Sunday, February 16, 2003

I did not cook for St. Valentine’s Day, no indeed.  We went to a schmancy Italian place called L’Empiro instead.  The earliest reservation we could get there was 11:15, so we had to stay awake until then – quite a challenge for us.  Luckily, since there’d been no hot water Friday morning and I hadn’t taken a shower, I got to pass some time scrubbing off my accumulated filth.  I got my Valentine’s present from the husband – a huge lampshade that looks like a lilac shag rug.  He knows me so well.  And there was still plenty of time after cleanliness and gift exchanges to work myself into a snit over how obese and hideous I am.  What else is Valentine’s Day good for, after all? The restaurant was gorgeous and romantic and full of couples trying too hard.  The menu was prix fixe, of course, because it’s Valentine’s day, and very good, though not noticeably Italian, for the most part.  I had raw fish for the first time in my life, and it was quite good.  We blew a wad on a bottle of wine.  The lighting was so flattering I forgot my snit.  We took a cab home – luxury of luxuries!  -- and crashed.  Saturday we actually went to the peace march, and that felt good, but I didn’t do any of the call-and-response, Who’s Streets?  Our Streets! stuff, because I’m really not into that whole protest lifestyle.  But hopefully our little heads were counted, and our beloved Commander-in-Chief will say, “Well, hey, lookit all those people!” and change his mind. Yeah.  That’ll happen. After the march we stopped by Grand Central and bought a bottle of Alsatian Pinot Gris.  I love America.  Then we went home and I got started on Caneton Roti a l’Alsacienne.  This is duck stuffed with apples and sausage and roasted.  Start by browning “pork link sausage”.  Our Astoria grocery had hot Italian sausage and breakfast sausage, and that was it.  I chose the breakfast sausage, thinking it would probably be less intrusively spiced.  This breakfast sausage produced no fat at all, so after I’d browned it and put it aside, I had to melt some lard in a pan to sauté the apples.  JC didn’t go into particulars as to the apples, saying only that they should be “crisp.”  I chose granny smiths.  I cored them, which really, I don’t know what it is, but I just can’t get the hang of coring apples.  It’s probably because apples made me want to vomit when I was a kid – I just don’t have much life experience with them.  Anyway, I did core them, with help from the husband, after I’d peeled them, and I cut them into slices and sautéed them, in several batches, until they were tender and browned.  I put them on a plate and sprinkled them with cinnamon, salt, sage, sugar and cognac.  Then I boiled down a fourth cup of port and a fourth cup of beef froth in the pan, and when that had cooked down, poured it over the sausage, which I’d crumbled up.  I mixed the sausage and the apples together, and stuffed them into the duck, then sealed the guy up with skewers.  Eric, meanwhile, was peeling little baby onions, which were due to be braised.  I mixed together cream cheese, flour, eggs, salt, pepper, and diced swiss cheese for Crepes de Pommes de Terre for Grated Potato Pancakes.  These I had attempted once before.  That time they’d turned out hash browns; I was hoping for better this time. The duck recipe, after the stuffing, was the same as regular roast duck.  Started by sticking it into a 425-degree oven for fifteen minutes, breast up.  Then I turned the oven down to 350 and turned it onto its side, cooked for another 15.  While this was happening, Eric peeled the potatoes and I grated them on my handy-dan Cuisinart.  I dimly recall that I was a dipshit last time and grated them on my manual grater.  Never.  Again.  I love my Cuisinart with a love at once sacred and profane. I mixed the potatoes in with the rest of the stuff for the potato cakes, and thinned it with some cream.  I had also gotten the onions braising, in butter and vermouth, on low heat.  I heated up butter and oil in a skillet for the potatoes. I turned the duck onto its other side. I ladled potato batter into the skillet, three cakes of maybe a third or half a cup at  a time.  The potatoes fried up quite nicely this time.  I mean, they weren’t perfect, and I still managed often to leave their pretty brown skins stuck to the bottom of the pan, but they held together enough that I could flip them, and when they  were done, they were definitely cakes not hash.  So score one for practice, then.  I turned the duck back to breast-up.  I so want to believe that turning the duck this way and that is a lot of stuff and nonsense, but it certainly is getting the bird nice and brown all over.  Also, and I really don’t understand this, but the duck seems somehow more compact than a chicken.  It doesn’t flop all around; it’s bones seem, I don’t know, tighter-knit or something.  So it’s easier to turn. I take out the duck at a time that I think it may be done.  It’s all a big guessing game around here.  I take the duck out of the pan and onto a platter, sticking it in the turned-off oven alongside the potato cakes, to keep warm.  I pour out most of the fat from the pan, and cook down some beef broth and a bit of port for gravy.  I take the onions out of the pot, and toss them in a bowl with butter.  Then I sprinkle them with minced parsley.  Sprinkling the parsley turns the onions into Petits Oignons Persilles, Parslied Onions, which is a whole new recipe. Score one for lazy! When the gravy’s cooked down, I take it off heat and stir in a couple of tablespoons of butter, then strain it into my schmancy gravy boat.  (I have a gravy boat.  I have arrived.) Dinner is good, because it is duck.  We eat the apples and sausage, and it’s okay, I guess, but I’m just not all that into fruit with duck.  Which is a problem, since I have duck with orange, duck with cherries, and duck with peaches coming up.  Ah well.  The potato cakes are excellent.  The onions are braised onions.  This is a meal Julia suggested, and she’s right – everything goes well together.  Plus, I made a pretty good wine selection, if I do say so myself – the Pinot Gris goes perfectly as well.  Oh what a foodie I am. Except, do foodies’ pipes freeze? Here it is Sunday, and our pipes are frozen solid.  Again.  Even though we ran the bathtub all night.  Not much we can do about it – there’s a hole the size of a side of beef in the side of the building that we can see out our window, but can’t get to.  The water pipe runs directly behind that hole.  Basically, it’s totally exposed, and though I can’t actually see it, I’ll bet you a dollar to a donut it’s not insulated.  God, I hate New York. I am weak, and I have decided that I cannot cook without running water.  So tonight, Czech food. 1:48:33 PM    comment []