Friday, July 25, 2003

So much to talk about. My shoulder-angel Helen, who is so very hip that her excuse for not coming to dinner as she had planned on Tuesday was that she’d burned herself on the exhaust pipe of her boyfriend’s motorcycle and had to go to the emergency room, made it over last night.  Much sparkling conversation was had about, among other things: 1) the fact that the scene in “Johnny Tremain” where he puts his hand in the molten silver is the most disturbing scene in all children’s literature; 2) the perils of narcissism, and how lucky we are that none of us suffer from it, ho ho; 3) the new Ashcroftian email policy at my office, and the sad effects it is having upon our witty internet repartee; 4) Little House on the Prairie.  It turns out that, when I brought up Little House on the Prairie the other day, I was placing myself rapidly out of my depth.  I am blown away by all of your encyclopedic knowledge of the series, when I can remember only scraps, and hardly ever which event went with which book.  Helen, however, is the LhotP queen.  When she was a child she wanted to be the “docent” of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum in I believe she said it was in Nebraska.  I am shocked and awed.  For dinner was steak with Beurre Colbert, which is butter creamed with lemon juice, minced tarragon, and melted meat glaze.  The meat glaze I made, or rather Eric made, by throwing the veal stock I’d made onto the stove top to reduce a lot.  It was the only thing about the meal that took any time at all.  On the side was just a green salad with ricotta salata.  I had gotten Eric to buy apples for La Tarte des Demoiselles Tatin, an upside-down apple tart, and I had bought apricots for a Tarte aux Abricots, which is just about what you’d think.  But again my fruit-phobic past caught up with me, and I bought apricots so overripe that by the time I got off the subway they looked like I feel after I get off the subway – sweaty and squooshed.  Actually, the more or less entirely liquid.  So no Tarte aux Abricots.  No La Tarte des Desmoiselles Tatin either, but that was just because I got lazy and drunk.  But I made up for it this morning by getting up at the crack of dawn and making the damned thing.  By 7 am, despite a bit of a hangover, I had peeled, cored, and sliced four pounds of apples.  These I tossed with sugar and cinnamon.  Julia says this is “an especially good tart if your apples are full of flavor.”  Which is her very nice way of saying that I shouldn’t be making this tart with the shitty Granny Smiths we get at the Astoria Key Foods.  But oh well.  She also says I should bake this in a pyrex dish, 9 inches in diameter and 2 inches tall.  I am just a primitive L.I.C. cook, I know nothing of your pyrex.  I used a springform pan.  Which, as it is developing, was not such a good thing, as I will explicate in a moment.  I heavily buttered the pan, and sprinkled a fourth cup of sugar on the bottom.  I layered a third of the apples in the pan, followed by two tablespoons of melted butter, then half the remaining apples, more butter, the last apples, more butter.  Another fourth cup of sugar sprinkled on top.  Then I rolled out some sweet short paste (I forgot, I did manage to make pastry dough last night) and cut out a round as big as the top of the pan.  I lay it over the apples, and cut a few holes in it.  It is now baking.  It is also smoking up a storm, because the apple juice is leaking out.  I’ve just put a baking sheet under, hopefully that will help. In the meantime, a report on yesterday’s apple pies.  Eric and I ate some of the Tarte Normande aux Pommes straight out of oven yesterday morning.  It was quite lovely, actually, the cognac and the creaminess of the custard actually made for a surprisingly complex taste.  (As opposed to the plain Tarte aux Pommes, which I just had my first piece of a minute ago, and which tastes like apple juice with a crust.  Then again, maybe that’s because it’s cold.)  I brought most of both pies to my office, where they were inhaled in approximately ten minutes.  I think this has less to do with my great talent as a pastry chef than with the republican piggies that inhabit my office. Okay, and so here’s something else that happened last night.  Eric put on Cyndi Lauper, and I was struck by this intense series of tween memories.  One of these was of the movie “Just One of the Guys,” a Cinemax perennial, in which the love interest at one point says, “Right.  And I’m Cyndi Lauper.”  Only he pronounced is “Laowper.”  It’s become a staple quotation.  But the more amazing memory was of the party that me and our own dear Hannah and another friend of ours, Lisa, threw at the end of sixth grade.  We were all set to perform a set of Cyndi Lauper songs – I remember we were all going to do She-Bop together, and I did Time After Time, and Hannah said to me “You perform that really well, I didn’t think you could sing.”  Ouch.  Hannah, meanwhile – well, I can’t remember what she did, could it have been “When You Were Mine”?  Probably, Hannah was always the one with the best musical taste.  Anyway, of course we never performed it, even after all our practice, we got too nervous, though I do think we dressed up for it.  And this is all tied up in the huge crush I had at the time on Lisa’s cousin Trace – that was his name, right? – that basically had me in this erotic fugue state.  Oh god, I was so horny at the age of twelve, it was ridiculous.  I miss it. Now that, ladies and gentleman, as my shoulder angel could tell you, is what's called narcissism.   8:00:12 AM    comment []