Tuesday, January 21, 2003

Picture to yourself something fun a young couple might do on a long weekend.  A trip to the country, perhaps.  A movie.  A game of forty-two.  Anything at all – any bit of amusement will do.  Do you have it in your mind?  Good. Now you know exactly what we didn’t do this weekend. What we did do was bail water out from behind the toilet in a frigid apartment, attempt unsuccessfully to fix various household problems, and, for a change of pace, drive to Costco.  Oh, and I did have a gimlet.  There was that.  Which sent me into sweet oblivion before we got through the first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season Three.  But I’ve got miles to go before I get there, so let’s get started. At around six thirty in the morning Sunday, after I’d been sitting on the bathroom floor for an hour and a half dumping water out of pots and writing the previous post for the Julie/Julia Project, I decided I might as well use the time I spend awake on this planet constructively, so I went to the kitchen and made the Mousseline au Chocolat.  Which, it turns out, was probably the most successful thing I did all day, and not all that hard.  Unlike the previous orange mousse disaster, this chocolate mousse did not require any “setting” process – no gelatin, no cornstarch, no constant stirring to make sure nothing separates from anything else.  Which is perfect for me, because that setting stuff is always where I run into trouble.  I think it has something to do with my magnetic fields or something – I have a gut feeling it’s related to my somewhat cosmic inability to keep up with anything.  And when I was kid my brother had this thing, it was two glass bulbs attached by this twisty length of glass pipe, and there was liquid in it that was somehow heat reactive, and the idea was you’d hold the bulb with the liquid in it in your palm and the liquid would bubble up to the other bulb.  Only it did the opposite for me – came down to my hand rather than bubbling away from it.  I think all these things are part of the same syndrome. So – chocolate mousse.  No setting.  Perfect.  I started by combining four egg yolks with some superfine sugar.  I wish somebody would call me “superfine.”  I beat it until it was “thick, pale yellow, and… [formed] a slowly dissolving ribbon.”  I beat in some Grand Marnier.  Then I beat over a pot of almost simmering water until it was “too hot for [my] finger.”  JC said this would take three to four minutes.  It was more like twenty.  On the other hand, when I then placed the mixing bowl inside another filled with ice water and beat it, it took much less than the three to four minutes JC described for the mixture to get cool and very thick, like mayonnaise.  Then I melted six ounces of chocolate in a double boiler with some coffee – it had been sitting in the coffee pot since Saturday morning, but what the hell.  I was supposed to use all semisweet chocolate, but I didn’t have enough, so I supplemented with unsweetened, which was probably for the best, given the taste, in MtAoFC, for very sweet desserts. Off heat, I beat in a stick and a half of butter, a tablespoon at a time.  I beat the chocolate mixture into the egg yolk mixture.  Then I beat up some egg whites with a bit of salt and some sugar until stiff, and folded that in.  Spooned the stuff into coffee cups – the cups we’d bought in a cheap souvenir shop outside of the Sistine Chapel during our honeymoon, after a long, long walk, which we used to drink wine with the cheese we had for lunch, on a green square, as we did every day during our honeymoon.  Ah, yes, I remember fun.  I think I had it once. The rest of the day had its events.  The plumber came and fixed the toilet, and only charged us a hundred bucks, which I thought was a victory.   Eric replaced the jagged horrible hole in the drywall near our dining nook with a neat square one.  I dug into the fiberglass ceiling tile to put up a wall hanging without scratching a cornea.  And we went to Costco. Costco.  Urrrrgh.  My mother, a recent convert, gave us a Costco membership for Christmas.  Unfortunately, since our car is a wheezing, rapidly dying wreck, it will soon be nigh-on impossible to get there.  Not to mention the fact that Costco just sucks.  Trying to trick people into believing that buying twenty Mach 3 razor blades for thirty bucks is a good deal.  I wound up buying six pounds of stew meat, instead of the three I needed, for eighteen bucks – not a great deal at all.  We bought Craisins©, which would we ever in a million years have bought a giant bag of Craisins© if they hadn’t been there staring us in the face?  And I know we hardly got any deal at all on the Buffy DVD.  Did get three pounds of butter for $4.50, though.  And you know I need that. For dinner, then, Supremes de Volaille aux Champignons ( Chicken Breasts with Mushrooms and Cream) and Fonds d’Artichauts a la Crème (Creamed Artichoke Hearts) and Riz.  Uncle Ben’s Riz, to be exact.  I started with the whole cooking-of-the-artichoke struggle, which I’ve gone into in great detail previously.  Tear off the stems.  Tear off the leaves.  Cut off everything above the top of the “choke”.  Pare off the remaining green parts.  Smear all the cut edges with lemon juice, which has the handy side effect of making clear all the little places on your hands where you’ve recently been punctured by shards of fiberglass.  Drop in water with lemon juice or vinegar.  Repeat.  Dig spiny bits out of your fingers as necessary.  I only got four artichokes – at our regular grocery store, the place where everyone knows your name, and what a relief it was after Costco – so it was done in fairly short order.  Then make a blanc, which is just a paste of flour and water beat into more water, lemon juice, and salt.  Simmer that for a few minutes by itself, then add the artichoke hearts.  Simmer for a good half hour or so.  Drain and scrape out the choke, which continues on an extremely satisfying task.  Cut the hearts into quarters.  Heat up four tablespoons of butter in a pot, briefly sauté a couple tablespoons of minced shallots, and throw in the artichoke quarters.  Cover with a round of buttered waxed paper and stick in the oven for twenty minutes.  While that was happening, I got the rice ready.  Cleaned and sliced a quarter cup of mushrooms, minced a tablespoon of shallots, and sautéed them together in five tablespoons of butter.  (Told you I’d need those three pounds of butter.  But then, you knew that didn’t you?)  Salted and peppered and lemon-juice-spritzed the chicken breasts, turned them briefly in the butter and mushrooms, covered them with waxed paper and stuck them in the oven, at around the time the artichokes came out.  I boiled down a cup and a half of cream to about half, then stirred in the artichokes.  Seasoned with salt, pepper, and lemon juice.  Took the chicken breasts out of the oven, set them aside on a plate, and boiled down the cooking juices with some port and beef stock until syrupy.  Poured in a cup of cream, boiled that down as well.  (Obviously should have gotten some cream at Costco, while I was at it….  That and the Slimfast I will be living off of once this project is over.)  Turned the chicken back into the pan, and there you are – dinner. Everything was very creamy.  Aforementioned gimlet happened somewhere in here – my husband mixes big girl drinks.  And I put together the marinade for the stew meat for tomorrow’s dinner – vermouth, brandy, olive oil, salt and pepper, sage, bay leaf, garlic, sliced onions and carrots.  Buffy was attempted and aborted.  We almost forgot to even eat the chocolate mousse.  We did share a mug between us, and it was very, very good, even without the whipped cream, which I forgot to make.  Which is fine, since we have three more big-ass cups of the stuff in the fridge. God, now I have to go to work.  To be frank, after this weekend, I’m almost glad to be going. Almost. 8:00:42 AM    comment []