Friday, June 27, 2003

I can see how this is going to go.  This morning the mess in the kitchen is spectacular, but I cannot bring myself to care.  Just now, the computer began mysteriously ceasing to recognize any action I took on the three thousand year old Compaq keyboard I’ve got plugged into my laptop, and I didn’t even throw a hissy fit.  The nice thing about the heat: the lizard brain kicks in, nothing but the animal basics seem to matter too much.  Maybe I really ought to move to New Orleans, fear of pistol-whipping aside. So last night the plan was to put together the Souffle Panache (Half-and-Half Souffle), and for the main meal just eat one of our hot day standards, tuna tossed with green beans and red onions and olive oil and red wine vinegar and parsley.  Well, the green beans that Eric bought at the Korean deli, which were wrapped up in cellophane, were totally rotten under the first layer, and we didn’t have the heart to go back out.  So I decided I’d whip up some bread in the bread machine and we’d have tuna sandwiches.  I hadn’t used the bread machine in some time, and I’d hardly ever used the “Rapid” option before.  I think I had this idea that we’d have a loaf of bread in an hour.  Try more like three.  It’s kind of funny, really.  You know how there’s this funny rip in the space-time continuum, so that no matter what time I get on the R train to get to work in the morning, 7 am or 8:30 am, I always get there at 8:56 am?  Well, dinner around here is kind of like that.  Eggs poached in wine with béarnaise sauce in pastry cups, or tuna sandwiches, it doesn’t matter – dinner will always be at 11 o’clock.  I decided I’d go ahead and make the base for the soufflé, because that part can be made ahead and sit.  And it really is almost too simple to talk about.  Just make a paste out of flour and water in a saucepan, beat in more water and sugar, bring to a boil, stirring, until thick.  Beat off heat until slightly cool, then beat in four egg yolks, one at a time.  Beat in two tablespoons of butter, then dot the surface of the stuff with two tablespoons more.  Piece of cake, that. Well, then we spent two hours drinking vodka tonics and watching “The Tailor of Panama” – quite a good movie, actually – and between the vodka and the hour and the heat, time began moving a little slow.  I went back into the kitchen to put together the soufflé.  I was supposed to divide the soufflé base into two bowls after very gently reheating it.  Actually I’d sort of forgotten about the reheating bit.  What I was concentrating on was boiling some water to mix with some instant coffee to beat into one half of the base.  I put the small saucepan on the burner behind the burner the soufflé base – which by the way is called by Julia, and I assume other people, the bouilli – and set it boil, and by the time I realized that water really ought to be boiling by now, I was smelling a frying egg smell, and sure enough I’d turned on the wrong boiler and the bouilli was toast.  Well, I’d come this far, so I went ahead and divided the stuff – bright yellow now, with chunky bits in it – into two bowls.  Beat vanilla into one, less vanilla with the coffee mixture into the other.  With my mortar and pestle, since I had no macaroons handy – where does one buy macaroons anyway? – I crumbled up together some toasted almonds and some stale butter biscuits, and moistened them with a bit of orange liqueur.  Then I beat together five egg whites until stiff.  Again, time moving at an odd rate, I may have beat the egg whites a tad too long.  But I folded half of the whites into each bowl.  It was quite quite clear that this was not going to work at all.  Fried egg soufflés rarely do.  But the lovely, lovely heat has got me so docile I don’t even care.  I put half of the coffee mixture into the soufflé mold, sprinkled over it a third of the almond/biscuit/orange crumble.  Half of the plain vanilla mixture, another third of the crumbled stuff.  The second half of the coffee mixture… and so on. We ate our tuna sandwiches.  Eric mixed up the tuna with mayo and red onions and pepper and lime juice, and the sandwiches were pretty damned good, actually. The soufflé sucked.  Didn’t poof at all.  Was grainy and weird.  But who gives a shit?  Next we have chocolate soufflé, and then a veritable promised land of “cold” desserts.  Many of them don’t actually look like they’ll be very good, but if they’re “cold” I’m a happy camper. So now I must to work.  How absurd.  This is clearly make-monkey-love-and-drink-mai-tais-on-the-beach weather.  Ah well.  At least I don’t have to wear a tie.   8:04:48 AM    comment []