Monday, August 25, 2003

I thought I’d have plenty of time, but it is amazing how this cooking shit just sucks away your day.  Here it is Monday morning, and I have not been out of the house in something more than 36 hours.  Thank God I need veal kidneys, and so will get outdoors at least once more before the end of the Project. The End of the Project.  I love you all, but I have to tell you, those are pretty much the most beautiful words in the language. Eric pointed out this morning that we have spent a year living “The French Paradox,” eating high-fat food and drinking tons of wine.  But the paradox part of it didn’t quite work out.  I am neither svelte nor particularly sophisticated, I have an inspecific but persistent ache in my innards, and I don’t think the French are known worldwide for letting inch-thick layers of dust accumulate on every surface of their homes. But I sound bitter, and I’m not, not at all.  Exhausted and in deep need of a cruel taskmaster of a personal trainer though I am, I am happy.  For one thing, my Pate de Canard en Croute turned out lovelily and amazingly, But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Sunday morning, I started by making the pastry for Petits Chaussons au Roquefort, Pastry Turnovers with Roquefort Cheese.  Because I had been flipping through MtAoFC, Volume 2, the night before, and had realized that Julia gives instructions for making pastry dough with this brave new contraption the food processor, I figured what the hell.  I used it, and it turned out fine, though it is not as satisfying.  But the real problem was that I had, in a shocking turn of events, run out of butter.  Mon dieu!  So out Eric runs while I post and make the bed.  As soon as he’s home it’s on to Beurre a l’Oeuf, Egg Yolk Butter.  I peel the hard-boiled eggs from yesterday and sieve the yolks through my nice new sief, which make a pretty yellow zest looking stuff.  This I blend in with a stick of softened butter, some salt and pepper, and some chives.  My chives have been in the fridge a few days and are looking a little sad, but oh well.  The Beurre a l’Oeuf is done, and in the fridge it goes.  It is really quite shocking how quickly the time goes.  I make the filling for the Petits Chaussons au Roquefort by mashing together a half pound of Roquefort, a stick of softened butter, two egg yolks, some kirsch, pepper, and more sad minced chives.  Then I roll out the dough, which has been resting in the fridge.  It’s gotten a little hot in the kitchen, as moderate though the day is, probably because I have the oven preheating in preparation for baking the turnovers.  I cut the dough out into two-and-half-inch (roughly) squares, put a little dollop of filling in the middle, paint the edges with some beaten egg, and seal them together with my fingers.  I go into this very weird fugue state where I start thinking about the Roquefort filling, which is determinedly trying to escape the turnovers, and how isn’t it sort of essentially arrogant, really almost a slave-owning mentality, to be approaching this from the perspective of how best to trap the Roquefort filling, without consideration for the Roquefort’s fundamental desire for freedom? In retrospect, this was probably the first symptom of my imminent psychotic break.  I manage to get the turnovers made, though the pastry dough is getting sticky fast.  Some of the turnovers are not pretty.  I couldn’t care less.  I throw them in the oven.  The kitchen is really horrific.  There are fucking houseflies EVERYWHERE.  When I don’t know what else to do with myself I stand in the middle of the kitchen with a flyswatter like High Noon, my body like a coiled spring, ready to kill.  Washing dishes is extremely difficult because, well, there are so fucking many of them, and the water doesn’t want to drain in the sink, probably because of the accumulated sludge.  It’s after two, and I haven’t even started the dough for the Pate de Canard en Croute.  The kitchen is absolutely disgusting – dabs of butter stuck to the side of the fridge, various meat juices sprayed like blood spatter at a murder scene across the walls, layers of doughy, buttery, dusty, cat-hairy crap on every surface.  It’s just too fucking depressing to contemplate.  I’m making the pastry for the fucking duck in the fucking food processor, fuck you if you think that’s cheating. I put six cups of flour and some salt and sugar in the cuisinart.  I add a fourth cup of chilled shortening and a stick of butter, cut up, and run the thing until the fat gets kind of chopped in.  I add two eggs and some cold water and blend.  The dough doesn’t stick together.  I add some more water.  Still no stickage.  I dump it out onto my pastry board – which who knows, by the way, what kind of filth has accumulated on that – it is a floury, mass.  I begin to freak out. I add rivers of cold water, and still it will not stick.  Eric comes in when the desperate sobbing babble reaches a fever pitch.  “Maybe it’s too hot in here.” Idiot!  Moron!  How could he think such a stupid thing!  I throw dry dough about in blind fury.  Fuck this fucking pastry dough.  Fuck it ! FUCKIT!  I’m a fucking failure, it’s been 364 days and I can’t make fucking pastry dough, I’m a useless piece of shit. I throw it away.  I am despondent.  I start again, this time I’m going to make it by hand.  It still comes out too dry, but I manage this time to get the stuff sort of stuck together.  I roll it up in plastic and stick it in the fridge. Then I have to go lie down, still hiccupping back tears. I would like to take back what I said before about Eric being a moron.  For one thing, he’s going to prove in coming paragraphs that he’s actually a genius.  But more importantly, he is the most wonderful man in the universe.  While I lay sprawled on the bed like a Victorian hysteric, he, rather than coming to comfort me, washes all the dishes and wipes down the entire kitchen.  This after he’s already spent the day cleaning up the rest of our exploded apartment.  One might argue that he was just trying to forestall another epic hissy fit.  I prefer to think he’s simply utterly devoted. So. The kitchen was livable.  The Roquefort turnovers – which I had taken out of the oven in due course, for those of you who have been reading with bated breath – had turned out looking actually okay.  Now I would Bone the Duck. With all the solemn apprehension the occasion warranted, I loosed my brand-new boning knife from its casing.  “Now I will Bone the Duck,” I said. “Good luck,” Eric replied, before running away to hid under his desk. I removed the bird from its wrappings.  I made the first incision, a deep cut down the back bone.  I began to scrape the meat away from the bone, down one side.  When I got to the wing and the leg, I separated the bone at the joint, leaving the leg bone and the two outermost joints of the wing attached to the skin.  I scraped away, my trusty boning knifing slicing through flesh with frightening ease and precision, until I got to the point at the center of the breast where the skin meets the bone.  Then I did the same on the other side. Here’s the disappointing bit.  It was a total fucking breeze.  I could bone ducks every day for the rest of my life.  Maybe I should become a butcher. Once the duck-suit was all spread out on the cutting board I sliced away strips of meat from the thighs and the breast.  These strips I diced up and lay back over the duck.  I poured on some cognac and Madeira and sliced up my eight-dollar truffle, and since my eight-dollar truffle was crappy, I sprinkled on some truffle flour, which is amazingly potent stuff.  Then I folded the duck-suit in on itself and stuck it in the fridge.  I made the Crème Plombieres a l’Ananas  This is a dessert that I had, sneakily, skipped, way back in the early days of the Project.  I just felt like I’d been making Plombieres for eons at that point, and I don’t much like pineapple, so I skipped it.  Now I had to go back.  Plombieres is a simple enough thing.  Just beat together egg yolks and sugar until it “forms the ribbon,” – and I still say that sounds like an obscure Japanese sexual practice --  beat in some flour, and then some boiling milk.  The first time I tried this, I discovered upon boiling the milk that the milk had gone suddenly bad.  Boiling bad milk is a bad idea.  But Eric had so cheered me by cleaning up the kitchen that I didn’t even freak – I just sent him out to buy some more.  I whiled away the time while he was out reading from Julia Child’s biography.  It is a terrible biography, I am endlessly amazed that someone can rise to be a writer considered worthy to write the biography of Julia fucking Child and still not be able to write your way out of a paper bag, but there’s some great resources there.  My favorite quote: Julia is cooking for Paul in Paris, she reaches in to retrieve some manicotti shells from boiling water, and says, “Wow!  These things are as hot as a stiff cock!” Anyway, so with new milk, everything went fine.  Stirred the hot milk into the sugar egg yolk mixture, Then poured it back into the pan to boil for a few minutes until thick.  Beat up some egg whites until stiff.  Folded them, plus some pineapples with syrup I’d boiled down in another pan, into the crème.  I scooped the stuff into margarita glasses, which looked very festive.  I still didn’t want to eat the stuff, but hey.  Now it was time to stuff the duck.  I think I didn’t mention that on Saturday I had made the veal and pork pate that would go in the duck – all it is is ground veal and pork mixed with chopped-up pork fat, with onions that have been minced and sautéed in butter, and Madeira that’s been cooked down in the same pan, some eggs, salt, pepper, allspice, thyme and a clove of crushed garlic.  Well, I mixed in the duck pieces that had been marinating in the duck-suit.  Here I ran into a problem, because I realized that at some point the duck skin near the tail had torn.  I would have to sew it up before I stuffed it.  I had bought some “poultry lacers” which had twine included with them, at the Broadway Panhandler.  I was a little concerned about how the would work, because the needles, rather than having an eye at the end like a sewing needle, had a loop with an unattached end.  They looked just like the metal things we had scattered around the kitchen, which we lost all the time, because they were so small they’d slip through the bars of our dishwashing rack and fall into the muck that inevitably inhabits the tray beneath, and then you didn’t want to cook with them anymore, and which I had always called “skewers.”  I didn’t understand how I would sew with them.  As it turns out, we had managed to lose the poultry lacers I’d bought, and I did have trawl about under the dishwashing rack for one of our old ones.  I embarked on this strange-o crochet-like maneuver where I looped twine several times around the skewer, stuck it through two layers of duck skin, pulling it in this looping move all the way through around the loop at the end, which as I say had an end that was unattached to the body of the skewer, and tried in the process to worry the twine through the holes before the string slipped off the unattached end. This was not a particularly sound procedure.  In fact, it led to a renewal of obscenities, sobs, and pounding of hands on tables.  Plus, my arthritis was acting up.  Eric had a brilliant notion.  After toying with the possibilities of safety pins, of which he is a big fan, he found, of all things, a sewing needle.  A very large sewing needle. The sewing needle worked like a charm.  Now I would not have to stab my eyes out with a skewer/poultry lacer.  I sewed up the tear in the duck suit.  Then I dumped the pate into the middle of it.  Then I sewed up the duck.  It was too easy to even talk about.  I tied up the duck with lengths of string until it was basically football shaped.  I browned it on all sides in oil.  I let it cool. I took out the pastry dough I had made.  The pastry dough had miraculously transformed from a crumbly mess into dough!  That I could roll out!  Two-thirds of it I rolled into a large oval, which I placed on a baking sheet.  I place the duck-suit-pate-football on top of it, and brought up the sides of the dough oval, patting it into place.  Then I rolled out a smaller oval.  I painted the edges of the bottom oval with beaten egg, lay the second oval on top, and pinched the two together.  All of this went so easily I’m almost embarrassed.  I even cut out little rounds from the leftover pastry, and made fan shapes on them with the back of a knife, and stuck them around the edges of the duck-suit-pate-football-cloaked in pastry, for decoration.  I put more rounds in the middle, around the hole I poked in the crust to let steam escape.  If you have a copy of MtAoFC, please turn to page 569.  You will see there an illustration of Pate de Canard en Croute.  That is exactly what my Pate de Canard en Croute looked like.  Who’s the man?  I’M the fucking man! Now it just had to bake for two hours.  Em came over.  We ate some weirdo Polish bread smeared with Beurre a l’Oeuf and Beurre de Crustaces.   I served the shellfish butter because Julia explicitly states it can be used for sandwich spreads and canapés, and because I wasn’t about to go out and make some goddamned fish stew, but I will with a nod to my commenters admit that probably it is best used as an enrichment, rather than a spread.  The Beurre a l’Oeuf, however, was quite nice.  I stuck the turnovers in the oven under the duck to warm, and took them out after ten minutes.  They mostly tasted like the surface of the sun, perhaps I ought to have waited longer before biting into them. Later they were good. We drank $65-dollar champagne, which tasted just like regular champagne, only more expensive. We subjected Em to Julia DVDs. “We are having three vegetarians for dinner.  I don’t mean we are going to eat them, but we have to make them a vegetarian meal.” The duck came out of the oven at nine.  It was perfect.  It was a sight to behold.  It was a big golden football.  I cut a hole in the top.  Julia wanted me to lift out the duck and detruss it and carve it.  That was simply not going to happen – there was no way I could do that without destroying the shell.  So I just cut the strings I could reach and pulled them out.  Then I put the top back on and we cut slices of Pate de Canard en Croute. It tasted like the richest meatloaf you ever had, with a pastry crust.  It was lovely, wonderful and amazing.  It was a sight to behold.  I cannot express to you how deeply satisfying it was.  The ultimate penultimate meal, even if Eric bitched that I hadn’t gotten around to making a salad. This morning, the house has descended again into chaos.  When Eric kissed me goodbye (I’m not going to work today, I think I fucking deserve it) he said, “You smell like duck.” Maybe so.  At least I don’t smell like pissy kidneys. Yet.   10:49:33 AM    comment []