Wednesday, April 09, 2003

I don’t know what’s wrong with me.  Monday night I came home and cheerfully slaved away for hours upon hours making Aubergines Farcies Duxelles.  Tuesday night prospect of cutting a cup’s worth of chicken off the bone had me whimpering like a baby. The dish of the evening was Quenelles de Volaille, or chicken quenelles, for the very compelling reason that I could use the raw chicken Eric hadn’t used the night before, and thusly not have to go to the grocery store at all.  Quenelles de Volaille are, of course, just like the other quenelles we’ve been making, only with chicken meat rather than ground fish.  Should be a snap. Well, cutting raw meat off chicken bones is not a snap, no matter what the storybooks say.  Especially when the bones in question are legs and wings.  And especially when you’ve got three ill-mannered cats sniffing around, and your husband’s got the fucking war -- which really is beginning to piss you off, this war thing, and make you think you don’t understand your fellow countrymen at all and you probably need to just move to France or New Zealand or something – on the TV, and work has been really kicking your ass.  I kept throwing the possibility out there – “You know, we could have leftovers, you know….”  But Eric was standing firm.  He always does that when I’m feeling weak and sad and self-pitying.  It’s very annoying.  But he’s right of course.  The mother fucker’s always right.  He’s going to be leaving town for three days this weekend, and I just don’t see myself making a lot of roast duck and boiled lamb to eat by myself in my lonely apartment on a Saturday night.  So Quenelles de Volaille it was. Actually, after I got the meat, it wasn’t so bad, though it does take awhile.  I ground the meat up in the Cuisinart.  Then I made a pate au choux by bringing the water, butter and salt to a boil, then dumping in flour to make a dough, then beating in an egg and an egg white.  I beat the ground-up chicken into that and chilled it for half an hour while I brought one pot to a simmer to poach the quenelles in, another pot to boil for rice, stuck the leftover eggplant in the oven and made up the white béchamel ­that the quenelles would eventually be served with.  When the chicken paste had chilled I took it out of the fridge, beat in a little cream, and started forming it into balls with two spoons I dipped in cold water to keep them clean.  The balls didn’t form quite as neat little balls as the Quenelles de Poisson had, but they stuck together well enough.  I dumped them in the almost-simmering water one by one until I’d used up all the paste.  They simmered along, taking longer than the Quenelles de Poisson had to cook.  When they were puffy and pale and floating at the surface of the water – about twenty minutes – I took them out and drained them on a towel.  I put some of the béchamel in the bottom of my fancy-dan braising dish, then placed the Quenelles on top of that.  The rest of the sauce over them, followed by the usual grated cheese and butter.  Broiled it for ten minutes.  So if Quenelles de Poisson are basically fish balls, and Quenelles aux Huitres are more or less oyster balls – both of which sound sort exotic, if a little repulsive – then Quenelles de Volaille are really just meatballs.  Poached chicken meatballs.  And you know it seems like a lot of work for meatballs.  Not that they weren’t good or anything.  They were.  They were really good, creamy meatballs.  You know, they’d probably have been more refined and elegant if I’d just gone and bought ground chicken (or veal, or turkey), rather than cutting up chicken legs and running them through the Cuisinart.  But then I wouldn’t get that warmy fuzzy feeling of being virtuous and efficient.  And speaking of virtuous, the leftover eggplant was good – somehow felt less oppressive to eat this time.  Quite possibly because I wasn’t eating it at 11:30 at night.  Shit, it wasn’t even ten yet.  Something has happened to our house this week.  It’s not just that housekeeping has gone down the toilet; it’s more like we have devolved as a couple to some lower, less particular subhuman form.  Our clothes are scattered hither and non.  There are dishes not only piled high in the sink, and not only on the stovetop, but all around the kitchen floor.  What’s happening to me?!  Oh, and though I must go to work now, which is depressing the shit out of me, I simply must tell you in brief about this dream I had last night, in which the entire staff of my office was having dinner together, along with my family, in our offices – we’d set the table in the executive conference room with crystal and china -- and my mom was cooking in the staff kitchen, but I was too busy to help because Alex Garvin, V.P of Planning, was meeting with Buffy and Willow to help fight the minions that were downstairs to destroy the world, so I was feeling guilty and torn about that.  Oh, and mom was making crepes.  And there was a three year old girl who was terminally ill and had to keep hooking herself up to an IV drip or a fibrillator or some such thing.  Just think – Buffy, work, family, children, illness and French cooking!  All my neuroses packed into one action-packed dream!  If only there’d been a teeny-tiny cat being flushed down the toilet or a shriveled-up snake I’d have touched all my bases at once!   8:00:37 AM    comment []