Monday, August 11, 2003

This Monday shit is just fucking killing me.  I have so much to write about, I know before I begin I’ll never get to all of it, it’s just going to wind up being this boring litany of food, when actually fun and interesting times were had, though the last five hours, during which I utterly failed to sleep because I was worrying about said litany, and sleeping badly in an insufficiently cool apartment, were not some of them.  And then at the end of it I get to go back to work.  Oy. We’re going to skip blithely past Friday, which was more or less a disaster on every front.  For one thing, we ate sautéed calves’ liver with Beurre Bercy – Shallot Butter with White Wine.  I was really looking forward to this.  Chris Lydon reminded me of what I thought of sautéed liver the first time we made it – I described it as “the silky soul of steak,” quite a nifty little phrase if I do say so myself.  I also compared it to great sex.  So what could be bad?  Well, I got worried as soon as I unwrapped the liver and found these pale pink slabs of meat swiss-cheesed with cirrhosistic holes.  I sautéed them up and topped them with the butter, which is made by boiling down vermouth and meat glaze with minced shallots and creaming it, and some minced parsley, into butter.  It was a disappointment verging on the bitter.  The liver was bitter, anyway, and mushy.  So sad.  I made some Ratatouille on the side, another repeat, and that at least was pretty good, though not as glorious as I remember from last time.  And then while the Clafouti aux Pruneaux, Plum Flan – which was very pretty, with little halves of plums that had been briefly boiled, peeled, and soaked in cognac for an hour or so before being set in the spring form pan with the batter surrounding it – baked, we watched part of this fucking movie that I rented as part of a crusade to find a Peter O’Toole movie that I actually like.  The movie was called The Ruling Class, and it was terrible.  The Clafouti was good – quite good, actually – but Eric was more or less conked out by the time it was done. That’s Friday done.  Saturday was spent sleeping in and shopping for the dessert party I’d planned for Sunday evening.  We carried 40 pounds of laundry to the laundromat – funny how those luxuries like clean underwear can go by the wayside at times like these – bought some essential food and booze, and then I went on in to town while Eric, bless ‘is heart, began cleaning the house.  I went to the Broadway Panhandler, where bought I a savarin pan (like a bundt pan, only with a bigger hole in the middle) and a popover pan (like muffin tins, only taller and skinnier) and some old fashioned glasses, since I’d had a wee problem when Em came over Thursday night with the big-girl glasses that are all we have around the house these days.  Then I went to Garden of Eden, to which I had never been, and which had gorgeous blackberries and strawberries and blueberries, plus kick-ass bread.  And on the way home I saw bulldog puppies for sale and was sorely tempted.  But I was a good girl, and instead of getting a puppy, I went home and made babas. Babas are very fun to make.  I was a little nervous, because making bread in an un-air-conditioned apartment in Long Island City seemed a disaster waiting to happen, plus inexplicably Julia calls for fresh yeast in her recipe, which I had not noticed.  I have never worked with fresh yeast, and had no intention of starting now.  So I looked up the Joy of Cooking babas recipe and guesstimated how to do the thing with regular packaged yeast.  I let a package-ful sit with a fourth cup of water for a few minutes.  Then I added two tablespoons of sugar, two eggs, and a bit of salt.  Stirred that in, then added two cups of sifted flour, and four tablespoons of butter that I’d melted and let cool.  Only wait, I just remembered that I was actually doubling this recipe.  So go back and do all the ingredients times two.  The dough made this extremely sticky mass that I needed by slapping down into the bowl a lot and pulling between my fingers like taffy.  Kind of fund stuff, but I had serious doubts that it would work out.  Then I let it sit in a covered bowl for an hour and a half until it had risen good and high.  Julia says to let the dough rise somewhere where the temperature is between 80 and 100 degrees – turns out my kitchen fits the bill perfectly.  I gently deflated the dough, put a little bit in the bottom of each popover tin, more in the bottoms of my one muffin tin, and still more in the bottom of the savarin.  Another hour and a half, and again the dough rose like a son of a bitch.  Then it was just a matter of baking them – the babas, or muffin-shapped ones, for fifteen minutes, the savarin, or savarin-shaped one, for thirty.  They turned out puffy and brown and perfect.  That’s the way we do it in the L.I.C., bitch! Then we cleaned the house some more, and ate tex-mex chili cheese meatloaf sandwiches, and watched Quills.  Which I liked very much.  I could be played by Kate Winslet.  Or Kate Winslet could be played by me.  Whichever comes first. Sunday it was nothing but cook, cook, cook, all the time.  Another round of babas in the morning, then Julia’s chocolate mousse – a repeat, but well worth it and not hard.  Used my precious Scharffenberger, a mixture of semi- and un-sweetened.  Then I made the Biscuit au Beurre, a spongecake that’s made more or less the same way ladyfingers are, but was more successful.  You melt some butter.  You beat together sugar and egg yolks an vanilla.  Then you beat egg whites until stiff, and fold them, and some sifted cake flour, delicately into the egg yolk mixture, a fourth at a time.  Then you fold in the butter, leaving out the white precipitate or whatever you call it.  Then you bake it for half an hour in a buttered and floured pan.  It turned out fine, nice and poofy and brown, though it was distinctly uneven, which may be my uneven oven or the fact that the batter is so stiff and slow moving that when I shook it around in the pan, I didn’t get it even, and it didn’t flow to even by itself.  Next I made the rum sugar syrup for the Babas and the kirsch sugar syrup for the Savarin.  I peeled, cored, and sliced the apples for the Clafouti aux Pommes, then sautéed them in butter and let them sit with rum and cinnamon and sugar for half an hour.  I made up the apricot glaze and warmed up the babas and savarin in the oven.  I beat up some Crème Chantilly, which is, um, whipped cream.  I beat up a lot of it.  Actually, I started to beat up a lot of it, then started scream at it to “Thicken, bitch!” until Eric took over.  See, by this point, I know it sounds easy, but we were running up on time for the guests to be here.  I was a mess.  I made up the three clafouti.  A batter with almonds and almond extract added into the blender mix for the Clafouti a la Bourdaloue, Cherry Flan with Almonds.  A batter with the alcohol drained off the apples substituting for part of the milk for the Clafouti aux Pommes.  And a batter with extra flour for the Clafouti aux Mûres, Blackberry Flan, since the berries produce so much juice.  Cooked a bit of the batter in the bottom of pans for each clafouti on the stovetop, added the fruit, some sugar for the berries and cherries, the rest of the batter, stuck in the oven.  I was also poking holes in babas and savarins and letting them soak in rum and kirsch syrup, respectively.  I was also painting babas and savarins in apricot glaze, and also the Biscuit au Beurre.  This latter I was also pressing pulverized almonds onto the sides of, which looked very pretty, and sprinkling slivered almonds on top of.  I was putting bing cherries on the tops of babas, and bing cherries plus slivered almonds on top of the savarin.  People were coming.  I was putting food out on a table, and Eric was offering people champagne and tea and water.  Lots of people came.  Brandon, a very sweet and handsome young jazz pianist, who used to work as a planner at our office but has flown the coop and is now trying to do the music thing.  John, who I work with in Memorial & Cultural, came with his wife and kid.  They’d been to P.S. 1 beforehand, because that’s just the hip kind of neighborhood we live in.  John and his wife Amy weren’t even scared in L.I.C., because they lived in Williamsburg back when it was scary, and then in Tribeca when it was as well.  Where they now own a place and make everyone very jealous.  Poor John, though: he used to work in the art world before being sucked into the whirlpool of government.  His kid, Otis, is also charming, and goes to summer camp, as a result of which he now owns five bandannas and gets his head slathered with olive oil every night.  The poor kid didn’t much like my babas, I don’t think, and neither did I.  I dunno, it was just boozy-tasting bread.  The Biscuit au Beurre, also, I was not particularly fond of, I thought it was sort of dry, though it looked gorgeous, I must say, tilted or now.  The chocolate mousse, on the other hand, was delish, as were the clafouti, particularly, oddly enough, the apple.        Eric’s co-workers, Amelie and Kristin, were there, and Em of course, and Helen and Dan, and the other Dan, Dan-Dan, an old and brilliant college friend who knows everything there is to know about doormen and think that pets are slaves, for which we’ll forgive him because he’s funny about it, and because he braved some of my desserts – though not the chocolate mousse – despite raving lactose intolerance.  Also my newly-found cousin Melissa with her husband Andrew, and Dianne, another office friend and newfound Julie/ Julia fan, who brought a box of coffee from Dunkin Donuts, much appreciated.  A grand time was had, by me anyway, even though I didn’t like the babas.  We watched The Restaurant – the bartender quit, and got a Vespa to come back, and the gay waiter quit, and didn’t.  And everyone drifted away except Amelie, who watched an episode of Buffy – Xander is fallen in love with by everybody, I love that one – with us while we ate burgers and cheese steak sandwiches from the 24-hour diner. And then I fell soundly asleep.  Until three or so, when I didn’t sleep at all. This morning, many messages on my answering machine of calls we never heard.  Cece from my work, lost somewhere in Queens.  Shit, Cece, I’m sorry.  If we ever see you again, I’ll give you some babas.  And mom, twice.  Sorry, mom.  I’m not dead, yet.  Will call tonight. And now to work.  Fuck me.   7:41:07 AM    comment []