duties.  I consider a move to save our marriage – better he tear the stems off the damn spinach than wait until midnight to eat, and be rewarded by the rantings of a spouse who’s gone completely around the bend.) Once the vegetables were diced I put on the water to boil for the spinach, which I ought to have done when I walked in the door at least, as it turns out, because I had inadvertently put the water in the Mountain Time Pot, which miraculously boils a pot of water in about an hour and a half.  I exaggerate.  Slightly.  I cooked the celery, carrot and onion slowly in five tablespoons of butter for ten minutes.  The water for the spinach was not boiling.  I turned the heat off under the vegetables.  Seasoned the chicken breasts with salt, pepper, and lemon juice.  The water was not boiling.  I watched CJ’s Dad get Alzheimer’s.  The water began to steam a bit.  Finally, just as the strains of “Law and Order” (damn that stupid crap show, it killed my “Homicide”) began to drift in from the living room, bubbles began to appear.  I stuffed the three bags full of spinach into the water, brought it back up to the boil for a couple of minutes, drained it by putting a colander over the top of the pot and turning it upside down, put it back in the pot, ran cold water over it, and drained it again, this time turning the spinach into the colander and putting the pot back on the stove.  Which didn’t go as smoothly as I just described it.  It was one of those things where I kept forgetting the next step – drain, start to walk away, cold water and drain, start to walk away, oh-yeah-the-spinach-should-be-in-the-colander-so-I-can-melt-the-butter-in-the-pot…. That kind of thing. I heated up the butter and vegetables in the pot again, got my husband to measure out the water for the rice and squeeze the water out of the spinach.  It’s so nice having a kitchen imp.  It won’t last – I’ve got some moral high ground at the moment because these past few days he’s been indulging a new obsession with Civilization III.  I turned the chicken breasts in the butter, covered with a round of waxed paper, and stuck it in a 400° oven.  Six minutes it was supposed to be in there for.  I started the rice, melted some butter in the pot and threw in the spinach, let that cook a minute or two until the water evaporated off the spinach.  Sprinkled in some flour and let that cook another minute or so.  Poured in something less than a cup of beef broth and let that simmer slowly for fifteen minutes.  (I could have used cream at this point, and made creamed spinach, one of the great apotheoses of human existence, but I figured the cream I’d be putting in the chicken would be sufficient to retain my fat ass.)  Somewhere in here I started the rice.  The chicken wasn’t done at six minutes – I’ve noticed with this technique that it never is.  Funny how Julia recipes err so inconsistently – on the side of overdone with vegetables and beef, and underdone with the poultry.  Maybe it’s these big-ass drugged-up bionic chicken breasts we get these days.  Anyway, it’s worth the checking up every couple of minutes, because this technique of poaching in butter has pretty consistently produced a not-overdone chicken breast, which is something to applaud in itself.   When the chicken was at last done I brought the pot up onto the stove, took the chicken breasts out, put in ¼ cup beef broth and ¼ cup port, and let that boil down to syrupy goodness.  Added a cup of cream and let that boil a couple of minutes.  Turned off the heat, seasoned with salt, pepper and lemon juice, and turned the chicken breasts back into it. Almost forgot to add the final couple of tablespoons of butter to the spinach, but remembered at the last minute thank god. Everything was yum, yum, yummy.  Might’ve let the cream sauce thicken a tad more, I suppose.  But I’m tellin’ ya, this port stuff works wonders – really deepens the taste, without you being aware of any particular flavoring at all.  The spinach was sexy – velvety, slickery, rich.  Cream would have been a mistake – this was perfect.  The only annoyance was the rice – I’d cooked it and cooked it, but it just remained kinda hard in the middle.  Maybe I bought crappy rice – I did get it from one of the delis at Queensborough Plaza, it had probably been sitting there for a decade or so.  Or do drug dealers and strip club dancers make a lot of rice? Eric keeps pushing for a rice maker, but I say no.  Rice makers are for the Japanese and pansies. Oh, for those who wanted Eric's lamb stew recipe -- I'll get it to you - slash - copy it out of the cookbook this weekend....   8:05:51 AM    comment []