Monday, July 21, 2003

It has recently come to my attention that I am totally fucked here.    In addition to what seems to be roughly a gazillion dessert recipes – actually 49 – 2 recipes for brains and 3 for kidneys, I still have several composed butter things and stock things and then there’s the fucking boned duck stuffed with pate and baked in a crust.  This to be done in, let’s see, 37 days.  Oh my Christ.  Some emergency measures are going to have to be taken.  I’m clearly going to have to arrange to be sick for several days in August.  And, agoraphobe that I am, I’m going to have to face up to the painful truth that I’m going to need people at my house – lots of people – to eat this stuff. I’m terrified here.  Isn’t that stupid?  But I am.  So last night was broiled chicken with my Concombres aux Champignons et a la Crème redux and for dessert Poires au Gratin, Pears Bakes with Macaroons.  I would have done Julia’s wild rice as well, but my Astoria grocery, sadly is without said staple.  I seem to remember that in my childhood people were always trying to fob wild rice off on me.  Now I never see it.  I wonder why that is?  The precarious world of food fashions, I guess.  I did the Concombres aux Champignons et a la Crème perfectly this time, with the cucumbers baked for forty five minutes, tossed with green onions and pepper and – okay, shit, not quite perfect, because I’d run out of butter, so I had to toss the cucumbers with a very mild olive oil.  Then I combined it with the cream sauce I’d made out of quartered mushrooms and cream and a cornstarch paste and salt and pepper.  And it was good.  Except, you know, I think the cucumbers really are better just plain baked.  The mushrooms, and even the cream, seemed a distraction – I could hardly taste that fresh cucumber taste.  A shame.  An aside: does anyone think cucumbers smell incredibly good, almost erotic?  This came to me for the first time this weekend.  Maybe I’m just in a mood. So, the Poires au Gratin is incredibly simple.  Just peel, quarter & core some pears – I used Bosc because they’re so pretty, any fruit can be red or orange or green, but it takes chutzpah to go around in that burnished brown – and slice the into almost-half-inch slices.  My pears were maybe a bit past their prime, a little mealy, so they didn’t slice as neatly as I’d like.  If you did a good job with the slicing, it would be a very pretty dessert, because what you do is line a round baking dish with them.  Mine looked a little raggedy.  Then just mix together some vermouth with some apricot preserves you’ve run through a sieve, and pour that over the pears.  Sprinkle over some pulverized macaroons – or my trusty substitute, butter puff pastry cookies and slice almonds crumbled together with my groovy wand mixer, which has this groovy little mini-food-processor attachment – and some butter, if you have any (I didn’t, and so – wait for it, this is really gross – sprayed Pam over it .  I know – disgusting.) and stick in the oven to bake for twenty minutes.  So it comes out looking nice enough, and brown.  And it’s a good enough dessert, I guess.  But here’s the thing.  I think I just don’t like pears.  This is not my panicked fruit-phobe talking here.  I ate my entire dessert, I wasn’t repulsed or anything (really, this section is doing wonders for me, in terms of vanquishing my vestiges of pickiness.)  I just didn’t like it all that much.  Didn’t like the flavor of the pears.  Maybe it’s just the Bosc-ness of them, or maybe it’s because they’d done over a bit.  Or maybe it was the butter lack.  But I wasn’t impressed. Going forward, it looks as though I’ll have to be doing roughly three recipes a night, with more on weekends.  It’s going to be a diet of, yes, brains, but mostly endless, endless sweet things.  It actually sounds just dreadful.  But soldier on we will.  Until tomorrow, then. Oh, and shit!  Anybody who hasn't done it, go and do this groovilicious web survey on the Project -- nothing less than furthering our knowledge of ourselves and the cyberverse, kids... 7:44:07 AM    comment []