Friday, May 16, 2003

Just like sometimes you have to dye your hair cobalt blue, or wear jeans and beat-up motorcycle boots to your government-wonk job, sometimes you have to go ahead and make something that’s going to make you sweat garlic for days.  So on Thursday night, that’s what I did. I did not have the heart to make another attempt at Sauce Tartare just at present, and the next mayonnaise was Mayonnaise Collee – that’s “Gelatin Mayonnaise – For Decorating Cold Dishes.”  She suggests forcing the stuff through a pastry bag.  Egads.  I will save that for another day.  But I had to make something, because even though it was Thursday, Eric’s Spicy had been cancelled due to an unusually busy, and cooking-preventative, weekend social calendar.  So it was Aïoli. Aïoli, as it turns out, is a marvelously satisfying thing to make, even if it is a pain in the ass.  It is the perfect thing to make if you’re a little peeved – say, about the promotion at your office of the vice president of communications to Chief Operating Officer, not because you don’t like this person, who’s a perfectly nice person – well, maybe not perfectly nice, but a pretty good guy, and good at what he does, but because it seems to mean that the entire purpose of the organization you work for is not about rebuilding and renewing and remembering, but about spinning about rebuilding and renewing and remembering, which is annoying – because you get to spend five to ten minutes pounding eight cloves of garlic to death with a mortar and pestle.  In with the pulverized garlic I pounded in a large slice of bread, crumbled up, that I’d soaked for five minutes with some white wine vinegar.  I was supposed to use stale bread, but I didn’t have any bread in the house, stale or otherwise, so I just stuck a slice in a warm oven for a few minutes to dry it out.  Julia says to pound it until is makes a “very, very smooth paste.”  I don’t know about “very, very,” but I got it pretty good.  To that I started pounding in olive oil, a few drops at a time.  I was a little cowed after the Sauce Tartare business, so I took the one-drop-at-a-time stuff pretty seriously.  But after half a cup had gone in, it became apparent that this mayonnaise wasn’t going to go in for any piss-ant separating business.  The Aïoli was here to stay.  So I dumped the stuff into a bigger bowl – the mortar, or the pestle, which ever it is that is the container for the pounding, not the pounding instrument, was getting over-full – and beat the rest of the oil, a cup and a half total, in with a whisk.  Too easy to even talk about.  I thinned it out with a bit of boiling water, from the water that was on for the potatoes I was about to throw in, and a bit of lemon juice.  Garlicky.  Mayonnaise.  uuuuuuuuh. The rest of the meal was just regular.  The Aïoli I mixed with the boiled potatoes, once they were boiled.  For chicken I did Poulet Saute, sautéed chicken, a dish from the early days.  I didn’t pay the strict opinion to it preparation that I did back in the days when I was making sautéed chicken seriously, and it was probably not as good as it should have been.  And when Poulet Saute is not as good as it should be, it’s just chicken.  Fortunately, sautéed chicken is good.  The broccoli I just steamed.  Managed to overdo it, though.  As I scooped it out of the steamer, I warbled in my terrible Julia imitation, “If you overcook the broccoli, you’re a worthless piece of shit,” but even as I said it, I knew she would never say any such thing.  And that was a comfort. I had planned to make Souffle Rothschild – Souffle with Glaceed Fruit.  Three guesses on how that plan turned out.    8:05:22 AM    comment []