Monday, May 19, 2003

I could lay in bed all day lounging like a cat, but I’m afraid work must intrude, and I have a few questions for you.  Sort of fill in the blanks questions, actually: 1)      Everyone I know has bought a great apartment somewhere close to a Fairway because: a.      That’s what adults do. b.      It’s a buyer’s market. c.      Julie’s a moron who can’t get her act together. 2)      I feel achey all over this morning because: a.      Good joint health after 30 depends upon a good diet, regular exercise and daily doses of glucosamine. b.      Might have something to do with the 200 pounds of stuff I carried through the New York City subway system Saturday. c.      Julie’s a moron who can’t get her act together. 3)      LMDC holds its staff meetings Monday morning at 9 am because: a.      It’s best to start things off on the right foot. b.      They’re a bunch of sadistic Republican bureaucratic motherfuckers out to torture me. c.      Julie’s a moron who can’t get her act together. I could go on all day with this, but you get the drift.  It is because of questions like these that Eric is eventually going to stab himself in the eardrums with an icepick. Jeff doesn’t indulge his wife Bekkah in such self-pity, which seems to me inutterably sad, but since this policy has resulted in their owning a cute-as-shit apartment a short taxi ride away from the big Fairway, with granite counter tops, a brand new stove with one of those ultra-low burners, a dishwasher, washer-dryer and a Sub Zero refrigerator (albeit broken), all of it cleaned and painted and otherwise gussied up by them when they’re not teaching underprivileged kids, working in soul-sucking corporate jobs, making their ways as actresses or rescuing little kitties off the streets, I guess I won’t cry spouse abuse.  That plus he took us to the 125th Street Fairway, where I bought some breathtakingly expensive veal chops that I suspect were still probably a good deal, AND cooked us a yummy yummy dinner – steak and chicken with a delicious Indian-ish spice paste, roasted potatoes, and this great curry-y spinach and onion and chickpea thing, all of which tasted great and none of which was likely to make me go into cardiac arrest, AND taped the first forty-five minutes of the Biography special on Buffy.  For which I am eternally grateful.  Thanks be to you, Jeff and Bekkah, for all your generous gifts.  I did my best to introduce early death to the party by making Cremes Frites.  I mentioned this yesterday – what this is is cream filling like one of the ones I used to fill crepes, chilled, cut up into squares, dredged in a variety of things, and fried.  I had made the mushroom filling, which is done by making a roux of butter and flour, beating in boiling milk and boiling it for a minute, salting and peppering and whatnot, stirring an egg yolk, half a cup of swiss cheese, some minced diced mushrooms you’ve browned in butter and oil in another skillet, and two tablespoons of butter.  But I hadn’t been able to get it set enough in the fridge on Saturday to comfortably cut into squares.  So we took it over to Jeff and Bekkah’s to attempt there.  Well, perhaps because the MTA has a secret master plan to drive me quietly mad (oh, not so quietly – Eric), or because it just wasn’t going to happen, the filling still wasn’t all that set when we got to Jeff and Bekkah’s.  So I just rolled them up into balls, dredging them in flour, beaten egg, bread crumbs, more egg, and more breadcrumbs.  This sounds like something that would work not at all and make a huge mess, but actually, it all went pretty smoothly.  I wound up with twenty or so pretty little balls that, Jeff insisted, looked like rum balls and made him think of Christmas.  We left these to sit in the fridge while we went to Fairway, where they have barrels of fresh sauerkraut, and I bought the crazy aforementioned veal chops from a man with super-human hearing, who picked up every curse word I muttered – you must remember that I spend my whole life wandering around muttering profanities. When we got back to their apartment, Jeff and I got to work, while Eric poured over LPs and Bekkah did lots of that kind of stuff you do when you have your own apartment.  I fried up the little buggers, and they worked pretty good – crispy brown on the outside, molten cheesy with mushrooms on the inside.  The only thing was some of them popped open on one side leaked their contents out into the oil.  But that wasn’t that bad either, because the filling stayed all in one piece, you could take it out of the oil, and you’d wind up with this little empty alien egg of crust, with a glop of cheese beside it, and it was perfectly good to eat.  The only problem was, and it wasn’t really a problem exactly, but the Cremes Frites didn’t taste so much like French food as like early-sixties hostess food.  Which is fine, actually.  If I’d used fancy cheese and mushrooms, they’d have been super-fabulous, but as they were they were pretty durned good.  We ate them straight off the paper towels they were draining on. Oh, and we figured out that Spike actually isn’t X-Men and X2 – the actors is James Marsden, not James Marsters.  Many apologies – I’m a moron who can’t get my act together.   8:03:04 AM    comment []