Monday, June 09, 2003

So, yes, I’ve been ill and ought probably to go to the doctor.  But Saturday morning I coughed up something roughly the size of my head – not to put too fine a point on things – and have since felt dramatically better.  So if it was the bronchitis, I seem to have licked the bastard. Yesterday I celebrated my improving health with a dinner of Porc Braise Aux Choux Rouges, Pork Braised with Red Cabbage.  The cabbage I had made on Friday.  My mother heard me chopping while we were talking on the phone and got angry with me, but really, red cabbage isn’t tough enough to drain one’s energy overmuch.  Just simmer some bacon in water, cook it slowly in oil, covered, with some sliced carrots and onions for ten minutes, then add a head of red cabbage, sliced.  Cook that, covered still, for another ten minutes.  Pour in a couple of cups of wine, a couple of cups of Better Than Boullion beef broth, some diced apple, garlic, bay leaf, clove, nutmeg, salt and pepper.  Then just chunk it in the oven for three hours or so.  That’s it.  After that it would have been a snap to stick in some pork, but I was feeling just a wee bit under the weather, so I took a nap instead.  And then Helen came over, and since I hadn’t been out of the house much, and since it was a beautiful evening, and since Eric the Thai-food hater was out of the state, we went to Woodside Thai mecca Sripaphai for an early dinner. Helen asked me not to make fun of her for ordering Pad Thai, though she actually wound up ordering roast duck instead.  I would never think of making fun of anyone for anything they order in a Thai restaurant.  What the fuck do I know?  I ordered noodles – those broad slickery kind that feel like sex in your mouth – with “Beef chili and basil.”  It was mostly just fucking hot as all hell.  I like things plenty spicy, but this was a little intense even for me.  It made my rosacea act up, I looked like my cheeks had been slapped multiple times and/ or attacked by a swarm of killer bees.  But I credit it with healing properties, since that night, once I got home, I felt well enough to watch all of “White Oleander” without falling asleep.  That might also have been because I was endlessly interested how the filmmakers would solve the problem of making the girl’s eyebrows go with her bleach blonde hair from one scene to the next – they couldn’t seem to settle on a single strategy for that. It occurs to me that  Helen and Em are the little angel and devil on my shoulders.  Em means cigarettes and booze, late nights, a surfeit of Buffy, drunken depressive talk and French food.  Helen, on the other hand, wants me to quit with the drinking and the smoking and the spicy food, though she manages, through heroic effort, not to harangue me at all. She encourages me to take up yoga.  But I get lots of sex talk with both of them.  I don’t know what that means. So Saturday morning, feeling better, I started on the Mousseline de Poisson, Blanch Neige – Fish Mousse with Shellfish and Chaud-Froid Sauce.  This, I suspect, is aspic in all but name.  Made a quick fish stock of clam juice, onions, parsley, mushroom stems, vermouth and water.  Simmered a flounder filet in it until just done.  Took the fish out and stuck it in the Cuisinart.  Threw some diced mushrooms in the fish broth and let that boil down a bit.  Strained out the mushrooms and set them aside.  Stir in gelatin softened in vermouth into the fish stock, heat until dissolved, pour that into the Cuisinart with the fish.  Puree.  Stir in the fish muck with the mushrooms and chill.  When it’s almost set, fold in some lightly beaten cream.  Let set in a ring mold.  Being still not entirely up to snuff, I couldn’t make myself read my Pepys.  Flipped through some Jeffrey Steingarten instead.  The man is infuriating.  Whenever someone refers to himself, even jokingly, as “impecunious”, squarely between descriptions of his trip down to Baja to charter a private boat to take him bluefin tuna fishing and his afternoons spent making the perfect foies gras, I get angry, I can’t help it.  But then he makes up with it with something like this: We passionate eaters elevate, we ennoble the bestial impulse to feed into a sublime activity, into an art, into the art of eating… we transmute what animals do into what the angels would do if angels ate food… and once we have turned eating into an art, and we see that it is good, then we practice this art as often as possible.  And if, on occasion, an observer sees what appears to be nothing nobler than me wrestling with the wrapper on a giant package of miniature Fun Size Milky Way bars, this too is the art of eating.  For isn’t art nothing more or less than whatever an artist does? Which brings to mind this: my mother and I have both, as it happens, been very ill for the last week.  My mother has lost five pounds.  I have had a sudden urge, amid the death rattles, for Cheetos.  Which urge, I add without a jot of shame, I indulged to the full.  I deserve some comfort, don’t I? Dinner was Porc Braise Aux Choux Rouges, all alone.  All this entailed was browning the pork roast before nestling it in with the red cabbage, which I’d brought up to the simmer on the stove, and sticking it in the oven for an hour.  Actually, I should have done less than an hour, the pork wound up a little overdone.  But it was delicious with the red cabbage, and with the sauteed potatoes, which are so much easier to make olive-shaped when they’re olive shaped to begin with.  I ate it in front of the television.  And since I was alone, and depressed that Funny Cide didn’t win the Triple Crown, and feeling better, I watched five episodes of Buffy and drank too much.  Back in fine fettle, am I. Sunday night, not so comforting. Mousseline de Poisson, Blanch Neige.  Which, I must say, is more than a little repulsive.  The fish mousse, unmolded, coated with this chaud froid stuff, which is fish stock simmered with cream and tarragon, mixed with some gelatin softened with vermouth.  Poured over the fish mold, and over some sauteed shrimp in the hole in the middle of the ring.  It is a) ugly; b) cold; and c) bland as shit.  You know, when I was a kid, I wouldn’t eat cream sauces at all – I found something sinister about that plain white sauce, like it might be covering up something foul and rotten.  This reminds me of that.  This vague, chilly fishy taste, with this overwhelming milky nothingness on top.  Uck.  To add insult to injury, there’s not a lick of booze left in the house, not a cigarette for my newly clear lungs, not even a can of diet pepsi.  I’m feeling so virtuous I could puke.   7:28:55 AM    comment []