Thursday, April 03, 2003

The dish was asparagus with Hollandaise avec Blancs d’Oeufs – Hollandaise with Beaten Egg Whites.  After one bite, Eric said, “I feel like it’s making fun of me.”  And I knew what he meant.  It was a saucy sauce, if you will forgive me. Making hollandaise really is so rewarding – just as you’ve always maintained, Pat.  There’s something absorbing and soothing about the process, which is delicate, yet moves at a stately pace.  Something about it feels essential and almost, dare I say it, erotic, in a serene sort of way. You beat some egg yolks in a pan until they get stick, a bit of water, a bit of lemon juice, a dash of salt.  Place a pat of cold butter in the pan, turn the heat to very, very low, and stir with a whisk until the butter melts and the sauce has thickened.  But not too much.  And not too fast.  Lumps of course mean disaster – although Julia has a long list of remedies for variously fucked hollandaise, which glows comfortingly on the next page like a nightlight.  So don’t let the heat get too high.  When it is thick enough that “you can begin to see the bottom of the pan between strokes, and the mixture forms a light cream on the wires of the whip,” whatever in hell that means, you take it off heat and beat in another tablespoon of cold butter.  Julia’s instructions, of course, can be infuriating, but they also encourage you to look closely at the food as it’s cooking, to be intuitive.  Once the cold tablespoon of butter has been beaten in, stir in the other stick and a half of butter you’ve melted in another pan.  Beat it in very slowly at first, just a half-teaspoon at a time or so, until it gets quite thick.  Then you can pour it in more quickly.  You want to beat as much butter as you possibly can into it without having it separate.  Leave out the white stuff in the bottom of the pan of melted butter, though.  When you’re done, you’ve got a lovely, thick, yellow, buttery, rich and mind-blowingly fattening sauce, which can sit perfectly well over the oven’s pilot light for half an hour while you pull the rest of dinner together. Which process is not nearly so serene, though I suppose one could say it was erotic, if you like hysterical acrobatics.  I asked Eric to keep an eye on the London broil I was throwing in the broiler while I boiled the asparagus and beat the egg whites until stiff (which phrase never fails to make me giggle fatuously, goofy thirteen-year-old at heart that I am.)  I’d gotten the egg whites into one of my mixing bowls before I remembered that my hand mixer was still dead for a ducat, so with a bit of that swearing you all know so well I pulled out my gorgeous but ungainly Kitchenaid stand mixer, which mixer happens to have a three-pronged plug, which means that, since I’ve never gotten around to getting an adaptor, the only place I can plug the damn thing in is resting on the top of the trash can, with the short cord stretched between it and the plug, which lies conveniently about three feet in front of the fridge.  So that what we’ve got is a situation like this: Oh shit.  I had the coolest drawing set up, but it won   Sove 't transfer over to this software.  Damn Damn!  Okay, well so the cord was stretched about thigh-high across from the trashcan to the wall about two and a half feet in front of the stove, blocking the only access to the stove.  Since the egg white were in a bowl that didn’t fit the Kitchenaid, I had to stand directly in front of the mixer, holding the bowl in place.  Eric was hopping back and forth over the cord checking the steak and draining the asparagus.  I was beating the white, stirring them into the sauce.  Also, and I haven’t mentioned this, monitoring the emergency fish stock with clam juice I’m making for eventual use in aspic.  (Not such a big deal – clam juice, water, vermouth, parsley stems, sliced onion and mushroom stems simmered for half an hour – but it did make for some cord-hopping on my part as well.)  I’m not going to say it wasn’t amusing – it was.  But not relaxing. Eric took the steak out and opened the wine, I napped the asparagus in Hollandaise avec Blancs d’Oeufs, (because the word “napped” is funny,) sliced the steak, put the dinner on. Red meat and asparagus with saucy, and eventually debilitating, sauce.  It was a good meal, a comforting one.  And I got some exercise in the bargain. *Lamb Special Report: I am continuing to turn the lamb in its marinade as it sits on our kitchen counter.  It is very purple and very soft, but does not stink, which I think is about as much as I can ask for.  Here’s keeping our fingers crossed…. 7:36:02 AM    comment []