Thursday, August 21, 2003

A quiet evening, and not much to report.  Eric got re-upped on my Radio Userland software, and it was a slightly stiff breeze, so my apologies to Salon for predicting disaster.  For dinner Eric made hamburgers as Julia suggests in her handy dandy new twenty-year-old videos we got from Bridget.  They were quite good, I think as much because Eric heeded her warning about handling the meat as minimally as possible as because of the addition of an egg and sour cream, and the dredging with flour.  Julia has you garnish with “a Mexican salsa.”  Not sure what that means, but I made a pico de gallo.  Only my pico sucked, man!  I chopped up tomatoes and one of the strongest onions I’ve ever encountered, I was weeping like a baby which I never do because of onions, maybe it was the pinkeye, and cilantro and jalapeno and salt and pepper, and it was the most boring thing I’ve ever tasted.  I’m so ashamed.  I guess I’ve been doing this French cooking gig for just about long enough.  But anyway, the burgers were good despite my shitty salsa, and despite the fact that Eric got nervous and probably overcooked them just a bit, to medium.  But they were juicy and flavorful, and what else can you want really? I made Galettes Sablees, which are sugar cookies made with (supposedly) leftover pastry from dessert tarts.  I had meant to make these weeks and months ago, but you know, I didn’t, and the little balls of leftover pastry dough slowly got gray and sad in the refrigerator, until finally I threw them out.  So I made up a new batch of Pate Brisee Sucre.  The actually mixing up the pastry went very well – I’m such a little Quick Girl Pastry Whiz these days, I mooshed the butter and shortening into the flour and sugar in a flash, made the dough stick together with a bit of water, rolled it up into a ball and stuffed it in the fridge in about a minute.  Genius! – but a couple of hours later when I went to roll the cookies out, things didn’t go quite so well.  First of all, after a brief respite from the heat, my kitchen was once more, at nine o’clock last night, hot as the devil..  Secondly, I found the instructions rather baffling.  I was to roll out the dough to a fourth inch thickness, and cut into rounds 1 and ¼ inch in diameter.  Done.  Then I was to “spread a 1/4 –inch layer of granulated sugar on your pastry board, lay a round of dough over it, and heap sugar on top.”  Er, okay.  Then, “roll the round into a sugar-coated oval 2 ½ inches long.” This was where it got weird. I couldn’t really make the dough roll on top of the sugar, so I rolled it between my hands, and to get it to 2 ½ inches long, it really had to be more a log than an oval.  But I did that, and made sure they were all covered in sugar, and put them on a pan.  Once I’d rolled them all out – quickly, because the butter in the pastry was clearly trying to melt on me – I glazed them with an egg beaten with some butter and stuck them in the oven for ten minutes or so.  They came out the saddest damned cookies you ever saw – small and crooked and wrinkled, with glazed brown stuff stuck to them from where the egg cooked to the pan.  They actually tasted okay – like sweet pastry crust with sugar on top.  Probably would be good with ice cream.  But not really a keeper. Then we watched “Ringu,” which is a silly movie, but which kept me up anyway, mostly because of that one bit where every time they watch the video you see a little bit more of the person crawling out of the well, I thought that was pretty nightmarish.  Also, when we were in bed and I said, “Eric I’m kind of scared, actually,” he said, “So am I.” What kind of fucking answer is that?  I need me a mastiff. So I would just like to extend a brief apology, in closing, to all the folks I have not managed to get back to yet – stupid aol problems continue apace, and have made answering emails quite a fucking chore.  I would also like to apologize because I was planning on holding a big blowout celebration and inviting you all over, but things have just been nuts and Eric’s freaking out about having yet another huge set of people in our house, plus the apartment is pretty much going septic, so I’ve had to give that up.  Which is why all Juliedudes should sign up on Hannah’s amazing sign-up sheet, so I can send the word out when it is at last time to party.  (Hannah would of course post this as usual, but she’s on her way to Bath to make crazy monkey love, so I’ll do the honors.) Oh, and for those who asked for a countdown: We are at T-minus 84 hours, with six recipes to go. Piece of cake. 7:52:27 AM    comment []