Monday, July 28, 2003

Okay, so this isn’t directly to the point, but I have this big important meeting this evening, so I just now put on my Big Important Meeting Suit, which I haven’t had on for awhile, and lo and behold, I seem to have gotten too busty to wear it.  I’m gaining cup sizes like, well, lots and lots of weight.  I’m like the Lara Croft of food, only without the groovy outfits and exotic locales and sex appeal.  Ugh.  I’m tellin’ you, when this thing’s over it’s going to be lettuce for months, and if I sell a book, I may just use the proceeds for breast reduction surgery. But back to the business at hand.  This weekend was, to use the great Bekkah’s term, Tartapalooza.  Tart Madness.  The Tarts, all the Tarts, and nothing but the Tarts.  Oh my god.  It started off quietly enough on Friday with Tarte aux Pêches.  It was Friday, so I figured I could allow myself the luxury of only one dessert.  It was pretty impressive, I must say, that I got as far as that, because as it wound up I spent pretty much all of Friday night lying on my belly on the sidewalk along Jackson Avenue, being stared at by passing transit workers, trying to urge a small kitten out from under the wheel of a car.  Which I didn’t manage to do.  Which I suppose is yet another mark of karmic debt on my soul.  But I got the tart done anyway.    Not all that impressive, really – it’s pretty goddamned easy.  Just partially bake the crust – I had the dough all ready to go, so that was one thing not to worry about – then drop the peaches in some boiling water for a few seconds, drain them, peel them.  Slice them, remove the pits.  Sprinkle some sugar in the bottom of the tart shell, arrange the sliced fruits over it, sprinkle on some more sugar, dot with butter.  Stick in the oven for half an hour or so.  Sprinkle some slivered almonds, and a glaze you’ve made with sieved apricot preserves and sugar.  And you’re done.  And I have a problem with peaches – surprise, surpise – but this was very good.  If my peaches hadn’t been runty little ones we got at the Astoria grocery it might have been great. So then the rest of the weekend was a little crazed.  Saturday, which the astute among you might notice marked the entering into the final month of The Project, was spent mostly making pie shells.  Two kinds of crust, Pate Brisee Sucree and Pate Sablee, which is made with more sugar and eggs, and no water.  In theory anyway.  I decided the better part of valor, given the number of tarts to be done and the temperature in my kitchen, was to make the dough in the food processor.  Well, I don’t know if the heat was unconquerable or making the dough in the food processor just wasn’t a good idea, but the didn’t turn out so well.  The  Pate Sablee, particularly, was a bitch.  Admittedly, with the first batch, part of the problem could have been my failure to add the called-for baking powder.  But even once that way rectified, the dough was, far from being “sticky” as Julia said it would be, do dry it barely held together.  I added a bit of water to make it stick, but then when I rolled it out, it was far too delicate for me to lift it off the pastry board and into the tart pan.  I inevitably wound up sort of smooshing the dough into the pan to fill in the holes.  Not terribly successful crust, but I did the fuckers, eight of them.  And I made both Crème Patissiere, which is a custard made of egg yolks and sugar, flour and hot milk, with butter and vanilla and, in this case, kirsch stirred in, and Frangipane, which is pretty much the same thing but with slightly different proportions and pulverized almonds and almond extract.  These I put in the fridge to chill. I also hulled strawberries and peeled lemons, which peel I put up into little 1/16-inch wide strips.  Eric hulled cherries. Eric also went to a Chinese place in Flushing, Sichuan Dynasty, which had been recommended as being authentic and all that.  And I think it was that.  We had, for twenty bucks, a family dinner with twice-cooked pork, eggplant in garlic sauce, and cold Sichuan noodles, along with some dumplings.  At least, that’s what Eric ordered.  The dumplings were dumplings – steamed, in a very spicy red sauce, filled with pork, excellent.  The eggplant was clearly eggplant.  There was another dish with lots of scallions and peppers and a bean curdy sort of thing and what looked like bacon, that must have been the twiced cooked pork and was also very good.  And then there was another dish, neither cold nor particularly noodle-ish.  When we opened it up, we thought it was pure pork fat – these semi-translucent cubes, about a half inch square on each side, in a very shiny red spicy-looking sauce.  I love pork fat, but I didn’t know if I could eat a whole plate of the stuff.  But then you put it in your mouth and it wasn’t pork fat at all.  I don’t know what the fuck it was, but it melted away in your mouth almost instantly, like solid soup.  I know there are some inveterate chowhounders out there, so I ask you, was this Sichuan cold noodles, or did we get the wrong dish by mistake?  Do the Sichuans have a different definition of the word “noodles”?  Or “cold”? Anyway, very good.  And then we watched “Rebecca,” first on netflix, and then on TV.  Ours is a sad sort of life. Sunday was nothing but tart fillings.  I began the morning by making Tarte au Fromage Frais, Cream Cheese tart, which is very easy.  Cream together a stick of softened butter and a half pound of cream cheese and some sugar and two eggs, and pour into a pie crust and bake for half an hour until puffy and browned.  Done.  This was going to be easy.  Next I started on the Tarte au Citron et aux Amandes, the Lemon and Almond Tart.  Boiled 2 cups of sugar with 2/3 cup of water, dumped in the lemon peels I’d done Saturday, plus some vanilla, and let stand for half an hour.  Beat together eggs and sugar “until… thick, pale yellow and fall[ing] back on itself forming a slowly dissolving ribbon.”  This proved to be a recurring problem.  I believe because it was too fucking hot.  No ribbons.  I beat in some pulverized almonds (not enough, I was running out until Eric managed to pick me up some more), almond extract, grated lemon rind and lemon juice,  It was all very very watery, but I went ahead and poured it into a pie crust and baked it for twenty-five minutes, and damned if it didn’t turn out just fine.  I scooped the lemon peels out of the sugar syrup, which was not nearly as easy as it sounds but I did it anyway, and rinsed them, and “strew” – now there’s a word we don’t use enough – them over the tart.  Boiled down the syrup the lemon slices were in and smeared that over the top.  Two tarts done.  Too easy to talk about.  Getting a little hot in the kitchen, but easy nonetheless.  The lemon and cream cheese tarts went in the fridge. Next up, the pears for the Tarte aux Poires a la Bourdaloue.  Peeled and halve the pears and cored them.  Let them sit in water with lemon juice until I’d brought some red wine, lemon juice, sugar and cinnamon to a boil.  Dropped the pears in and let them poach at a bare simmer for a little under ten minutes.  Took them out, let them drain.  They were pretty and purple.  The wine stuff got boiled down pretty much a lot, then a fourth-cup of it was cooked with some red currant jelly to make a glaze for the pie crust.  The pears got slices in horizontal slices, so that each pear half still looked whole but was actually slices stacked on top of one another. The cherries for the Tarte aux Cerises, Flambee got more or less the same treatment, only without the cinnamon or being sliced.  (Speeding up now, late for said Big Important Meeting.)  Also made a red currant glaze to coat the crust for the Tarte aux Fraises (Fresh Strawberry Tart.)  Made lime zest and squeezed lime juice for the Tarte aux Limettes, Lime Souffle Tarte, which would have to be done more or less last minute.  I managed to take a shower at this point, and wash our nice dessert plates and coffee cups that have been gathering that nasty sticky dust everything in New York that you don’t use very often gets on it.  I was a little frantic, but I was keeping it under control, I’ve become so very in control.  Put together the fruit tarts, which you do by spreading a layer of the Crème Patissiere, for the strawberry tart, or Frangipane, for the pear tart, into the bottom of a glazed pie crust, and arranging the fruit on top; or, in the case of the cherry tart, stirring the cherries into the Frangipane and dumping the mess into the crust.  All these went into the fridge to wait.  Made the Tarte au Fromage Frais et aux Pruneaux, which is just another cream cheese tart only with prunes and almonds in it.  Baked that.  Made the soufflé tart by beating together sugar and egg yolks until that supposed ribbon thing happened, then beating in the lime zest and the lime juice, and stirring it over a pot of simmering water until hot and thick, but not scrambled, and folding into that egg whites beat in the handy-dandy KitchenAid-on-a-Trashcan, and baking that, until poofy and brown, sprinkling some powdered sugar onto it at somepoint.  So that was all the pies done, and no one had even arrived yet.  I laid out everything, and then Bekkah and Jeff showed up, and Lisa and Konrad, and two new acquaintances that know a lot about television, though not as much as Bekkah, who, it turns out, is the reality TV show master.  We all ate lots and lots of tarts.  All of them were good, even though when I ran my cherry tart under the broiler, and poured cognac on it, and tried to light it, it failed to flambee and so was very boozy tasting.  People seemed to be fans, particularly, of the lemon almond tart and the pear tart. We watched Julia & Jacques together, where we saw Julia deglaze a cookie sheet, which was impressive and dangerous looking.  Later we watched The Restaurant, which was surprisingly entertaining, though we’re going to have to give up this charade of bleeping out the curse words on network television one of these days, it was fairly obvious what Rocco was saying that bleeped out half of his sentences.  Kindred spirit, anyone?  Also, more creative uses of cookie sheets, when they tried to put out a fire (unsuccessfully) with one.  And much more that was exciting happened, but I am now blinded by despair that I have to go to work, and so cannot write anymore about it.  More later….   8:13:15 AM    comment []