Wednesday, August 20, 2003

On to the next. So after the CNNfn, thing, and the work thing, it was on home to make roast duck and Marrons Braises for dinner – Helen was coming over!  On the way home, though, I stopped by Astor Wine to buy some outrageously expensive wine to celebrate the End of the Project.  A thirty-dollar bottle of burgundy to go with the final meal, and an amazingly cool-shaped bottle of champagne that came in a box and was gotten for the bargain price of $64.99!  Due to the extreme generosity of you people, I had gone in willing to blow a hundred bucks on the bubbly, but the nice woman suggested this one, pretty decent of her.  And when I told her I wanted a red to go with kidneys and beef marrow, she just grabbed the closest bottle and said, “this will be perfect.”  I don’t know if she’s the Super Duper Wine Woman or just an excellent bullshitter, but either way I’m impressed.  Both the wine lady, when she brought the bottle out of the back, and the check out girls, two of them, handled the thing – the champagne, I mean – like it was a vial of plutonium.  Very impressive. And so home.  Stuffed some onions up the duck’s bum, tied it up, and stuck it in the oven.  Drained some canned chestnuts and covered them with a paste of cornstarch and Madeira, and brown beef bouillon (had to use – Mon Dieu! – regular old bouillon cubes because I have somehow inexplicably run out of or lost my Better Than Bouillon) and brought them to a simmer on the stove before setting them in the oven beside the duck. Then we started to drink.  I don’t know what happened, but I got totally fucking hammered.  It was bizarre.  And now I think I’m dying but this is neither here nor there.  Anyway, the duck was good, that much I remember, as were the chestnuts, though I think I prefer the puree, and it will be interesting, at a more appropriate time of year when I am in a more appropriate frame of mind to peel chestnuts, how this would taste with the fresh variety. Helen and Eric and I discussed starting a magazine.  Don’t you think we should start a magazine?  And –ooh ooh – we watched Julia!  Not the TV show -- a wonderful woman name Bridget sent us tapes that were made in the eighties as a sort of cooking class series, that show Julia talking through and demonstrating some basic techniques – pastry, etc….  It was wonderful wonderful wonderful.  She looked so young!  She sounded drunk! So next thing I know it’s morning, and I’m reading Amanda Hesser’s article in the Dining section, and it was totally inspired by me!  She mentioned “The Restaurant” – we talked about “The Restaurant” when she came over to our house!  She talks about cooking in un-air conditioned kitchens – who believes Amanda has an un-air conditioned kitchen?  She was clearly remembering sweltering in ours!  She talks about how potatoes are good served just barely warm – I totally fucked some potatoes trying to keep them hot when she was over at our house!  Amanda can’t stop thinking about me, she’s obsessed! Beat THAT narcissistic fugue!  Ha! Also in the dining section, William Grimes gave a rave to Atelier.  This is interesting to me because it just so happens that the wife of the chef at Atelier works with Eric at Archaeology.  Willy reviewed them right after they opened, and the verdict was less than stellar.  But then, at some point, he let drop that he was going to give them a second chance.  So for the past four months the chef and his wife both have been working twenty-hours days, running on fumes, basically, on the off-chance that Grimes would give them a second review.  And he did!  And it was ecstatic!  So 1) congratulations to the happiest couple in New York – talk about hard work paying off, and 2) Goddamn, but it must be nice to be the most powerful individual on earth, the restaurant critic for the New York Fucking Times. At the office, interesting developments.  It seems that someone has alerted the Powers That Be as to the heretical content of my blog.  I think that bit about me dreaming of cussing out the suits and having kinky sex in the kitchen got them worried.  Discussions have been had.  I have been told by two different Powers that, and I quote, “You have a lot of anger,” in the past twelve hours. Why yes I do.  Thanks for noticing. So here we are back to tonight.  It will be a light evening – the primary task will be re-upping my Salon blogability.  By all accounts, this is an arduous task.  I know that some of the recent Salon bullshit has been my fault, but still in all, I must say this – if something happens that keeps me from blogging the last weekend of the Project, so help me God I will send my hordes of flesh-eating fans after you, Salon!   7:33:22 PM    comment []

So the Successful Hostess portion of the post goes as follows: On Monday night we had Eric’s Mom and Carol over for dinner.  They had spent a long day doing the tourist thang and were exhausted, so it was something less that Successful Hosting that I didn’t get home until after seven, and then realized that the Haricots Mange-Tout a l’Etuvee, or Wax Beans Braised with Onions, Lettuce, and Cream, took, if we were to take Julia at her word, an hour and fifteen minutes to cook.  Also subtracting from my Martha Points was the fact that I was feeding Zuzu at long last – six, count ‘em six, mice – and it was none too appetizing to see me going back and forth into the office – the only place that has a door we can shut so the snake can’t get out and the cats can’t get in, except the bathrooms, but Zuzu has a tendency to get herself lost among the plumbing in bathrooms – and know what I’m doing when I’m in there, and then back I go into the kitchen to make the wax beans.  And the Roquefort quiche.  Because we revisited Roquefort quiche.  But first the wax beans.  Another debit on the Successful Hosting side – I made Mom and Carol snap the wax beans, while I baked the crust for the quiche – I had made the pastry the day before, but today I rolled it out and baked it, I even made a pretty edge by slashing it with a knife, Successful Hosting points there.  Also, I put out some nice French goat cheese.  Then I tossed the beans in a pot Eric had generously buttered (and buttered generously) for me with some diced onions, laid a shredded-up head of boston lettuce on top, half a stick of butter slivered up on top of that, and chicken broth poured over.  That baked for 45 minutes (only it was half an hour, really.)  I meanwhile mooshed cream cheese and Roquefort and eggs and cream together and squooshed them through sieve.  This last I did sitting in front of the TV, watching the first episode of “Buffy.”  Was this Successful Hosting or Un-?  You be the judge. Once the wax beans had baked for half an hour I poured a cup of cream on top of them, and stuck the quiche in to bake beside it.  Twenty five minutes later, Buffy just done, we had dinner at the stroke of nine, almost.  A very sophisticated hour to eat. Dinner was quite a success.  The wax beans were rich and creamy and good, the lettuce more or less melted into the sauce, absorbing all the butter and creamy and giving body to the beans.  I cooked them for a few minutes less that Julia suggests, both because Eric’s Mom and Carol were about to drop and because the whole cooking green beans for an hour and a half continues to rankle – I think they could have handled it though. The Roquefort quiche was as fabulous as I remembered.  I have always been sorely afraid of cheese with blue or green stuff in it, it just seems so wrong, and I still quail a bit before the straight stuff, but that musty taste cut with the cream cheese is just an elemental pleasure.  I don’t even have the words, really, to describe the taste, how’s that for crappy food writing.  I’ve never liked anything so reminiscent of mildew before.  I feel like I’m growing.  And then we all sat around talking about pagans. Good dinner.  Successful hostessing. And now for the Raging Pinkeye portion of the post. I awoke with raging pinkeye.  Or maybe it wasn’t, maybe I just scratched my eye.  Regardless, I had to get up and put my contacts in, because my glasses are being held together by a ridiculous piece of wire, and I had to go on CNNfn at noon.  Not only that, but they were expecting me to bring cake.  I had the Le Marquis in the fridge waiting to be iced.  I decided I would go ahead and take the morning off work, make the three icings at once per Hannah’s suggestion, and decorate the cake Mercedes Benz-style.   I didn’t have to leave until 11 (I had to go into makeup at 11:30, if you can believe that shit), I had plenty of time. Ho HO! The first icing, Crème au Beurre, Menagere, was no problem.  Threw an egg yolk, a third cup of sugar, some Grand Marnier, and three-quarters of a stick of softened butter into a bowl, and beat it with a mixer until it was creamy.  Stuck it in the fridge – no problem. The second icing, Crème au Beurre, au Sucre Cuit, proved, um, challenging.  The kernel of the problem resided in the following instructions: 1)      Cream the butter until it is light and fluffy.  Set aside. 2)      Place the egg yolks in the bowl and beat a few seconds to blend thoroughly. So I beat the butter and eggs together, but they didn’t blend very well.  And then I made a syrup of sugar and water, but when I beat that into the egg-butter mixture, it hardened into malformed chunks of crystal, and beating the stuff in a bowl over a pan of simmering water did nothing whatsoever to make it in any way resemble icing. I did this twice. Then I realized – she wanted me to cream the butter in one bowl, the eggs in another.  And beat in the butter at the end.  The great thing about being a moron is that it makes life so very much more interesting.  The third time worked like a charm.  I flavored it with some leftover coffee and stuck it in the fridge. Between attempts 1 and 2 of the Crème au Beurre, au Sucre Cuit I tried the Crème au Beurre, a l’Anglaise.  This is icing made with a custard base.  The Crème Anglaise I’ve made several times – it’s just egg yolks blended with sugar, with hot milk beat into it, that is then cooked over very low heat until thick, but not curdled.  Crème Anglaise makes me nervous.  So the first time, I didn’t get the custard thick enough, and the icing didn’t thicken up sufficiently when I beat in the butter.  But attempt number two, during which I got distracted from the Crème Anglaise for a minute because I was desperately washing dishes because I’d run out of bowls fucking up the Crème au Beurre, au Sucre Cuit, turned out perfect.  Haste makes Crème Anglaise, I guess.  I flavored the Crème au Beurre, a l’Anglaise with chocolate. So I sliced the cake in half and filled and iced it with the three icings.  The Crème au Beurre, Managere was too hard because it had been in the fridge too long, the Crème au Beurre, au Sucre Cuit was too hard because I’d stuck it in the freezer, and the Crème au Beurre, a l’Anglaise was just right.  I squeezed the Crème au Beurre, au Sucre Cuit through my fingers to soften it; the Crème au Beurre, Managere softened all by itself.   The cake was not what you’d call Martha.  Especially after riding with me on the subway in a hatbox.  But whatever.  They’d asked for a cake, and they’d get it.  CNNfn is a sad sort of place.  The makeup artists are starting a business doing brush-on tanning.  I wish them well.  I went on Flipside.  Any of the five people who watched it would see that my eye was disgusting, and my cake was sad.  I don’t even know if it tasted good – the three hosts ate it all, I didn’t even get a slice, and then the STOLE MY PLATE.  Shooed me off the set with the cake AND MY PLATE, and MY KNIFE, still in their grubby little hands.  Plus, they asked really lame questions. I hate TV. So, because I have to go to work now and because I don’t want to totally exhaust you, I will go now.  Will post again later on, about duck and chestnuts and Helen, oh my.   7:51:33 AM    comment []