Sunday, May 11, 2003

So Thursday was Bangladeshi food.  Friday was Williamsburg, where we met a long lost cousin of mine, Melissa, and her  husband Andy over crazy over-priced paninis and wine in the hippest neighborhood in the city, at least the hippest neighborhood an un-hip person like myself is aware of.  Melissa and I bonded by admitting to one another how much we hate people as a species, and by dishing about our brutish ancestors, and by talking too loud while drinking wine.  Eric walked away disturbed by this experience of genetics in action.  Melissa and Andy also gamely offered to come over and eat sweetbreads, probably blithely thinking we would never call them on it.  Mouihahahahaha….. Saturday I spent an ungodly amount of money and time getting my hair cut and colored.  My new hairstylist looks like Nigella Lawson, and I walked out of there looking like 4th season Willow, which I have decided after some pondering to be happy with.  Saturday night we had been asked to attend a Georgian (the country, not the state) themed dinner party being held by Eric’s co-worker and fellow Vassar alum Kristin.  But the thing is, though, I was feeling a little odd, having not cooked in going on three days.  Plus, there was the whole failure-to-make-souffle thing.  So, Kristin, I hate to confess this but we made and ate Souffle a la Vanille prior to coming to dinner.  I started at 5.  I smeared butter around my charlotte mold, then shook sugar around in it to coat it.  I mixed together some flour with a little milk, then beat in more milk, then beat in some sugar.  I brought it to a boil.  Julia asked me to boil until thickened.  It didn’t thicken and didn’t thicken and didn’t thicken, and then thickened a lot, all of a sudden.  I beat in four egg yolks, one at a time, and then some butter.  I dotted the stuff with some more butter, so keep it from growing a skin. I whipped up five egg white – the four from the yolks, plus one – in my KitchenAid.  I feel guilt every single time I beat egg white using my KitchenAid, I know that Julia wants me to learn to do it by hand.  What can I say, I am weak.  I stirred vanilla into the soufflé base, and then folded in a quarter of the whites.  Then folded in the rest of the whites.  I just noticed for the first time that Julia provides detailed instructions, with illustrations no less, for folding egg whites into soufflé bases: Using your rubber scraper, cut down from the top center of the mixture to the bottom of the saucepan, then draw the scraper quickly toward you against the edge of the pan, and up to the left and out…continue the movement while slowly rotating the saucepan…. I don’t understand this at all.  But I do my best. I spoon the stuff into my charlotte mold, stick it into a 400-degree oven that I immediately turn down to 375.  I cook it for twenty minutes.  I sprinkle on some powdered sugar, cook it for ten minutes more.  Poofy vanilla soufflé.  Yummy stuff.  Kristin, please understand that we filled ourselves up on vanilla soufflé not because we have any doubts about Georgian food, but only because I was getting neurotic due to Julie/ Julia pressures. Kristin is One of Us, a Queenser.  I’m always a little nervous about meeting Vassar folk, because there’s whole thing about them as a species being hipper and more beautiful than me, but when we got to her apartment I could smell garlic from three floors down, so I knew that all could not be wrong.  And it turns out that everyone was fabulous and friendly, and H. is the co-mayor of an extremely well-regarded small dog run, which position, as you may imagine, gives access to a mother lode of hilarious examples of the insanity of the human race.  I felt right at home because I could share cigarettes out on the balcony with H. – when you live in Queens you can have things like balconies – and because the charcoal briquettes, for grilling the pork kebabs, took so long to burn down that we ate at an almost-Julie/Julia hour.  I got to watch the J. – H. Routine, a well-practiced and hysterical comic revue, and eat a smorgasbord of fan-TASTIC Georgian food – chicken and pork and garlic and eggplant and goddamn it was good.  Plus, I was privy to a breathtakingly incisive apotheosis of 21st-century life, courtesy of H.: “So I was watching ‘Bridezilla’ on TiVO with my mother, and I said, ‘Hey, that photographer’s my drug dealer!” My god, it’s so true….   8:28:08 PM    comment []