Thursday, March 20, 2003

It was one of those evenings where nothing went right.  Making the Sauce Brune, I thought I’d fucked up when I dumped the flour into the pan I’d been browning the diced onions, celery, carrot, and boiled bacon in, before taking the vegetables out.  That turned out to be okay, I’d just been reading the recipe on the facing page, which is very similar.  But then I actually did fuck up by continuing to read that recipe and putting in vermouth when I shouldn’t have, with the beef bouillon.  Also, I had no tomato paste.  So who knew how the sauce would turn out. Then I started on the Patalina – Semolina Gnocchi.  Julia’s recipe for semolina gnocchi calls for instant farina cereal, but I couldn’t find that.  I got something called “Semolina” and, at another place on the bag, “Pasta Flour.”  What could happen?  Well, it all seemed to go okay at first.  I got some water with butter, salt and pepper boiling, sprinkled in the “semolina”, and stirred it around until it got good and thick, like fine-grained grits.  Julia has written that “untreated semolina takes 20 to 30 minutes to cook.”  I was assuming that what I had was the untreated stuff, but it was good and thick after five minutes or so.  I set it aside to make the Pate a Choux.  A cup and a half of water, 6 tablespoons of butter, salt and pepper, boiling, mixed with a cup of flour.  Wait, no, shit!  The recipe calls for a cup of water, not a cup and a half.  I’ve gotten the proportions all fucked up.  I pour in another half cup of flour, let the butter take care of itself.  It looks kind of sort of right, like a dough.  I beat in four – no, six, right?  I’m getting befuddled with off the cuff proportion changes.  Call it six – eggs, one at a time.  It takes a while to get them beat in.  Then I beat in the “semolina” and a half cup of parmesan. That was one thing that went right.  I grated parmesan with my microplane.  Only the second time I’d done it, and it is a miracle.  When I die, I want to be buried with my microplane. I’m mixing the stuff together, and something is definitely wrong.  Julia wants me to form this stuff into cylinders with my hands, but there’s no way.  It’s a sticky loose mess.  The fuck?!  This worked fine with the other gnocchi! …the semolina.  There isn’t enough of it.  Because I’d made too much of the pate a choux! Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuckfuckfuck.  Dammit. I make some more semolina.  I dump it in.  Some more parmesan too.  Correct proportions are pretty much out the window.  The stuff gets slightly less sticky, but not much.  Tell you what, we’re going to do these dumpling style.  I get some water boiling and I dump spoonfuls of the stuff into the water.  And it isn’t a disaster, actually.  The blobs don’t disintegrate, they puff up and rise to the surface, bobbing.  I take them out to drain, do another batch.  When I’ve done all I can manage (lots of gnocchi dough leftover, fuck it), I place them in a casserole dish, grate some more cheese over them (When I am sad and blue, I grate with you, microplane!!!), and dot them with butter. Meanwhile the Sauce Brune is just about done.  I strain it into a bowl.  In the pot the sauce was in I boil down some Madeira until it’s syrupy.  I add two cups of the brown sauce back in and simmer.  Add a splash more Madeira and some butter and I have Sauce Madere.  I’ve got to sauté up some chicken livers, and some scallions.  I have two pans going, a couple of tablespoons of butter in each.  I throw trimmed scallions in one, chicken livers in the other.  Stick the gnocchi under the broiler.  Toss the stuff around in their pans until they look brown.  Take out the gnocchi.  It too is browned. Holy cow.  For everything going wrong, this sure was good. First of all the meal just looked pretty.  Crispy browned scallions, rich brownish-reddish chicken livers, golden puffy gnocchi.  And it was. All. Every bit of it.  Great.  I’d cooked the chicken livers just enough so they were buttery smooth, the almost-too-much, almost frightening taste of the liver tamed by the smooth Sauce Madere.  The gnocchi also velvety, light.  And you know, good parmesan is so much better than using crappy swiss cheese, even if Julia does say crappy swiss cheese is perfectly fine.  Nutty.  (the flavor of the parmesan, I mean.  Not Julia.)  And you know, I gotta say.  The sautéed scallions are obviously not a MtAoFC recipe, not particularly French in feel – actually, they taste kind of Chinese.  But they are great.  Clean-tasting and light and yet good and brown-crispy.  Yum. A perfect meal, comforting counter to a terrible night of watching the war-porn. Just goes to show.  Screaming hysteria, applied liberally, is Julie’s secret ingredient.   8:07:19 AM    comment []