Sunday, July 20, 2003

So I’m comin’ around on these fruit desserts, sort of.  They’re all dead easy, once you get the timing down, and damned if they aren’t pretty good.  Friday night was some plain old dinner not really worth going into, plus Pêches Cardinal – Compote of Fresh Peaches with Raspberry Puree.  I don’t really know what a compote is, but what this was was peaches poached in a vanilla-flavored sugar syrup for a little  under ten minutes, allowed to cool in its syrup, then drained and chilled.  For the raspberry puree Julia wanted me to push the raspberries through a sieve, but I just threw ‘em straight in the blender with some sugar.  The resultant puree was good, if a little seedy – easily cured by sieving it after the pureeing.  A better deal all around, that.  The only problem was the aforementioned timing issue.  By the time I’d chilled the peaches and the raspberry puree, as well as eaten dinner, watched an excellent episode of Buffy, talked to my folks who are in New Mexico, lucky bastards, and drunk my fair share or a tad more of G & Ts (having switched over from the vodka at my capricious husband’s demand), it was high time that I fall asleep in front of C-Span (Eric would say “pass out,” but that is totally unfair and libelous – he was sitting there subjecting me to random congressional discussions and reading Harry Potter, I was being totally ignored, so what if I fall asleep, isn’t he a bastard?), during which time, I might add, Eric went and ate one of the peaches, raspberry puree-less.  So anyway we didn’t get around to eating the Pêches Cardinal until the next day.  Okay, confession – Eric ate the Pêches Cardinal on Saturday.  I didn’t dare eat a Pêche Cardinal until, well, just now, and it was only a bite.  I have a problem with peaches.  But lo and behold, peaches taste like raspberries!!!  Pretty good stuff.  Still have problems with Julia’s sweet tooth though – the puree would have been better with quite a bit less sugar, maybe some kirsch or other alcohol, and – wait for it – I’m thinking black pepper might be interesting.  Am I crazy?  Possibly.  I will experiment once this godforsaken – excuse me, glorious – Project is over.  So after a day of doing very worthwhile things like taking the cat to the vet, consulting a plant person in Chelsea about what to do with our ailing tree, buying Eric an I-book, eating at an outdoor café in Soho next to some Eurotrash, and picking up sweetbreads, it was home to cook again.  I noticed this time in soaking the sweetbreads that these didn’t have that formaldehyde whiff of the last ones.  That was encouraging, I thought.  I didn’t get too freaked out about pulling the filament stuff off them this time, as I was soaking them.  Because, see, it’s very annoying.  When you get the sweetbreads – I picked them up at Pino’s on Sullivan street, which is a refreshingly un-Soho-ish place, though I nearly had to hit some girl who came in the same I did with her boyfriend, and was clearly a vegetarian freaking out that she had to be in the vicinity of animal flesh, the stupid little cunt (sorry, Aunt Ruthie, but the vegetarian hatred runs deep and bitter here, as I’m sure you can understand) – they’re these nice, pale, smooth, solid things.  But as soon as you start pulling away the filament, they disintegrate into these tiny little lobes, and even if I could get all the filament off, which I don’t think I could in a million years, it would result in a pile of little marble-size bits of gland, and that’s no good.  So I didn’t worry about it.  Before I started on cooking the sweetbreads, I peeled and sliced and scooped the seeds out of three cucumbers, and sliced them into big thick matchstick-y shapes, and let them sit in white wine vinegar and salt and a bit of sugar, for Concombres aux Champignons et a la Crème – Creamed Cucumbers with Mushrooms.  I cleaned a pound of mushrooms, sliced half of them and quartered the other half.  And I peeled and cored three apples for Pommes a la Sevillane – Apples Braised in Butter, Orange Sauce – and placed them in acidulated water.  Eric, meanwhile, was busy at play with his new laptop.  I am very happy that he has at last a computer of his very own, and rejoiced with him when he discovered that it really, truly plays DVDs – Casablanca for example.  When I heard him cry from the office, in a tinkling high-pitched voice, “Viva la France!” I felt mysteriously, truly happy. So it was with good heart that I began cooking the sweetbreads.  I started them the same way as the ones before.  Started by sautéing diced celery, carrot and onion in butter (I forgot the ham, probably because I was so distracted by the fucking vegetarian), then added the soaked sweetbreads, basted them, and let them cook five minutes, covered.  Turned them over and let them cook another five.  Then transferred them to a braising dish, cooked down the cooking liquid with some vermouth, and poured that plus some beef broth over the sweetbreads.  Brought to a simmer and stuck in the oven for forty minutes.  At the same time, I stuck in the cucumbers, which I’d drained and tossed in a baking dish with some melted butter, minced green onions, dried basil and pepper.  It was all going so well.  I placed the apples in a buttered casserole, sprinkled them with sugar, stuck a bit of butter in each core-hole (ooh, dirty.)  Poured in some vermouth, water, and cognac.  I set it aside until the rest of dinner was done, so it could bake while we were eating, because I’m so clever and forward-thinking.  By this time Eric had loaded Joss Whedon’s commentary on the episode “Hush,” one of the top ten of all time, clearly, on his trusty I-Book.  Life was good. It wasn’t until the sweetbreads had finished braising that everything went to hell.  I had to make two cream and mushroom sauces, one for the sweetbreads and one for the cucumbers.  This sounds like a wonderful thing, and it was.  For the sweetbreads, I had to set the sweetbreads aside and make a sauce with a flour and butter roux, the sweetbread cooking juices, and cream, which then got the sliced mushrooms stirred into it.  For the cucumbers, I was just cooking the quartered mushrooms in a dry skillet, then adding cream and cornstarch, and simmering until it had thickened.  The cucumbers were supposed to cook for slightly longer than the sweetbreads, for just under an hour – I say just under an hour because I still cannot quite get my head around the idea of baking cucumbers for a whole hour, even though that’s what Julia instructs – so I had left them in the oven while I finished these two sauces.  Only I was getting a little discombobulated, also with the rice happening, and my parents were on the phone, and I don’t know, I just kind of got fucked up, and, well, I turned on the broiler.  Because I was making Ris de Veau a la Crème et aux Champignons au Gratin – creamed sweetbreads with mushrooms au gratin, which means that after I’d made the cream and mushroom sauce, and turned the sweetbreads into it, I was to sprinkle it with swiss cheese and butter and run it under the broiler to brown it.  And, well, yeah, I forgot the cucumbers.  Which promptly became blackened cucumber fritters.  I threw a bit of a fit.  One might have even called it melodramatic.  Eric says I throw these fits just to create grist for the Julie/Julia mill.  But I don’t think that’s it – not exactly, anyway.  I’ll admit there’s something faux about these violent bouts, but I think of them as release gauges.  There’s something profoundly relieving about expressing your self-hatred with glorious abandon, calling yourself filthy names and throwing things, and maybe even giving your forehead a few autistic-style smacks with your palm.  It’s like letting out a cougar or something that you’ve kept confined for too long.  What he does might not be pretty, it might maul some kid or eat the zookeeper, but at least it’s finally doing what comes naturally. So anyway, the cucumbers were toast.  There were just a few green spots amidst the black, though, so I went ahead and tossed the cucumber fritters in with the mushroom cream sauce.  Ran the sweetbreads under the broiler and we had dinner. Eric didn’t object to the sweetbreads, and I have to admit they didn’t taste faintly gamey, like they did last time – I don’t know if they were fresher, or just more disguised under the extra cover of mushrooms and browned swiss cheese.  I suspect it was a bit of both.  The cucumbers were sad, though, and I’d really been looking forward to them.  (I think I’ll try them again tonight.)  I stuck the apples into the oven to bake while we ate.  I had managed somewhere in the pre-dinner hysteria to peel some oranges and slice their zest into little strips.  These I boiled for ten minutes while I was eating and the apples were baking.  I also managed, after dinner, to cut some bread into circles and brown them in butter.  Jesus, in retrospect, I’m fairly impressed that I managed to do it, what with my recent emotional breakdown and all.  But I did.  When the apples were nice and soft, I put one on each browned bread circle – “Canape” they called in the 60s.  I beat some red currant jelly into the apple cooking liquid and boiled it to thicken, before stirring in some cognac and the orange peels.  Then I put the sauce over each apple, and poured some cream around them.  And I’ll be goddamned if this Pommes a la Sevillane was fucking excellent.  The apples, even with the sauce, weren’t too sweet, and the buttery crisp bread, and the cream, all came together lovelyily.  And it was beautiful, too.  I’ll be good and goddamned, and besides that, I ate a whole entire apple.  It wasn’t raw, I’ll grant, but a pretty amazing accomplishment, nonetheless. And then I punished Eric for various crimes by making him watch “Newsies.”  Christian Bale, I have come to understand, it absolutely fucking yummy, even when singing badly and playing a newsboy.  But not so yummy as Johnny Depp.  If I’ve been a little distracted for this post, it is not only because there’s been so much ground to cover.  There is also the matter of “Pirates of the Caribbean.”  This is a movie that has no right to exist, it’s absolutely reprehensible, and of course Jerry Bruckheimer needs to be shot.  Except.  Oh.  My.  Fucking.  God.  Johnny Depp, in case we had any doubts left, is a FUCKING GENIUS.  The man deserves an Oscar for this performance, or would if it wasn’t so obvious he could do it in his fucking sleep.  My GOD.  I have already informed Eric of the fact that should I ever be trapped in some Parisian bistro during a transit strike with Mr. Depp, Eric and Johnny’s wife and children notwithstanding, I will have no choice but to have my way with him about six ways from Sunday. Okay.  With that lovely image to think on, it is back to cooking.   5:34:35 PM    comment []