Monday, May 26, 2003

By Friday, I was deep in the thrall of an intense, possibly terminal, bout of the Lazy Asses.  It was bad.  Work was an utter washout.  For my lonely dinner I ate Fricadelles de Veau a la Crème.  That’s veal patties with cream sauce – just exactly the same thing as the last set of veal patties, only I finished the sauce with cream at the end.  It was good of course – veal meat mixed with mince pork fat and tomatoes and onions and garlic AND topped with cream sauce tends to be.  I had thought I would make the coffee soufflé, but Emily wound up having something to do besides eat French food with me, and I didn’t much feel like eating an entire soufflé by myself.  Which would have happened, don’t kid yourself.  So I watched the rest of Mostly Martha. Some people have been asking me for my report on Mostly Martha, so here it is: It was a smart, intelligent movie that was refreshingly incident-free.  Yeah, so the sister dies and Martha has to take care of her daughter, who’s tortured, and she winds up falling in love with a freewheeling Italian chef, so stuff happens, but every step is not fraught and laden and stupid in the way of American romances.  The characters were grown-ups, even if they were fucked up.  So that was nice.  And the integration of food preparation into these people’s emotional lives was lovely to see.  Lots of pretty culinary footage, though perhaps not as orgasmic as, say, “Eat, Drink, Man, Woman.”  The actress who played Martha was sexy in the way ordinary women are, and the actor who played the Italian chef was sexy in the way ordinary, round Italians are.  It was sort of a sad movie to see alone, though.  And for God’s sake, someone has to do something about the soundtrack!  Godawful early-eighties light jazz saxaphone, endlessly, broken only occasionally by one incessant Louis Prima song.  Germans don’t know shit about music, I fear. Oh, and I FINALLY braised the beef for the Braised Beef in Aspic.  Jesus, it’s the aspic that wouldn’t end.  The meat had been soaking in its red wine marinade for so long it was stained a Welch’s purple.  I was supposed to brown it on all sides, but the meat was so dark I could hardly tell whether it was browned or not.  I poured in the marinade, boiled it down, threw in some bacon, let it braise in the oven for an hour and a half.  I couldn’t make myself continue on with the recipe after the braising though.  That’s what happens when you have the Lazy Asses.  I suspect the meat has gone the way of all good meat, but now that it’s cooked, maybe it won’t actually kill me, when and if I finally eat it. So Saturday was when the laziness really threatened to turn fatal.  I started off my morning watching the last episode of Buffy, which tape was given to me from Beth, who I don’t know from Adam but who so strongly felt my pain at having missed the final episode that she insisted on dropping the tape by my office, this on a day when she got off work early and had major dental surgery.  Beth is generous and has a butterfly hairpin that is SO cute, and I am endlessly grateful for the loan of the tape.  I needed the closure, I didn’t realize how much.  And it actually wasn’t bad.  I mean if you don’t count the fact that Joss just pulled the whole episode out of his ass to make a nicely thematic end for the show, throwing away in the process any attempt at all to make any of it make any kind of sense at all.  But magically, look, a funny script!  Characters acting like themselves!  There was actual smiling involved!  I would say that Anya was killed rather summarily, which was annoying.  On the upside, Willow’s line about the pierced tongue, and Dawn’s reaction, was cute, as was the vintage-Willow, “That was nifty.”  And did anybody else notice that the little redheaded SIT, who I’d always found sort of particularly annoying, really kicked ASS?  She all of a sudden looked like Amanda Plummer and was just savaging vampires.  So shout out to the little redhead actress – you rocked. Okay, so that done, I really was about ready to call it a day.  But regular readers will remember that my hanging rod in my closet had collapsed.  I would have to make the heroic trek out to Bed Bath and Beyond to deal with that situation.  In order to gird myself, I went to see Blue Car. David Strathairn.  What other middle aged graying man playing a high school teacher with pathetic statutory yearnings toward his student can hold me so thoroughly in his erotic thrall?  David – call me, ‘kay? So, that done, I went to Bed Bath and Beyond, where a scary Rene Zellwegger type named Tiffany, I kid you not, helped me get two garment racks, to be delivered to my lovely LIC apartment.  So okay, home, where I managed to get my closet into some kind of order, which is a great deal for a person stricken with the Lazy Asses to do.  I began to get obsessed with the idea of going to Times Square and standing outside the theatre where David’s doing Salome, just to get a glimpse of him and maybe convince him to have torrid sex in an alleyway, but luckily Em called, and said she’d come over for dinner.  I planned on making the asparagus, bacon and aioli sandwiches I’d been yearning for for so long, and the coffee soufflé.  Well, most of a bottle of vodka later, guess who didn’t make the soufflé?  Again?  We had a nice time, though.  To make asparagus sandwiches, chop up some asparagus and steam it until it’s good and soft.  Make some bacon.  Make some toast.  Spread some aioli onto the toast, or not.  Soft asparagus.  Bacon.  Delightful – the perfect meal to eat in the kitchen while drinking and smoking cigarettes and indulging in a bit of filthy girl-talk, a pleasure I have all too rarely, because you can’t have filthy girl talk with husbands around.  Sorry, Eric. Sunday.  Braised carrots and pearl onions for the aspic.  Sliced the meat, which continues on slightly scary, laid it in the bottom of a dish.  Laid the braised carrots and onions in among the meat.  Boiled down the cooking juice from the meat, strained it, stirred in gelatin dissolved in beef broth, and cognac.  Poured it over the meat and vegetables.  Stuck it in the fridge.  I may eat it someday.  Played Civ III. And then, all of a sudden, Eric was home!  God bless him, he was all worn out from his exhausting business class flight home from Switzerland.  He’d had to tell the stewardess to stop plying him with champagne.  Poor kid.  So yet more veal patties for dinner – Fricadelles de Veau Duxelles.  These were exactly the same, except that along with the onions and tomatoes and garlic and salt pork mixed into the veal were some minced, sautéed mushrooms.  Didn’t taste a goddamned bit different from the previous two veal patty recipes, but it was good.  Ate broccoli with it.  And noodles.  And no coffee soufflé.  I don’t know what my fucking problem is.  We were going to watch The Rookie, but Netflix sent us the wrong fucking DVD, Insomnia, which we’ve already seen, so we settle for Prime Minister’s Questions, endlessly amusing, and the second to last episode of Season Three Buffy, which is heartbreakingly wonderful.  Seriously, guys, I don’t know what I’m going to do here.  I feel like someone died. Maybe someone in the world finds this interesting – I find at the end of writing that I’m bored to tears, and it’s my life. Ah well.  Happy Memorial Day.  Stay warm. 11:41:01 AM    comment []