Sunday, April 13, 2003

What’s a girl like Julie, abandoned by her husband for the weekend, to do for a solo dinner on a Friday night?  Why, crepes, of course!  I suppose I dreamed about crepes the other night because the crepe section is coming up in MtAoFC, and then had my midnight crepes-for-dinner revelation as a result of the dream.  Now the real question is this:  Thursday night I dreamed I was being chased around an abandoned shopping plaza by a large, foul-mouthed black woman with super-human strength who was out to slap my ass really hard, all while clutching a pair of cucumbers.  What will I feel the urge to cook because of this immensely disturbing dream?  Anyway, my foolproof plan was foiled when I got calls from both Helen and Em, wanting to do something Friday night.  Ah, the burdens of being loved.  We decided that just for a change of pace they would come over for dinner.  Which was great, especially since what with Helen’s allergies and her sister’s weddings and the distractions of the Great Boyfriend Switch (the lord be praised), she’d not been out to Long Island City to see our Muppet chandelier and other household improvements.  And the first recipe in the crepes section is Gateau de Crepes a la Florentine, a “Mound of French Pancakes filled with Cream Cheese, Spinach and Mushrooms,” which sounds like a bit much for a girl on her own in Long Island City to consume; good to have friends around for this sort of thing.  I’ve made crepes before, once before that it is, and I remembered it being a rather fun and off-the-cuff sort of experience.  What I didn’t remember is that JC asks that once I mix up the crepe batter by blending together in my Cuisinart a cup each of water and milk, four eggs, some salt, four tablespoons of melted butter and two cups of sifted flour, I have to refrigerate it for two hours.  It also turns out that for the Gateau de Crepes, Julia calls for a double batch of the crepes batter.  Both of which points can put a bit of a crimp in one’s style when one doesn’t get home until seven at night.  Especially when for some reason when making the second batch of batter, the cuisinart starts hemorrhaging milk and water, making a total fucking mess, and especially when before any of this happens, one must do something about the house because it is completely unfit for un-Powell human habitation.  Once I’d gotten the crepe batter in the fridge I started on trimming and cleaning the spinach.  I put some salted water on while I did that, and by the time I’d washed two bags of spinach – well, before, actually – it was boiling.  I dropped the spinach back in the pot, brought it back up the boil, and let it simmer for five minutes before draining, then plunging in cold water.  Around this time I got a call from Helen – “Julie, I haven’t left work yet, but I’m leaving now.  Don’t hold anything up on my account.” “Er.  I don’t think that’s a problem.” I made up a mornay sauce – roux, boiling milk and salt and pepper, boil for a minute, thin with cream and stir in the grated swiss cheese – I’d actually gotten some good stuff this time around, factual Swiss swiss cheese.  Then I squeezed the water out of the spinach and chopped it up.  For the spinach filling I sautéed some shallots in butter, then added the spinach and some salt and cooked until the moisture had evaporated.  Then stirred in some grated swiss cheese and simmered for a few minutes Helen arrived via one of those bizarre rips in the time-space continuum that the Julie/Julia Project seems to engender at around this time, bearing Milky Way ice cream.  While she walked around admiring the apartment and trying not to notice the piles of dirty clothes, thick layers of dust and odor of stale kitty litter, I mashed up a cup of cream cheese in a bowl with salt, pepper and an egg.  Em got here next, and immediately got to work, as Em is apt to do, on the cocktails, while I minced a cup of mushrooms and sautéed them with some shallots in butter and oil.  This got dumped into the cream cheese mixture. I am describing this as if everything happened entirely smoothly, and to some extent it did.  There were no crises, at least not after the Cuisinart leak.  But this is not to say that it happened in a flash, either.  It was nearly ten before I actually started making the crepes. It’s a funny thing about crepes.  They aren’t hard to make; they just either work or they don’t.  JC is very comforting on this.  She writes:  “The first crepe is a trial one.”  And so it was.  I started by rubbing the bottom of the skillet with a slice of bacon and heating it up.  When I thought it was good and hot I dumped in the crepe batter.  Which immediately stuck like fucking glue.  That got me a little nervous.  I scraped the stuff out, washed the pan, and set it back on the flame.  Rubbed it again with the bacon – which what a nifty cooking technique, to bunch up a strip of bacon and wipe it around a hot pan.  I feel like the Neanderthal Gourmet.  And the second time, I do exactly the same thing, pour the batter into the hot pan, and lo and behold, the thing works like a charm!  In less than a minute I have a lovely browned crepe, which I can easily flip over with a couple of big spatulas to brown on the other side!  The only thing I can think is, either I didn’t get the pan hot enough the first time or I didn’t get enough bacon grease on it.  Well, you don’t have to tell me to add more bacon grease twice.  So I’m making the crepes, drinking the vodka tonics, smoking the Marlboros.  Helen, who God love here is the most disciplined woman in the universe and probably isn’t used to eating food with three kinds of cheese sauce at ten-thirty at night, is beginning to look a little peaked.  But we’re having a good time.  I’m supposed to make 24 crepes, but I give up after sixteen or so, because it’s just too late. I butter a casserole dish, then lay a crepe in the bottom of it.  Smear some spinach filling on top, lay another crepe on top, smear on some mushroom filling, another crepe, and so on, layer upon layer of crepes.  It turns out that sixteen crepes was plenty, because by the end I was running out of my fillings.  I put one last crepe on top, poured the mornay sauce over it all, and sprinkled with a bit more swiss cheese and some dots of butter.  Baked it for half an hour or so. When it comes out of the oven, it’s this enormous, glistening white pile, a little brown on top, not particularly appetizing.  But when I cut it into slices, lord it was glorious.  All of these tiny layers, golden brown, white and green -- gorgeous.  And yummy?  I’m telling you what.  This was some seriously good shit.  Helen, a Buffy neophyte, wanted to watch an episode with “girl-on-girl action,” so we complied.  Then Helen, a reasonable girl, went on home, while Em and I watched a tape of Victor Vargas, at least Em did.  Mostly I fell asleep. I awoke at five a.m., covered in a blanket on the couch with a bottle of water beside me.  Em was asleep in the bed.  Later that morning, she watched the dishes, at her insistence – just when I was beginning to miss my husband – before dashing off like the little brownie that she is.  Saturday I ran errands and cleaned the house.  Saturday night I ate leftover crepes while watching “The Piano Teacher,” because there’s nothing more fun than sitting alone on the couch on a Saturday night eating leftovers and looking at some French actress mutilate her genitals.  Today my husband is home, and none too soon.  I believe we’ll be, in the interest of maintaining a cash flow (I went a little overboard Saturday on the Anniversary Present), continuing on with crepes.  And hell, maybe I’ll make some cucumbers in cream.  I’m feeling the urge for some reason. 1:09:15 PM    comment []