Monday, January 20, 2003

The meal was a London broil, Harticots Verts, Sauce Crème, and Gratin Savoyard.  It tasted, as my husband pointed out, less like a trip to France than a trip through time, back to 1961, when home cooking was about feeding your growing boys rather than keeping your boys from turning into early-onset diabetes statistics.  All that was missing was the chocolate mousse – that comes Monday.  Would have done it Sunday if Sunday hadn’t turned out to be a Time-Space Vector of Home Improvement-cum-Collapse.  But let’s think about food – that’s much more fun. Sing it with me now: There is Nothin’ Like a Gratin, Nothin’ In this World. There is Nothin’ to be Gotten That is Anything Like a Gratin To make the Gratin Savoyard, I peeled two pounds of big new potatoes and sliced them, relatively thinly.  I let them sit in a bowl of water while I preheated the oven to 425°, and rubbed a casserole dish with a halved clove of garlic and a tablespoon of butter.  I drained the potato slices and dried them in a towel.  I lay half the slices in the dish, topped them with salt, pepper, half a cup of grated Swiss cheese, and dotted it with a couple tablespoons butter.  Laid on the other half of the potatoes, and then the same other stuff again.  Poured boiling beef broth over it all, and – oops – stuck it in the oven for half an hour.  I say “oops” because, as it turns out, I should have been using “fireproof baking-serving dish.”  This is something Julia often asks for, and I neither have one nor really know what one it.  She wanted me to get the dish simmering before putting it in the oven, but really, how much difference could it possibly make?  I just stick it in. For the Harticots Verts, Sauce Crème, (creamed green beans), I simply trimmed the beans and blanched them in salted water for a couple of minutes, drained them, then through them back in the pan over a bit of heat to evaporate the remaining water off them.  I set those aside for a moment while I made the Sauce Crème, which is béchamel sauce, and so is becoming pretty much second nature – butter and flour cooked together to make a roux, boiling milk beat in, boil for a minute until thick, season with salt and pepper.  To make the béchamel Sauce Crème, just stir in some cream.  I also stirred in a little of the mousseline sabayon from the fish soufflé the other night, just for kicks.  There you got it -- Sauce Crème.  Also, somewhere in here, I sautéed some mushrooms Eric had kindly cleaned and sliced in butter and oil.  Funny thing with sautéing mushrooms.  Sometimes they release their liquid, and then the liquid evaporates and they brown, and some times, the liquid just keeps coming out of them, and they wind up almost steaming or poaching rather than sautéing.  I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.  Ah well. I tossed the green beans with a couple tablespoons butter, some minced shallots, and some salt and pepper, and let them cook slowly, covered for three minutes.  Then I stir in the Sauce Crème and the mushrooms, and let them cook another three minutes.  Voila!  Harticots Verts, Sauce Crème. The potatoes are done about then – the stock wasn’t entirely absorbed, as JC wanted to be – perhaps a problem caused by lack of stovetop simmer? – but when I took it out of the oven the liquid seemed to get sucked up, pretty much. The London broil I broiled.  Medium rare. It is an incredible delicious, utterly good and simple meal, though not one that gives me faith in my powers of discipline.  I was snacking off potato slices and creamy green beans all evening. It wasn’t until after dinner that things went really to shit. The toilet has sprung a leak of Biblical proportions.  After searching everywhere --  including the creepy crawlspace under the tub (I know, hard to envision – it’s best not to think about it) and the basement, which is not unlike the house at the end of “The Blair Witch Project,” except that if you will recall that place was relatively uncluttered and those kids never caught sight of actual bones in the beams of their flashlights – we concluded that there was no way to turn off the water to that particular toilet.  Frantic late-night calls to plumbers have produced nothing.  It is now five o’clock in the morning, and I am spelling Eric who was up all night heroically bailing out the pots and bowls wedged under the commode.  I sit cross legged in the bathroom, my laptop on my knees, accompanied in my scribblings by some cats and an incessant drip.  Living in New York, I know, provides a certain frisson – the city is as much a character in this melodrama that is the Julie/Julia Project as Julia herself.  But damned if Omaha ain’t lookin’ pretty fucking good right about now.  Thank the little baby jesus for Martin Luther King Day, or we might be looking at some grisly murder-suicide configuration. 6:32:06 AM    comment []