Thursday, March 13, 2003

You know that feeling where you’re lying in bed at 6:15 in the morning, and you literally have the physical sensation of every corpuscle in your body opening its tiny mouth and crying out, “For the love of all that is good and holy, please God, don’t get up!!!”  You’re lying there, staring at the clock, making precise calculations as to the exact number of nanoseconds it will take you to wash your hair over the din of your screaming elbows, your screaming toes, your screaming eyelids: “DON’T DO IT DON’T DO IT DON’T!!!!”  Pair that with that other feeling you get when you’ve been up for three or four minutes, feeling a little better after your corpuscles stopped screaming bloody murder, giving your eyebrows a quick pluck, when all of a sudden a realization hits you, like an abyss opening up abruptly beneath your feet, that this morning is the BOARD MEETING and you’re supposed to be at your office, in lower Manhattan, in TWENTY MINUTES, and you have my morning.  Thus the lack of a post this morning, for which my apologies. Announcement: In accordance with the unimpeachable wisdom of our Congress and beloved Commander-in-Chief, the decision has been made to redirect this project: We are now the Julie/Julia Project – Mastering the Art of Freedom Cooking.  Nobody here but us Warmongering American Cooks.  On the other hand, if you think that anti-war sentiment is the very last reason to pillory the French (there being so many other excellent grounds handy), or if you think that even if the cat-o-nine-tails should come out, that’s no reason to dump perfectly nice camembert and Bordeaux, or rename French fries, for fuck’s sake, then go here and do what I can’t because I’m technologically inept. So Eric managed to get the lamb kidneys last night for the lamb stuffing – only two instead of the four requested, but so what -- as well as some ground lamb that will come in handy for the next two lamb stuffings.  He also brought me flowers.  And was being very affectionate.  It got me a little jumpy.  But then he went to watch the news, and things were back to normal.  I made the stuffing, which was not at all hard – sautéed some minced onions in butter, stirred in a third cup of rice and sautéed it a couple minutes before pouring in 2/3 cup chicken stock and letting that simmer, covered, for ten minutes or so, until absorbed.  While that was doing I briefly sautéed the kidneys in some butter and oil – just browning them, not cooking them through.  My mother says that kidney smell and taste like piss, but I smell no urinous odor. I think Eric might have been a little offended that I showed more interest in the kidneys, which I’ve never handled before, and which are firm and smooth and heavy as river stones, and rest so prettily in the hand, than in the tulips he brought, which are also very pretty, orange with yellow edges, a bit bedraggled as flowers bought in Astoria tend to be.  I suppose I’ve written off flowers, since they are destroyed by felines immediately upon being placed in a vase.  So when the kidneys were sautéed I sliced them and mixed them in with the rice and onions, along with some garlic and sage, allspice, salt and pepper.  Then I just unwrapped the lamb and smeared this inside, then tied it all back up.  Thanks to this very helpful link from Victoria, I’m rolling lamb like a lonely rancher’s son.  Eew.  I mean like a champ.  I stuck it in the oven and roasted per the usual method, and that was that. Except not really, of course, because then there was the asparagus stuff, monstrous stuff Eric had brought home, so fat I had to cut the stalks in half lengthwise, and I browned them olive oil for a very long time, and what with looking after them, and the lamb, and the plutonium potatoes we were reheating from the night before.  Meanwhile Eric was watching pundits and Spanish soap operas, and talking to his mom on the phone, and surfing the net, and otherwise doing all the fulfilling things I would be doing if I wasn’t fucking cooking all the fucking time, and then he came in the kitchen and had the nerve to say, “Wow, what’s that fancy thing you’re doing to the asparagus?” “Fancy?!  What the fuck is that supposed to mean?!!  Fuck off!!” This, ladies and gentlemen, is what’s known as hitting a wall. Luckily these psychotic breaks are, though unpredictable, brief, especially if the husband learned enough to respond with, “So you want to watch some Buffy 3rd Season?”  Because next to a big honking bottle of vodka, nothing tames the cook-crazed beast like La Buff.  So we ate in front of the TV.  Again.  Which led inevitably to Eric’s spilling of red wine upon his pants, and subsequent panicked salt and boiling water treatments.  When he is a wildly wealthy and eccentric writer this owning no clothing not stained by ink, wine, or various greases will be considered charming.  So long as he only has two pairs of slacks to his name, however, it is a habit something less than completely winning. The lamb was good.  Actually, the lamb itself was just a smidge less rare than I like it.  The stuffing was good.  The kidney was not at all repulsive, though it left behind a back-of-the-mouth whiffiness, a taste good but feral, like tearing muscle off a gazelle’s leg bone or snuffing up something out of the earth with your snout.  However – and this goes for all the stuffings so far – the stuffing flavor didn’t much influence the meat’s flavor; vice versa, perhaps.  When I stuff a lemon up a chicken’s bum and roast it, the chicken tastes like lemon.  None of these stuffings have had that effect – maybe that’s just how it’s meant to be.  The next stuffing has olives in it, perhaps that will do it. The asparagus, tasted kind of crappy, as asparagus as thick as my wrist, shipped from Mexico to Astoria in March, can tend to be.  But it was fine – I ate it, didn’t I? Then we watched the Buffy episode where Vamp-alter-Willow shows up, and everybody thinks Willow’s been got, and when the real Willow shows up, Giles hugs her really hard, and I cried for about half an hour.  I’m a very emotional person. So now we have not one, not two, but three varieties of lamb leftovers in the fridge, plus the ground lamb.  Plus pork bellies with the fat cut off, some pork skin, and I think some pig’s feet, all of which Eric bought in a conscientious attempt to make up for not finding salt pork.  Oh, and about two and half pounds of bacon. Oh god.  I have seen my future, and it is cholesterol-influenced.   8:08:49 PM    comment []