Monday, April 07, 2003

Eric called last night a “softball dinner,” because if you put enough butter and cream in something, it doesn’t matter what else you do to it.  Dinner was broiled flounder filets with Sauce Chantilly, which is a Hollandaise sauce with whipped cream folded into it at the end.  Also rice and DeGroot’s 7-Minute Cabbage, which is something of a standby.  For dessert, Petits Pots de Crème, which is just exactly the flan-like custard I made back in Houston last week, but in little ramekins.  Actually, since all my ramekins are currently being used to hold leftover chipotle peppers from a thousand years ago and Eric’s shaving soap, I used my pyrex mise en place bowls, which are very handy, and besides which, calling them mise en place bowls gives me a cheap thrill, made all the more piquant by the fact that I’m not absolutely sure I’m using the right phrase. I also put together the Crabe an Chaud-froid, though I didn’t eat it.  The crab’s probably gone bad by now.  This aspic shit is like pulling teeth, I gotta tell you. So.  I started by making the caramel to line the bottoms of the pyrex mise en place bowls.  Now, I don’t know if the earth’s magnetic field has flip-flopped or the poles have reoriented or what, but something’s going on with the caramel.  I’ve made caramel before – sugar and water, heat together, not exactly a big mystery – and I have never, before the last week, had this dry crystal stage happen, where the liquid totally solidifies before melting again into brown caramel.  Now it’s happened to me twice in a row.  And I know I’m not the only one – it happened to my brother to.  Maybe it’s a family thing?  I don’t know, but if any cooks or chemists out there have any illuminating thoughts, they’d be much appreciated.  Anyway, I made the caramel, poured it into the bottom of the dishes.  I’m halving this recipe, and I don’t know if that’s the reason or if it’s this fucked up crystal thing, but there’s not really enough caramel to go around.  Ah well.  I leave it to set, which happens pretty much instantaneously. I shred the cabbage and put it in a big pot with a little bit of water and some oregano, where it will wait until I’m ten minutes from done.  I put the water on for the rice, also to wait a bit.  I turn on the broiler to heat. I think I can safely say it’s time to get the oven cleaned.  I’m dying of smoke inhalation before I ever put anything in there.  And seriously, opening the window when it’s so fucking cold out, which is another story I won’t get into at this precise moment, is no picnic.  I start on the Sauce Chantilly.  I’m going to by a hollandaise-making fiend before this thing is over.  I was able to whip this up with pretty much no problem at all.  Though I was halving this recipe as well, and that caused some bobbles and messiness – dividing egg yolks in half and such.  Plus I’m supposed to beat the egg yolks until sticky, which is kind of hard when I’m only beating one and a half yolks, which doesn’t come close to taking up the whole bottom of the pan.  But I get through without fucking it up – beat in a bit of water and lemon juice and salt, then throw in half a tablespoon of butter and heat over very low heat until it’s thickened up a little.  Throw in another cold half tablespoon of butter to stop the sauce cooking.  Beat in oh, say a stick of butter or so (this is halving the recipe, remember….)  Hoo-pah, hollandaise.  Then whip a fourth cup of whipping cream.  Only my Kitchenaid doesn’t do so good with fourth-cups, so I have to beat a half cup and then use half of it.  Meanwhile I’m broiling the fish, steaming the cabbage and getting the rice started, and somewhere I beat eggs and sugar, then slowly beat in hot milk, for the Petits Pots de Crème.  I’m feeling like an expert plate spinner here.  Key points to remember are that the window is at this point propped open with a potato ricer, and the Kitchenaid is thrumming along at its usual station on top of the trash can, so there’s the usual cord-hopping going on.  And yet all is well.  The rice gets done, and the cabbage, and the fish.  I stir the whipped cream into the hollandaise, which was sitting on the back burner, warmed by steadily smoking oven, and was maybe just a little thick until the cream nicely thinned it out.  I nap the fish with the sauce.  (What is it with food writing and the word “nap?”  Also “drape.”  Can’t I just say I got a spoon and scooped up some sauce and plopped it on the fish?  Okay, so I guess I just did.)  Scoop up some cabbage and the rice and we got dinner.  Set a kettle on to boil, for the water that needs to surround the pan of Petits Pots de Crème when I start baking them after dinner. Mmmm, softballs.  The fish tastes like hollandaise sauce with whipped cream beat into it, which how could that be bad?  Rice soaks up whatever of the various artery stoppages the fish misses.  And I think that lightly steamed cabbage, that still has its crunch and isn’t boiled with lots of shit, is actually a really nice foil to fish.  (“Foil.”  Another foodie word.  What’s wrong with me today?)  Light, but with some body to it.  Yum.  And since I will be eating it for lunch all week, I’d better like it.  (I didn’t halve the cabbage recipe.) For the Petits Pots de Crème I got the oven’s heat down to 325 degrees, and placed the mise en place bowls in a pan.  I strained the custard into the bowls, then poured boiling water in the pan around the bowls and placed the whole thing in the oven.  I let it bake for half an hour or so while I watched Dragnet, which is actually not a bad little show.  When they were barely set, I took them out of the pan of hot water and put them in a pan of cold water for ten minutes.  This process seems inevitably to involve wet oven mitts.  The Petits Pots de Crème are delicious.  Very delicate, and though you can eat them cold, they are so lovely warm. And that was dinner. And now I must go find myself a nice flat rock to beat my head against.  Nothing lethal, just something to dull the existential ache of a Monday morning in New York in April, on which day is predicted six inches of snow. What Julie wants for her birthday is this fucking winter OVER.   7:58:27 AM    comment []