Saturday, February 01, 2003

So my husband and I were trying to decide, if I were a celebrity chef, what my trademark saying, my “Bam!”, should be, and we decided that whenever I threw in another stick of butter, I’d say “What could happen?”  This catchphrase is perfect, because it works in so many situations.  Thus, “The Julie/Julia Project on the Upper West Side – What Could Happen?” Well the first thing that happened was that I was an hour late getting up to Helen’s place, because I was an hour late getting off work, because we’re all feverishly making sure we get every last thing any moron on earth ever thought about rebuilding lower Manhattan into our database.  The people must be heard, after all.  We were making Saute de Boeuf a la Bourguignonne (at Helen’s, not at work), mostly because since I’ve gotten Helen to start eating bacon I like to feed it to her every chance I can get.  So I had to stop by my Turkish grocery on the way up to get a big hunk of bacon and some meat.  I wasn’t going to spend another forty bucks on another 2 pounds of tenderloin butt, so I bought some thick sirloin steaks to chunk up.  And I stopped by the wine store and bought a bottle for dinner – I had been told that Helen’s friend from work, The Redhead, was bringing wine, so I just picked up one cheap bottle for cooking.  When I got up there, everyone else was already there.  That would be because, as I mentioned, I was an hour late.  Helen had even gotten the onions braised and done, and made the salad.  I threw off my coat and started trying to figure out where to begin. I bitch and moan about my crappy outer borough apartment, but every time I try to navigate a kitchen in a Manhattan apartment I remember why I’m there.  Helen’s kitchen is the size of my closet.  The Redhead, who’s an extremely helpful sort, is asking what can be done to help –possesses some knife skills, apparently.  Unfortunately – or fortunately, if you’re me -- Saute de Boeuf a la Bourguignonne requires very little in the way of knife skills.  I ask the Redhead to slice some mushrooms, while I chop the bacon into lardons (we’re living on the edge and decide not to blanch the bacon.)  While the Redhead sautés the mushrooms and Eric mixes me a vodka tonic I chop up the sirloin steaks into pieces.  The truth is that I’m not much good at cooking with other people.  The solicitous Redhead is always asking me what else is to be done, and frankly making me feel a little hurried.  Bacon lardons get browned, the fat poured off, all by the Redhead.  As I’m beginning to brown the meat in butter, Helen’s vegetarian roommate Andrea comes in, and I swear to god, she very nearly faints at the sight of raw beef in her kitchen.  I’m not making this up – she literally looks like she’s going to swoon. (Brief aside on vegans here.  I cackled gleefully when I read this – was that wrong?) Andrea starts to make her dinner – some kind of green pea things, something that’s like tofu but isn’t, a slice of cheese.  She boils her peas while right next to her I’m browning beef and putting it on one of her plates, where it leaks pools of red blood.  Hee.  The Redhead is draining bacon fat in the sink, Eric’s mixing us another round of drinks.  All in this room the size of a small walk-in. So once the beef is browned, we pour the red wine, beef broth, garlic, tomato paste, the beef and thyme in with the bacon. This is where I fucked it all up – but I maintain it isn’t entirely my fault.  Yes, Eric was mixing the vodka tonics very strongly that night, and I was drinking them up pretty good, because I was, I’ll admit, a little nervous.  It was the fault of no one but me, but the Redhead had that effect on me.  And yes, I’d had nothing to eat all day but a bagel with butter, at one thirty in the afternoon.  So I was not at my sharpest.  But here was the way the recipe read:  2 ½ lbs filet of beef prepared & sautéed as in preceding master recipe  A 3-ounce chunk blanched bacon 1 ½ cups red wine 1 ½ cups brown stock or canned beef bouillon 1 clove mashed garlic 1 Tb tomato paste ¼ tsp thyme Saute the beef and set it aside.  Cut the blanched bacon into the 1-inch strips ¼ of an inch thick.  Brown lightly in the sauté skillet and pour out fat.  Add rest of ingredients above and slowly boil down by half. Okay, so yes, I could have been prepossessed enough to read the whole recipe.  But doesn’t the above instruction imply that the beef is one of the ingredients to be put in the pot?  So that’s what I did.  I felt strange about it, but I did it.  And things started getting weird.  I started boiling the liquid down, and it wasn’t boiling down.  I thought, “huh”, worrying about how I was cooking the beef too long.  I poured out some of the liquid.  I stirred in the beurre manie, butter blended with flour, which was supposed to thicken the liquid, but didn’t really.  Then I got to the instruction about adding the mushrooms and onions, and beef, and realized how badly I’d loused things up.  So we decided to go the stew route, and keep cooking the meat until it was fork tender. It wasn’t a disaster, in the end.  It tasted like beef cooked in wine with mushrooms and onions and bacon.  We ate it with pretty little potatoes Helen had gotten at Fairway.  (Helen lives on the upper west side and shops at Fairway.  I live in Long Island City and shop at Western Beef.  This is the essential inequality of life.)  But I was embarrassed.  I’d fucked up the meal, I was a lousy cook, and the Redhead saw.  The Redhead also, it turned out, used to catalogue wine for Christy’s.  I’m not making this up.  The wine the Redhead had brought was a Sauternes, and was designed to go with the chocolate and raspberries Helen was serving for desert.  So we had no wine for dinner.  Wound up drinking the cheap piece-of-shit Chilean stuff I’d bought.  Again, embarrassing.  And the Sauternes, after, was fantastic, really just an amazing wine. I needed a drink. Now, I maintain that what happened next was not my fault.  It’s a tough position, I’m the first to admit it.  But it’s my story, and I’m sticking with it. See, we’d dressed the salad with olive oil and red wine vinegar.  The table was not large, so when we were done with the vinegar Helen put it back where it belonged, on top of the refrigerator.  This was, mind you, quite a large bottle of vinegar.  Helen had just bought it.  It was very full.  And red.  Helen’s walls and floor, I should mention, are gleaming white.  Much like the crisp white walls of a hospital E.R. moments before the victims of the fifteen car pile-up coming pouring in. So I open the freezer door to get ice.  That’s all I did.  It wasn’t my fault that the vinegar bottle was resting on the lip of the freezer door.  What could I do?  It could have happened to anyone. The crashing of the bottle of wine vinegar onto the floor was very, very dramatic.  All I can say is, thank the lord for linoleum.  And 409.  And the five-dollar paper towels Eric ran out into the night in a blind panic to get.  We went home shortly thereafter – I think Helen feared for her life at that point.  I left my wallet at her apartment.  The subway was insanely slow, I threw just a bit of a drunken fit on the platform over it.  (The subway service in New York is abysmal nowadays.  And on the N/ W line, they’ve stopped lighting the above-ground platforms in the evenings – you’ll be getting off a train in Astoria at seven o’clock at night with seventy little old ladies, trying to get down the stairs in the pitch dark.  You can’t tell me they aren’t drastically reducing service, if they’re risking lawsuits from little old ladies to avoid paying they’re electric bill.) I hate this place. But now I’m going to make ladyfingers, which I’m sure is going to make me feel much better. 4:22:35 PM    comment []