Wednesday, February 12, 2003

So here I am in the hopelessly hip Lower East Side (“The Bowery – if you lived here you’d be home now”), in a bar with the requisite moody lighting, spare and stylish furnishings, exposed brick and European waitress.  So why is it that when I order “a vodka gimlet, up,” I get one that is explicitly not up, and is crappy besides?  You don’t have to be the world’s best cocktail waitress to know that when someone orders something “up” and you deliver them something crammed full of ice, there’s a problem.  People, it’s not that hard! This was the only downside to an otherwise lovely, if too short, evening out for Bekkah’s birthday (Happy Birthday, Bekkah!… you little juvenile, you…), where Jeff pointed out that according to the New York Times soufflés are no big deal, Matty and I discussed at greater length why “Joe Millionaire” is no “Bachelorette”, Pinky regaled me with jello horror stories, and Lulu gave me a fish.  Mold.  A fish mold.  Which will be perfect for aspic.  (uuuuu…..aspic…..) But all too soon, it was time to make the soufflé.  Again.  This is the last of the batch, and I must say, I won’t be sorry to see them go.  Not that they were bad.  They were good.  I’m just not a soufflé kind of girl.  This one, Souffle aux Blancs d’Oeufs, was made with just egg whites, no yolks.  Since JC remarks upon its “Strong cheese flavor” in the introduction, I had sprung for some real Swiss Swiss cheese, rather than the rubber crap I usually buy.  It was the same drill.  Butter the soufflé mold and coat it with grated parmesan.  I grated my parmesan with my microplane this time, and it was easier.  Grated the parmesan to little curlicues rather than coarse powder, which was fine – kinda pretty, actually.  Make a roux out of butter and flour – this one, for some reason, was entirely liquid, rather than the slightly gluey stuff I usually get, which made me a little nervous.  Also, as I’m writing this, I realize that after I poured in the simmering cream (not the usual milk) and beat the roux into it, I probably didn’t let the mixture boil again, at least not for very long.  So that might explain some things. I grated ¾ cup Swiss cheese, and chopped another ¾ cup into dice.  I beat seven egg whites (throwing away the yolks, which was dumb, see below) until stiff.  I stirred in a quarter of the whites, then the grated cheese, then the diced cheese.  Folded in the rest of the whites, and turned it out into the mold.  Sprinkled a bit more grated Swiss on top. There seems to be not as much stuff as usual.  Weird.  Disturbing.  Oh well.  I stuck it in the oven.  While it was baking I boiled some asparagus and made a Sauce Maltaise, which is a hollandaise sauce with orange, to go on top.  Because Julia said I could, and it is technically a recipe, I tried to make the hollandaise in the blender.  But, maybe because I’d made myself a real genuine gimlet when I got home, just to prove I could, and because it was late, because I’d been delayed by Buffy and 24, which really, I don’t want to talk about it, I had trouble transferring the blender hollandaise into blender Maltaise.  I started by putting egg yolks – at which point, of course, I had to go and separate more eggs, because I’m an imbecile – lemon juice and salt and pepper in the blender.  I melted the butter in a pan – not enough, probably, I’m realizing now, not a whole stick.  I blended the yolks, then poured in the butter – not slowly enough.  I was just fucking it up all over the place.  Also, I should have put some orange juice in with the lemon juice at the beginning.  The stuff wasn’t thickening.  I put in the orange juice and the orange zest, and some cold butter to “cool” it. Whatever.  It was thin, creamy stuff that tasted like orange.  I put it on top of the asparagus that was a bit tough, and served it with the soufflé, which hadn’t poufed very much.  Plus, it was weird, the diced cheese didn’t melt at all, they were just these chunks of cheese in the soufflé.  Which was fine, but not what I’d have expected. Eh.  Fine.  A little sad in its not-quite-successful-on-any-level-ness.  I guess we all have these disappointments.  I’ll bear up – especially since I’m getting ready to check my lottery numbers and find out I’m a big old honkin’ millionaire. 7:24:45 AM    comment []