Tuesday, July 22, 2003

The bad news is that it seems that, especially when cooking until 10:30 at night, I will drink just about as much wine as there is available to me, regardless of the fact that drinking cheap Spanish rose together with cheap Sicilian red (called Nu-har, actually pretty good for $9.99) is quite obviously an unfortunate idea.  The good news is that I managed to knock down three recipes, and one of them was even good. Dinner was poached chicken with Sauce Alsacienne (Herbal Mayonnaise Made with Soft-Boiled Eggs), Julia’s treatment for wild rice, and some asparagus browned in olive oil, plus Flan des Isles, a pineapple custard, “for dessert,” though of course I knew there was no way I’d manage to make it and chill it in time for us to eat it. I started with the dessert.  I was depressed and irritable from the start, because I hate pineapple, even above and beyond my anti-fruit fetish I hate pineapple, it’s something about the whole palm trees and mai-tais faux exoticity of it, I dunno.  Eric could see that I was a powderkeg ready to blow, and there was a lot of tiptoeing about in the Powell kitchen.  I myself figured it was only a matter of time before I started screaming like a banshee at something or other.  I started by lining my charlotte mold with caramel – had to dump the remaining un-aspic-ed apple aspic, bye aspic! – which has gotten to be kind of fun, really.  Boil some sugar and water in the mold until it caramelized.  Dip the mold briefly in cold water, then turn the pan all around to coat it with the caramel, leaving the mold upside down on a plate to harden.  Then I drained some canned pineapple and boiled the syrup, almost two cups of it, in a pot for five minutes.  The pineapple itself I ran through the cuisinart, and when the syrup had boiled for five minutes I dumped it in and let it boil another five.  In a bowl I beat together a tablespoon of flour with three tablespoons of lemon juice, a fourth cup of cognac, and five eggs.  Then I slowly beat in the pineapple. Eric, meanwhile, had asked what he could do to help, probably due to the aforementioned awareness of my impending explosion, so I had him mincing carrot and celery and onion for the wild rice.  It was one of those husband moments where he was being all considerate and sweet, but he just didn’t know what the fuck he was doing, and by the time I got him a knife that was sharp enough to cut things, and a cutting board, and the vegetables, I could have done it myself.  So I thought at the time.  Patently false, of course, but I was, as I say, irritable – or in truth Irritable, capitalized, that female sort of Irritation, if you know what I mean.  But relations warmed when I took the mold off the plate, and there were all these pretty Pente-piece nuggets of caramelized sugar on the plate for us to eat, which reminded me, for reasons too obscure to go into, of two cookbooks I had as a kid, Tasha Tudor’s Christmas (who the hell was Tasha Tudor anyway?  I can only remember her name, and that one book) and the Little House on the Prairie cookbook, which got us talking about our favorite Little House on the Prairie books, I’m partial to Little House in the Big Woods, but it turns out Eric read Little House on Plum Creek like half a dozen times or something.  That and the Odyssey, two books to turn to again and again.  Isn’t he cute?   So I poured the pineapple stuff into the mold, and set the mold into a casserole dish full of simmering water, and there it was to sit for something over an hour, barely simmering.  Then things got a little crazy with all the pots on the stove.  In one pot I had to sauté Eric’s minced vegetables in butter.  In another I had to boil the wild rice – which is like pitch black, I had always remembered it being sort of mottled-colored – for five minutes.  In a third – well, fourth if you count the casserole with the pineapple custard in it, which of course I do – I had water simmering for soft-boiled eggs for the mayonnaise.  I was also mincing green onions and capers and dill for the Sauce Alsacienne.  Things began to get a little frantic.  I had to keep the water around the custard at a bare simmer, the water for the eggs at a bare simmer, the sautéing vegetables not brown.  I dropped in the eggs to soft-boil, and when the water was finally boiling for the rice, dumped the rice in there.  Then the eggs were done, and I got all consumed with separating the whites from the yolks, which what with my past as an avid egg non-eater was a little difficult for me, and I managed to boil the rice for too long.  So I drained the rice, set it aside, refilled the pot with water, chicken broth, and some vermouth, some celery sticks, peppercorns and bay leaf, and set it back to simmer for the chicken.  I had the egg yolks separated into a boil, and began beating them with a whip until thick, but then I’d forgotten the rice, I’d forgotten to heat up the oven for the rice.  I stirred the rice in with the butter and vegetables, and added beef broth, bay leaf, thyme and salt and pepper, and let it come to the simmer before sticking it in the oven, which I’m sure wasn’t totally heated yet.  The water still wasn’t simmering for the chicken, but I stuck the chicken in the pot anyway.  I resumed beating the egg yolks to thicken.  I just realize as I write this this morning that I used three eggs instead of the clearly indicated two.  I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking – I guess I read the “boil the eggs for 3 minutes” and sort of went with that number all the way.  I was fairly sure this wasn’t going to work, but I went ahead and beat in mustard, salt, lemon juice.  Then I performed my now-patented mayonnaise making technique, a combination of several of y’all’s suggestions brought together under the Julie rubric of half-assedness.  I held the little cup-shaped cuisinart attachment with the hole in the bottom in one hand, my whip in the other.  Eric poured the cup of oil – we used peanut oil – into the cuisinart thingy, and I beat like hell.  And it turned out nice and thick and perfect!  Three eggs, two eggs, who gives a shit!  Of course, then I had to beat in a fourth cup of cream, and that thinned things out a bit, maybe too much.  Then I beat in the capers, green onions and dill, and we were done. The chicken was poaching.  The rice was cooking.  I’d forgotten the asparagus, but that was easily rectified.  The pineapple custard finished its cooking without incident, and was set aside to cool.  All the crises were over, and we ate dinner with minutes to spare before eleven o’clock.  The chicken with the Sauce Alsacienne was great.  Really.  Yummy yummy mayonnaise.  Eric seems to have the reaction to dill that the scientists doing that study that was in the comments yesterday link to the smell of cucumber in women.  Dill and cucumber, two great tastes that taste great together, after all.  Veeeeerry interesting.  And well-browned asparagus is always good. Wild rice, though.  Man. You know how you’ll be reading some article about the exotic jungle cuisine of Thailand or some other place where they eat bugs, and they’ll talk about termite eggs or giant grasshoppers or something being delicacies?  Well, they always describe the taste as “nutty.”  Coincidentally the same word used for “wild rice.”  And of course, this “wild rice” looks not a little like insect casings – black, shiny, distinctly un-food-like.   I am, to say the least, suspicious.    7:49:34 AM    comment []