Wednesday, August 13, 2003

I am going to float a proposal here.  Would it reduce the petty crime rate in New York City – hell, maybe even the rape, murder and pillage rates – to pass an ordinance forcing grocery stores to widen all their aisles by ten or twelve inches?  Maybe, maybe not.  All I know is, I was at Garden of Eden near Union Square last night at seven thirty buying a duck and canned chestnuts, and Garden of Eden is a great store, better stocked and cheaper than Zeytuna, a hell of a lot easier to get to than Fairway or Whole Foods, with a pleasant, helpful staff, plus they had my duck AND my chestnuts, a small miracle, I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to find the place, but damned if after twenty minutes sidling hither & non that fucking bitch with the yoga mat strapped to her back (and don’t even get me started on women who walk around with yoga mats) who stood lollygagging about in the middle of the fucking aisle staring at plums or something, wasn’t inspiring gleeful visions of disembowelment.  Forget about using a cart; you can barely get one of those handheld baskets around, once you have a baguette and a five-pound duck in it.  The cans of chestnuts I was buying for the Puree de Marrons cost $7.50 each and I had to buy four of them, so between that and the $15 duck I was completely broke when I walked out of the store, but at least I had negotiated the eight-inch wide aisles designed, I guess, for the six-inch-wide asses of the models who live and work in the neighborhood, without knocking down a display of Pirates Booty or something.  It’s funny how one’s plans get whittled down when one leaves work at seven and then shops in a store with eight-inch-wide aisles and then goes to a wine store where the owner seems a prig and the checkout girls are always rude and then gets laughed at by the guys with the water cooler bottle collecting money for the homeless -- possibly because one has a stricken look on one’s face and is muttering strings of obscenities that tend to end with the phrase “fucking New York” -- then lugs all the shit home on the train and gets home at eight-thirty.  Wait, no, ‘funny’ isn’t the word I’m looking for.  I think I meant ‘pathetic and sad.’  Yes, that’s better.  The original plan had been to bake, fill and ice a Gateau a l’Orange, as well as roast the duck and make up the Puree de Marrons.  Well, I got it baked anyway, although Eric nearly had to strangle me during a cake pan search that got ugly.  It was relatively easy, actually.  (The cake, I mean, not the strangling.)  For awhile I was looking, by mistake, at the recipe for the Biscuit au Beurre that I’d made over the weekend, which is a little precious and which didn’t turn out all that well.  I got as far as melting the butter that recipe called for before I realized with relief that I was on the wrong page, and that the recipe for Gateau a l’Orange is a lot less annoying.  Just beat together some sugar and egg yolks, and orange zest (Microplane!  Zesting!  Always a cheering activity!) and orange juice and a bit of salt, and some sifted cake flour.  (I didn’t have enough cake flour, so supplemented with the ordinary stuff.  Sue me.)  Then I whipped up the egg whites with a bit more salt and a bit of sugar until stiff, and folded the result into the batter.  Turned it into the pan Eric had found and I had buttered and floured, stuck it in the oven for half an hour, and that was that.  Only I knew by the time I got it in the oven that the icing and filling would have to wait for another day.  For one thing, I’d run out of sugar.  For another, my knees were about to buckle under me.  I drained the chestnuts and put them in a pot with a bay leaf and some thyme, covered with beef bouillon.  I was supposed to have celery and parsley in there, but I’d mysteriously run out of both, this was turning into one of those bad ingredient nights.  I let it simmer on low heat for a good long while.  I put some salt and pepper and thyme and sliced onion up the duck’s bum, tied it up in my inimitable ‘Novice Dominatrix’ style, stabbed it a few times in the thighs and breast with the tip of my knife (when I’m tired and making poultry I just can’t seem to get the rough trade metaphors out of my head) and stuck it in the roasting pan with some sliced carrot and more onion that my dear husband had sliced.  By the time the cake was ready to come out, the duck was ready to go in.  It roasted for a little more than an hour, first at 425°, then down at 350°, with me turning it from side to side every fifteen minutes or so so it browned everywhere.  Eric, meanwhile, trimmed some green beans while watching “The O.C.”  When the chestnuts were well softened, I ran them through the food mill, which actually worked – possibly a first.  Then I just beat in some butter and a bit of cream to loosen it up, and some salt and pepper.   By, oh, say, eleven at night, the apartment smelled lovely.  The Gateau a l’Orange smelled deliciously orange-y, and looked nice and golden and poofy and cake-y, so that was nice even if there was no way I was going to fill and ice and eat it at this point.  The duck smelled like duck, which is always a good thing, and came out of the oven golden brown and yummery.  We ate our meal on, yes, our TV tray tables, whilst watching The Daily Show, which continues on giving me hope for humanity.  The duck was great, as duck very nearly always is.  God I love roast duck.  I even love the way the apartment still smells intensely of it this morning, though duck isn’t really a morning kind of smell.  I didn’t have particularly high hopes for the Puree de Marrons, but I’ll be damned if it wasn’t really great, even if it was an unappetizing ecru, and even if the texture of it lent itself to what Eric referred to as a school cafeteria worker serving style – scoop out of the pot, decisive rap of spoon on edge of plate, heavy plop of brownish-grayish food mass onto plate service.  It’s hard do describe the taste.  It was like dessert without the sweet.  It had this rich, nutty (obviously), almost smokey taste, and this smoothness, and it complemented the duck in a startling way – every one always says how this food complements this one, but I find that I rarely come upon two foods together that actually make me sit up and say out loud, “Damn.”  Always rewarding when it happens.  And green beans.  With the butter I’d melted for the cake I thought I was making when I was on the wrong page.  Green beans good. Okay, so here I am late for work again, and I haven’t even mentioned Amanda Hesser.  Yes, it’s true, Amanda Hesser came and ate dinner with us.  She is tiny, she did not wear barrettes, she was terrifically nice and fun and not intimidating, and did not visibly cringe upon entering our very scary apartment.  For this, I thank her.   8:03:38 AM    comment []