Tuesday, July 29, 2003

I came home after my Big Meeting to find Eric peeling cucumbers and fuming over Ann Coulter.  He was annoyed, if you can believe it, about her criticism of JFK’s actions during the Bay of Pigs.  This is the same woman who argues that McCarthy was a national hero and the Democratic party should be disassembled, but what got Eric peeved was her questioning of JFK’s policy toward Cuban revolutionaries.  But after he’d bitched for ten minutes or so, listing in detail all the Republican presidents who had similarly backed rebels with words only to fail to provide the back-up – Georgie’s daddy of course among these – we got to the real heart of the issue.  Eric had fallen quiet for a moment after I had pointed out that he was spending an awful lot of energy trying to poke holes in the argument of a certifiable nutjob.  He peeled his cucumbers.  And then he said this: “Whenever I see Ann Coulter, it’s suddenly 1988, and I’m at the Whitesnake concert, and she’s that horsey girl in front of me with the big hair and the fake snakeskin pants who won’t look at me.” Ah.  Skanky adolescent fantasy: 1; crazy Republican harpy: 0. All this to say, of course, that I didn’t cook at all last night.  Well, that’s not quite true.  I made the Pate Sablee for the pineapple tart I put off over the weekend.  And I would have made the tart, much as I’m repulsed by the idea, but sorrow of sorrows, I was all out of red currant jelly.  So not pineapple tart, for which I am sorry. Instead we had an impromptu sort of Eric’s Spicy.  Chile-rubbed chicken, a longtime favorite I stole off of my mother after she stole it off of Martha.  Fabulous, and very easy.  Mix together two tablespoons of chile powder – we use the real shit, Chimayo – 1 and half tablespoons of cumin, and 1 tablespoons of paprika.  Shit, or something like that.  I always have trouble remembering the proportions.  Plus salt and pepper.  Thickly slice a large red onion, and lay them in a baking pan.  Top with thyme – supposed to use fresh, but dried is okay too.  Drizzle with olive oil.  Pat the chile mixture onto pieces of bone-in, skin-on chicken.  Martha and Mom use breasts, we did it with whole legs.  The chile mixture will be really really thick on the chicken.  Bake it at 400 degrees for half an hour.  This is some good, good shit.  If you were Martha, you could cut it off the bone and serve it taco-style, with tortillas.  If you’re me, you can just tear it off the bone with your teeth and eat it with rice.  Eric also made a cucumber salad we saw being made on America’s Test Kitchens the other day.  This is still a work in progress, but very promising.  Toss together sliced cucumbers that you’ve peeled and scooped the seeds out of with thinly sliced red onion.  You’re actually supposed to let this sit in a colander in the fridge with a weight on it to press out the excess water, but Eric skipped that bit this time.  Then toss it with a good little bit of mayonnaise and lemon juice and pepper.  Supposed to use dill too but Eric forgot to buy it.  Which made him angry, because to him the whole thing is about the dill and mayo.  Then, for some reason, we decided to stick it in the freezer instead of the fridge, I guess we thought we were closer to dinner than we were.  Eric then got involved in a call with his mother and I got involved with my biography of Jane Austen – in one of her letters to her sisters about a guy she’s flirting with she writes that she indulged in “everything most profligate in the way of dancing and sitting down together”; I fucking LOVE that woman – and of course forgot the cucumbers, so they were a little frozen around the edges, and frozen cucumbers, especially when they haven’t had the excess water pressed out, are a little oddly sorbet-y in texture.  So it was not an entire success.  But I have extremely high hopes.  You could probably be all lo-cal and use yogurt or something, too.  Eric will beat me about the ears when he reads this, of course. We also drank the last of Eric’s Himalayan Sunrise that he made last night for our tart party.  A Himalayan Sunrise is a drink invented by Julia’s husband Paul, which was pointed out in the comments by someone – I forget who because I can’t find the comment anymore, we had to google extensively to find the recipe at all, I’m so sorry!  What it is is a gin martini with cherry juice in it, and a cherry.  And the drink is all pinky gold with the cherry at the bottom of the martini glass, and it really looks like a Himalayan sunrise!  But it tastes like a martini. So, all in all a very pleasant and utterly useless evening.  Tomorrow the last of the tarts, and some other stuff.  And then crepes!  Flaming crepes!! But now to work.  Because I love a place where I get to a) draw up a contract signed by the CFO every time I want to order food for a meeting; b) agree every morning before turning on my computer that I will use said computer only for work-related purposes; and c) receive cultural proposals from God.  I kid you not.   7:54:43 AM    comment []