Monday, April 21, 2003

The tragedy was not that I was sobbing while making my mornay sauce for the Poireaux a la Mornay, Gratines.  And the irony was not that I smashed one of the last wine glasses we got for our wedding while sitting in front of the television, eating at our lovely cherrywood TV tables.  No, the tragic irony is that while the tears were still drying on my cheeks, I broke the meaningful wine glass while Monica Lewinsky hosted “Mr. Personality” on a television that did not work.    We were sitting on the couch before TV tables before a TV showing one 1/8- inch horizontal band of picture, listening to idiotic men blather on about Kahlil Gibran and “kinky” sex, when I sent an entire glass of red wine spilling onto the rug that is one of our only lovely belongings.  I find this cruel twist of fate almost too much to abide.  I may have to become a wandering hobo, an Odysseus of the streets endlessly wandering to avoid my own demons, after this episode. The dinner was beef patties, noodles with butter and parmesan, and Leeks Gratineed with Mornay sauce, the aforementioned Poireaux a la Mornay, Gratines.  It does not bear much going into.  I cleaned some leeks.  I simmered them, covered, on the stove top with water, butter and salt, for half an hour.  I poured out the water and baked them, covered, in an oven for another half hour.  I made some mornay sauce – flour and butter roux, hot milk beat in, boiled for a minute, grated swiss stirred in.  I poured the sauce over the leeks, and some butter and more grated swiss, and broiled it until browned. I also broiled some ground beef.  I boiled some noodles. I browned some neck bones (beef) and carrots and onions, and covered them with water, simmered them for a brown sauce.  This is eventually to make the elusive meat glaze, and thus to make the Sauce Colbert, or béarnaise sauce with meat glaze built in.  I stress eventually. Eric said the leeks were stringy.  He was probably right.  Since he’s the one trying to wrangle the rug into the bathtub to rinse it, I will not argue. My mother today said I need to take a break.  And she may be right, for all that my cooking has not been so strenuous of late.  I am feeling much, particularly, the failure these days.  It is not turning thirty so much as it is the eventual turning forty, the fear that I will go another decade without doing a goddamned thing worth doing.  What have for the past decade, after all?  A husband – a divine husband, it must be said, which would be a significant accomplishment if the fact was not that by all rights he ought to divorce me -- and the Julie/Julia Project.  Some of you optimists might argue that the best is yet to come, and the sentiment is appreciated.  But bitterness is my special gift, and for the moment I choose to wallow in it.   10:28:41 PM    comment []

Thirty years of life, five years of marriage, untold centuries of crap office work. I’ve been getting a lot of rah-rah-ism, lots of “you’ll be so glad to get out of your twenties,” and “Thirty is great – you’ll love thirty,” and “I’ve felt like I was thirty since I was twenty – it’ll be such a relief to actually get there.”  Thanks, guys.  But I gotta say, so far I am unimpressed.  For our anniversary Eric gave me some hyper-designed cherrywood TV tables, and I gave him a deep-fry set and a tree.  I’m sure I could come to some sort of telling psychological conclusion about that, if only my arthritis weren’t acting up and that goddamned cliché of a biological clock hadn’t all of a sudden started up this Big Ben-caliber tick.  We also went to Felidia, which is this super-duper Italian place run by some celebrity chef and located conveniently just across from Long Island City in the Upper East Site.  I should have known nothing good ever comes out of the Upper East Side.  They sat us at a table that smelled like cat shit, the waiter had one of those weird inscrutable Martin Short accents and was an asshole besides, and everyone around us was an asshole, too.  From the quartet of “Foodies” behind us I was getting, “Marcella makes me so nervous, she writes down everything I say,” and “So, we were in Tuscany….”  From the mafia-pup behind us came, “Listen, just put some fava beans on it somewhere.  I love fava beans.  And get me the sommelier.”  And the food, I’m telling you people, just wasn’t any good.  It wasn’t bad, it was worse, it was boring.  I guess I’m getting spoiled – I don’t want to waste my money and time eating food with no soul.  I’d rather have gone to some Mexican joint in the garment district, or to Prune, where I’d risk being served something bizarre or that plain old didn’t work, than go to some goddamned celebrity chef food factory where people turn up your nose at you for ordering the “cheap” fifty dollar wine that tastes like something you’d pick up for $8.99 at the corner place in Astoria. So okay, enough of that.  Sunday, the Lord’s Day, my birthday, we went to see The Quiet American, good movie, I’m sure this wasn’t the point but that Brendan Frasier is the most adorable thing in the universe, plus since it was the day when only heathens go abroad sowe had the theatre pretty much entirely to ourselves.  Then home to make duck – Canard Braise avec Choucroute a la Badoise, to be exact. Oh, and yeah, so on Saturday I went to Fairway, by the way.  Not the huge one on 125th, just the regular one.  And I gotta tell you , it wasn’t that bad at all.  Not so unbearably crowded, not expensive at all.  Got my duck for under fifteen bucks.  I think I’ll be back.  Back to the duck.  I started by soaking my sauerkraut – I’d been picturing scooping the stuff out of an old pickle barrel or something, but I wound up just buying a jar of it – for twenty minutes or so, changing the water a few times, then squeezing the water out of it.  This was one of those times when my arthritis kicked in, I had to have my husband help me.  Then I sliced up a carrot and some onion and some big honking pieces of bacon I’d gotten – the bacon I cut up into pieces about half an inch in diameter and two inches long.  The bacon I simmered in water for ten minutes, then drained.  I cooked the bacon, carrot and onion slowly in butter, covered, for ten minutes.  Then added the sauerkraut and cooked for another ten.  Added parsley, a bay leaf, peppercorns, juniper berries – less than three dollars for a big jar of them, at Central Market in Houston they were charging like eight bucks for them, and isn’t Texas like the land of juniper?! – two-thirds of a cup of vermouth and three cups of Better Than Bouillon broth.  Covered it over with a round of wax paper and let it sit in a 325-degree oven for… 3 and one-half hours.  I had to add water a time or two to keep it from scorching.  While that was doing I slaved away at an article my husband is making me write.  On my birthday.  My thirtieth birthday.  Sometimes I distracted myself from my labor by lifting my hand to my face and seeing if I had faded away sufficiently so that I could see through my palm, “Back to the Future”-style. About half an hour before the three and a half hours were up, I cleaned out the duck and dried it, seasoned it, browned it in oil in a big skillet.  When it was browned on all sides, and the sauerkraut had finished its Long First Cook, I stuck the duck in the sauerkraut, scooped some over the top of it, and stuck it back in the oven for another hour and a half.  I fried some potatoes up in the oil I’d just browned the duck in. Now this is eating.  I’m telling you, this was like three thousand leagues better than Felidia.  Perhaps the copious amounts of fat from the duck had something to do with it.  Definitely the sauerkraut, rich with the bacon and deeply, smokily flavored, had something to do with it.  Definitely the moist meat of the duck, done exactly as it should be.  And nice to eat it under our Muppet chandelier in the dining nook, with the cats being rude and the nice Alsatian Gewurtztraminer Julia suggested, which I didn’t have to shell out fifty bucks for.  If this is being thirty, then I guess I can live with it alright.  Beats the hell out of being twenty-nine in an over-hyped restaurant, I can tell you that. Now it is time for work.  I have spent the night in a bed that seems to have been magnetized, so that I sleep all night pressed into it, sheet marks engraving themselves on my face, and have to exert super-human strength to get out of bed.  The downside of thirty, I suppose.   7:57:01 AM    comment []