Sunday, February 09, 2003

Friday night was Souffle Demoule, or unmolded soufflé.  This is the first non-pesco soufflé I’ve done in quite awhile – it’s just a plain old soufflé with cheese, with slightly different proportions, and cooked slightly differently.  The idea is that at the end you will unmold the soufflé onto a platter.  JC says that “although is does not rise as high as its molded relatives, it sinks only a little bit, and may be kept warm for a good 30 minutes before it is served.” Insert comical foodie double take here:  “Wha??!!!  A soufflé that needn’t be served immediately?!  Heresy!” Insert knowing foodie chuckle. There is a greater proportion of egg whites to yolks, which would argue, I’d think, for a poofier soufflé, but on the other hand the base seems designed to be thicker, with more flour to butter and less milk.  So, to recap, I buttered a soufflé mold (using the indefinite article “a” cavalierly, as if I have dozens of soufflé molds lying around the house, different sizes and designs, doesn’t everyone?) and coated with parmesan.  Made a roux of butter and flour, whipped in some boiling milk, then, off-heat, beat in three egg yolks one by one.  Beat 6 egg whites until stiff and fold it, along with a cup of swiss cheese, into the soufflé base.   Then turn it into the mold.  The cooking method is a tad different, which I didn’t notice until I’d come to that part of the recipe, because I’m an idiot and didn’t read ahead.  You put the mold into a pan, and pour boiling water into the pan.  Then you bake it, in the pan of water, in a 350° oven, for an hour and a quarter, which was the part I hadn’t read, and which pushed dinner back 45 minutes or so, which was sort of a bummer.  Sometimes the Julie/Julia Project is an oddly serendipitous endeavor, and a minor example of this is that two days after making the Beef Saute with Fresh Tomato Sauce, Olives and Herbs, which called for the making of a tomato sauce, and after which I’d been left with a couple of cups of said sauce left over, I quite naturally came to this soufflé, which calls for a cup and a half of the same sauce.  I almost feel that Julia is speaking to me through these sacred pages, as if across space and time we are communicating on a deep, spiritual, nearly mythic level. But that would mean I believed in horseshit.  So we’ll call it a weird coincidence and proceed.  I dumped the sauce into a pan and let it heat up. And then, since when my husband had asked me Friday morning what we were having for dinner, and I had said, “cheese soufflé”, he had asked, “but where’s the meat?” with a pathetic look on his face, I decided that instead of our usual boring green salad with boring olive oil and wine vinegar, we’d do spinach salad with hot bacon dressing, because one of the great truisms for the ages is that Salads are Always Better with Bacon. My mother regularly made such a thing, but I could not recall exactly how to make it, so I went to FoodTV.com to glean a recipe. There was a time when I was a FoodTV.com junkie.  I provide as evidence a very scary broken and bursting expanding file stuffed to the gills with printed out recipes, three-fourths of which I have never made.  But this was the first time in probably half a year that I’d searched for anything there.  It felt illicit, like an afternoon motel-tryst might feel, at once exciting and terribly humiliating.  Anyway, I found a recipe that seemed a good deal like mom’s, nice and simple.  Chop up the bacon.  (I used a new knife I got for Christmas, and my God, it’s so amazing to use a sharp knife after being used to totally dull sad knives for so long.  What power!  What ease!  I guess I’m going to have to learn to really sharpen knives.  I’m just pathetic with those sharpening steels….)  Saute it until crisp, then take out the bacon and pour out some of the fat.  Saute some minced shallot.  Pour in cider vinegar, a bit of sugar, mustard, a bit of olive oil, and salt and pepper.  Boil it down a bit.  Pour it over spinach and toss.  Sprinkle the bacon over. It was good.  Not as good as my mom’s somehow. The soufflé, also, was fine, not fantastic.  True to JC’s word, it didn’t puff up that very much.  It was quite golden brown.  I forgot I was supposed to unmold it until I’d dug in with a spatula.  I went ahead and turned it out onto a plate and poured some of the tomato sauce around – too, thick the tomato sauce, it got too dry, I should have loosened it up with some water – but there really wasn’t that much point.  I guess I don’t give much of a shit about presentation.  But the real problem is that, after all the fish soufflés, the plain cheese just tasted a little insipid or something.  Boring.  The tomato sauce helped. Okay, so that was Friday. Saturday we went to Smith Street in Brooklyn to meet Helen and her parents for brunch.  At Banania Café – French bistro food, if you can believe it.  Although thankfully it wasn’t really French bistro food at all.  It was Brooklyn Brunch Food.  Eric had the eggs benedict, I had penne with bacon, leeks and gorgonzola sauce, because I don’t really much like brunch.  Give me pasta any fucking day.  Helen’s parents had been to see Emeril live the night before, but we didn’t really talk about that.  Instead, we spent a disproportionate amount of time discussing the implications of reality TV shows, and particularly “Joe Millionaire”, which, it turns out, Eric and I have a dispiriting depth of knowledge about.  Then it was on to Atlantic Avenue to get a leg lamb from a Halal butcher, as per the many kind suggestions of my readers.  I was a little apprehensive, having never before either bought leg of lamb or been into a Halal butcher’s.  But it was easy.  We went in and asked for a leg of lamb.  The lady behind the counter basically said, “You mean this leg of lamb,” and pulled out the big honking leg of lamb that was sitting in the middle of the teeny tiny meat case.  Yup.  Seven and a half pounds of the leg of a baby sheep for thirty bucks.  Is that good?  Bad?  I dunno.  But these lambs are going to break me.  The butcher offered to cut incisions into the leg, said that’s what people do, and what the hell do I know? so I said sure. Emily was coming over, and at first I was worried that I wouldn’t have time to get the house straightened up.  But lamb’s easy, as it turns out.  Baste the lamb with some melted lard, and stick it on a rack in a pan.  Cook it in a 450° oven for fifteen minutes, basting and turning, then turn the heat down to 350 and just leave it alone for an hour or so.  The only problem was that I didn’t have a big enough pan.  But thanks to the cuts the butcher had made, I was able to do a sort of Slinky© number and wedge the thing in.  Turning it over was kind of a bitch, too, but I did it.  I made Sauce Speciale a l’Aile pour Gigot, a garlic sauce, to go over.  Simmered the cloves of a head of garlic in water, drain and peel them, and simmer them again, briefly.  Then simmered ¾ cup mile, salt, dried rosemary and a couple of tablespoons of rice.  Dumped the garlic in and simmered that for 45 minutes.  Impossible to keep the milk from evaporating, I had to add like another ¾ cup milk, in drips and drams, to keep the stuff from scorching.  Then mashed the stuff through a sieve, and simmered it with a cup of beef broth.  I was also serving plain buttered green beans and Gratin Jurassien, Scalloped Potatoes with Heavy Cream and Cheese.  I sliced my potatoes on my fancy-dan mandoline that Eric got me for our anniversary last year, and which I really haven’t gotten in the habit of using.  Because I haven’t gotten in the habit, it’s not all that super easy to use, though it certainly is fun.  But one day I’m going to make homemade potato chips with it, and then I’ll know I’ve arrived.  Anyway, pretty simple – butter a dish, then put down a layer of potatoes.  Salt and pepper, then grated Swiss cheese and dots of butter.  Continue layering until you’ve used everything.  Pour in cream and stick in the oven.  Actually, you’re supposed to bring it to a simmer on the stove top first, but once again I hadn’t read the recipe ahead, and so I hadn’t used my fancy-dan All-Clad braising dish, so I couldn’t but it on the stovetop, so I decided to screw it and just throw it in the oven, beside the lamb. Now, I was worried about overcooking the lamb.  I’d stick in the meat thermometer, and it would really high – like 170 degrees, when JC said 147-150 was medium rare.  But then I’d poke it somewhere else and it would seem not hot enough.  I bear an abiding mistrust of meat thermometers, and I’m much more afraid of drying out my thirty-dollar meet than of dying after eating raw lamb meat.  I took it out after an hour, because the suspense was just killing me.  I put it on a platter, poured out the fat, deglazed the pan with some beef broth, and poured that stuff into the garlic sauce.  This was at seven o’clock.  Emily hadn’t even showed up yet.  The meat had to sit for half an hour, which was how long the potatoes had to cook, and the green beans were pretty much done.  Just call me Martha – I am the hostess queen! So dinner was really, really good.  The lamb was lamb – nothing complex, but really quite fantastic.  The garlic sauce was yummy, though maybe curdled just a bit, which had no effect on the taste but kept it being from perfectly smooth.  The potatoes were, as potatoes baked with cheese, butter and cream tend to be, fantastic.  Even the green beans were good.  The whole meal just seemed to go together.  And then Emily brought for dessert some profiterole-looking things that she bought at a Polish deli in Greenpoint, that were stuffed with some kind of hazelnut cream and which tasted like those little Euro wafer cookies.  Oddly enough. Afterwards, of course, Buffy.  Emily shares my dizzy infatuation with Giles, so we watched Episodes In Which Giles Kicks Someone’s Ass And Is Sexy As Hell.  Eric was very patient, and washed dishes. Now it’s Sunday.  It is a sunny day, and though it’s probably really cold I don’t have to find out if I don’t want to, because it’s Sunday.  I am feeling fat and lazy, in the best possible way, and contemplating only doing one J/J Project recipe tonight.  It’s a nice thing to contemplate. 1:25:49 PM    comment []