Sunday, May 04, 2003

You wake up with a blazing headache and a nasty blistered burn on your forearm, still smelling of veal and cigarettes, and there’s a strange man (or an odd one, anyway) in bed beside you. Ain’t it always the way? Friday night was Dinner with Lisa and Konrad – Galettes au Roquefort (Roquefort Cheese Biscuits), Saute de Veau Marengo (Brown Veal Stew with Tomatoes and Mushrooms), and Petits Pois aux Oignons (Buttered Peas with Onions.)  Souffle a la Vanille was also meant to be on the menu, but when one eats at 11:30, one tends not to want to whip up a soufflé after. Lisa had very generously agreed to contribute the veal stew meat.  Originally, I had been planning on making Veau Sylvie, roasted veal with ham and cheese, very appropriate because no mushrooms – Lisa being allergic to the fungi.  Only upon reading the recipe at 10:30 Thursday night, I realized it had to marinate for at least 6 hours.  So, Saute de Veau Marengo.  I asked Lisa to buy four and a half pounds, enough to time-and-a-half the recipe, as I was expecting Casandra, our receptionist at work who had been rudely ousted in an act of firing most foul by the Cronies-In-Charge.  Also, I imagined Emily might show up. While waiting for Lisa, I got together the rest of the meal.  Eric, who had come home early both because he was sick with what he continues to insist is SARS, and because he’s a dear who knew I’d freak out if I came home and saw the house still a wreck, shucked the peas.  I started by mixing up the dough for the Galettes au Roquefort.  Mash together a quarter pound of Roquefort, a quarter pound of butter, two tablespoons of cream and an egg yolk.  Mix in one and a third cups of flour.  Chill.  While that was doing I minced a cup and a half of onions, boiled pearl onions for the peas and skinned them.  Simmered the peas for a few minutes.  Chopped the mushrooms.  Not making the connection until I was chopping them up that Lisa is allergic to mushrooms.  Somehow, in the recipe switch, that helpful fact had gotten lost in the shuffle.  Well, I’d just have to make a separate dish for Lisa. I rolled out the Roquefort dough and cut out little rounds, precisely an inch-and-a-half in diameter, just as Julia requests, because I have this nifty tin of nesting cookie cutters that I got from my mother-in-law, which I rarely use, but which are just the ticket when Julia wants you to make inch-and-a-half rounds.  I brushed them with a beaten egg (with a pastry brush also, oddly, given to me by my mother-in-law) and stuck them on a baking sheet and baked them for 8 or 9 minutes.  They were very cute and brown when they came out – I let them cool on a rack. So I was fairly calm.  Yes, I had a brief meltdown over the minced onions, because sometimes mincing onions just becomes too horrible to contemplate, but other than that I was fine.  Preparations were laid; now we had only to wait for Lisa and the veal. Meanwhile, Lisa was scouring Manhattan for veal stew meat.  She had spent the day industriously calling up fancy-ass butchers.  When she said “veal”, the butchers kept saying they had something called “veal log.”  Lisa is no butcher, but she knew enough to find the word “veal” and the word “log”, together in the same sentence, vaguely sinister.  So on she wandered, from shop to shop, searching vainly for veal stew meat.  Also meanwhile, guess who’s not coming to dinner?  Casandra, it seems, will not deign to honor us with the pleasure of her company.  Whatever. Also meanwhile, Emily’s in Boston, which was rather a shock.  Poor Lisa – looking for veal, and too much of it, in all the wrong places, while I start on my first vodka tonic of the evening, not to say my last. So Lisa finally made it, and we made stew.  I browned a mountain of veal stew meat in a skillet, and put them in a casserole.  I browned the minced onions in the skillet.  I tossed the meat with salt, pepper and flour, then stirred over moderate heat for a few minutes to brown the flour.  I added damn near an entire huge bottle of vermouth in with the onions, boiled it, scraped up the stuff off the bottom of the skillet, and poured the whole mixture in with the meat.  Brought it up to a simmer.  Stirred in tomatoes, basil, thyme, dried orange peel, and two mashed cloves of garlic.  Brought to a simmer and stuck it in the oven for, oh, an hour and a half or so.  It was probably ten or so when I did that. Konrad got there somewhere in here.  Champagne was drunk – some very nice stuff Lisa brought.  The Roquefort biscuits, it turns out, were VERY addictive.  Just the slightest punch from the blue cheese.  Flaky, buttery, delicious.  Konrad started rearranging our lighting.  We watched an episode of Buffy, because we’re so unpredictable that way. After the stew had been cooking and cooking and cooking, I took it out, and scooped some into a smaller pot for Lisa.  (This is about the point at which I gave my forearm the nasty burn.)  Into the big pot I stirred three-quarters of a pound of quartered mushrooms.  I stuck it back into the oven for twenty more minutes.  I made some rice, and I tossed the peas in a pan with some butter and the onions. Things were getting a little sloppy by this point, I’ll be the first to admit.  The main thing was that for the stew, there was this annoying stuff at the end where I was supposed to strain it, boil down the sauce, put the meat back in.  That was seeming awfully involved, when the stew looked perfectly good just sitting there in the pot, at elevn thirty at night, after multiple cocktails.  So we just ate the stuff.  It was pretty good, I think.  I don’t know.  I know we had a good time sitting in our dining nook, as I tried to balance holding a fork and holding a bag of ice to my forearm.  We ate a variety of ice creams afterwards.  Lisa and Konrad were wonderful company, Eric went out and bought be cigarettes because he’s crazy, and Konrad, who rivals Eric in the skinny-n-sweet department, even washed all the dishes.  Ah.  Good times. Oy.  Mornings, though. After the Friday night bacchanal, I was not much in the mood for more culinary endeavors, or any other endeavor, for that matter.  We went to see X-Men instead.  We’ve been discussing our super powers ever since.  Eric is obviously the Almanac, who can access any obscure fact ever written with just the power of his brain.  I can’t decide if I’m Pottymouth, who can render the enemy stunned by my high-pitched streams of obscenities, or Bechamel, who can flood the world with rich buttery sauces.  Either way, the criss-crossed layers of burns on my left forearm are my special power symbol. Tonight, of course, it’s back in the saddle – I’m not sure what I’ll be making actually, but I’m almost positive that an unappetizing dessert will be involved, and that in the very near future we’ll be spending more money we don’t have on veal.  An aside here: really, I don’t like to get much into politics, there’s too much of that in the blogverse already, and I generally cringe when “Hitler” is brought into political debate, but seriously folks.  When the third most powerful Republican in Congress can openly say that sodomy, and by implication adultery, can and should be criminalized, and when the second-most powerful Republican in Congress can praise him for his courageous stand, how scary is that?  In New Zealand, I’m sure there are people who share such views, but – key difference here – there are not enough assholes in the country to elect such a person to office. I think I’ll go see “The Pianist” now.   10:50:40 AM    comment []