Monday, June 02, 2003

Someday I’ll write a book, called “Mayo and Me.”  It will be a tragic farce of cosmic proportions. Dinner on Sunday was going to be completely simple – just braised leeks and roast pork sandwiches made with bread machine bread and Sauce Alsacienne, Herbal Mayonnaise Made with Soft-Boiled Eggs.  Just the name and you know, don’t you?  All will not go smoothly here.  Problem the first – I have never made soft boiled eggs.  I follow Julia’s directions to boil the eggs for three and a half minutes.  Well, the first set of eggs I break just getting them into the water.  I remember that I’m supposed to simmer rather than boil, so I turn down the heat a bit and start again.  The third egg cracks as well, and because the water’s just barely simmering, it leaks white into the water.  The next two survive the boiling process, but when I try to open them up, the white is incompletely set, and I can’t separate out the white and the yolk very well.  Very frustrating.  I manage to kind of sort of separate them, spooning unset, milky, disturbingly biological looking egg white from the yolks.  I had decided to try the tip from the Comments to use the food processor with its handy-dandy mayonnaise oil-drip hole, so I threw the egg yolks into the bowl and tried to process them.  Only problem being, there wasn’t enough yolk in there, it all sort of sank below the blade’s radar.  So I scraped the yolk back out and beat it by hand, adding mustard, salt and lemon juice.  I put it back in the bowl of the food processor and tried processing from there, pouring the oil through the handy-dandy hole.  (“The Handy-Dandy Hole” – now that could be a lewd colloquialism for something or other, couldn’t it?)  No dice.  No.  Dice.  At.  All.  Liquid nothing mess. Fuck. Poor Eric – between my continuous grousing disconcertion over my widening girth and my kitchen hysterics, I am amazed he’s still around.  I sent him out to get eggs, then couldn’t help worrying that he wouldn’t come back.  Okay, attempt #2.  I again cracked the first egg I tried to boil.  The second and third ones went alright, and I boiled them a fraction of a minute longer.  They wound up being slightly easier, though still a pain in the ass, to separate.  And okay, fuck it.  I’m going to do this, even though I’d sort of taken a pro-technological, anti-foodie stance on this.  I’m going to beat the motherfucking mayonnaise by hand. Here’s what I did.  After I beat together the egg yolks and the mustard and the salt and the lemon juice, I took the little insert from the food processor and pulled the oil into it.  (I was using peanut oil, because that was what I had to hand.)  Then I beat away with my big ole balloon whip or whisk, or whatever the fuck you want to call it, while holding the insert, and the side of the bowl, with my other hand.  (One reason that I hate beating things into things by hand is that I can never manage to keep a hold of the bowl.  It’s always spinning out.  I guess I’m just retarded that way.) Damned if the stuff didn’t thicken right up!  I’ll be good and goddamned! So after the mayo became mayo, I beat in a quarter cup of whipping cream, which made it a hair less mayo-y, and some minced capers and green onions and parsley.  And that was it.  Sauce Alsacienne.  Too easy to even talk about.  Except I just did. After that it was a cinch, if a rather long one.  The leeks I trimmed and washed and simmered in water and butter for twenty minutes before sticking in the oven for another twenty.  The pork and the bread machine bread I, uh, sliced.  Oh, and I made the Pralin for the Souffle Praline we’d be having for dessert.  This I did by making some caramel.  Where I made a new discovery.  Regular readers will remember that the last few times I made caramel, it did this strang-o thing where the sugar and water hardened into crystals before melting back into caramel.  Several theories were posited on this, and in the end I think we settled on the proposal that some sugar crystals from the side of the pan had gotten into the caramel.  Well, going back to Julia’s recipe Saturday night, I realized that she said not to stir, but to “swirl the pan.”  Which swirling to me always seemed some namby-pamby shit.  But I’ll be goddamned if it doesn’t work!  I swirled the water and sugar in the pan in a circular motion, and the sugar dissolved, and it boiled, and it never hardened up once.  It still took about half an hour, though, rather than the 3-4 minutes Julia says it will.  No matter.  When it was done I stirred in the powdered almonds that I’ve had sitting in my refrigerator for god knows how long, and which I’ve more than once almost mistaken for parmesan and tried to sprinkle onto my noodles or a gratin.  The almonds I’d toasted in the oven, and yes I burned the first batch, because I always burn my first batch of toasted nuts.  But I mixed the powdered almonds into the caramel, and poured the caramel out onto my nifty marble board, which I’d greased up with some Pam, which is a scary thing to do – pouring the caramel out onto marble, not spraying the marble with Pam.  But I did it, and I let it harden while we ate our pork-and-Sauce Alsacienne sandwiches, which were lovely, and our braised leeks, which were even better.  God, do I love leeks.  When we were done, the pralin was hardened.  I could it up off the marble in one disk, it was so.  Cool.  I broke it up and ran it through the coffee grinders until it was powdered up.  I made the soufflé the usual was.  Coated the soufflé pan in butter and sugar.  Made a paste out of a bit of milk and some flour, then beat in more flour and sugar.  Heated to the boil, stirring all the time, until the stuff was gluey and thick.  Beat off heat to cool, beat in four egg yolks, one at a time, and some butter.  Beat some egg whites until stiff – NOT by hand, thank you very much, but with my handheld mixer, which I bought in far Astoria when I simply couldn’t handle the lack of one any longer.  Stirred vanilla and a half cup of this here powdered praline into the soufflé base, then folded in the egg whites, then poured it all into the soufflé mold and baked as usual.  I lost track of time a bit while baking it, so it probably wasn’t the best soufflé I’ve ever made, but the good thing about soufflés is that they’re good even when they’re not.  I’ve got to say, though, all the soufflés so far have tasted more or less the same, whatever they’ve got in them.  I’m relying on the chocolate soufflé to provide la differance. So here it is Monday – isn’t it always?  My poor husband and I have been kept up all night by my incessant death rattles.  You know, I get irritated whenever he sneezes.  I can’t imagine how he handles these great scraping, honking noises I’m making all day and all night without slitting my throat.  But in any case, to work, so I can torture my colleagues instead, so imminently more deserving of torture as they are.   7:26:51 AM    comment []