The Hallelujah Chicken Run Band won’t save you. Practicing piano every day won’t save you. Your memories of Paris or Bali or Cuba or New York City won’t save you. Photography won’t save you. Your sparkling personality won’t save you. The Absinthe Martini you invented won’t save you. Art won’t save you. Love won’t save you. Nothing can save you.
OEUF EN COCOTTE
My
Oeuf en cocotte this morning was overdone. Yours will not be, because you won't make the same mistake I did, of prodding it with a chopstick and leaving it in the oven more than, say 18 minutes when the centre looks runny. Trust me, the eggs’ll cook just fine.
This breakfast was a dry run of one of the contenders for a boxing day breakfast in Montreal for my brother and his husband. It failed, in part because it was overdone, and in part because I used what we had on hand, as is my wont for a weekend breakfast, rather than making a trip to the grocer. So, today, no cream, and the poor oeufs suffered for it. So it’s still in the running, even though it was only very good and not great.
Am I worried about potentially ruining the surprise? No. Like you, my brother no longer reads this stupid blog.
Preheat the oven to 350 and put in a water bath, as per instructions in
The Joy of Cooking or whatever basic handbook you use.
Okay, so: chop a shallot like the size of 3/4 of a ping pong ball. Sauté in a tablespoon of butter until soft and then throw in a handful of baby spinach and a bit of water. If you washed your spinach, that’s water enough. If you bought it, as I did, pre-washed in a glassine coffin, you must add a teaspoon or so. I just cupped my hand under the tap and took what I could get that way.
Prior to that, I should have mentioned, I soaked a couple of dried flower mushrooms in cold water with four chopped sun-dried tomatoes. Use fresh exotic mushrooms and tomatoes in oil if you can. I was, again, improvising with what I had at hand.
Mushrooms in cold water reconstitute just fine, to my surprise. I always used hot water, but Killer today informed me that she read in
The Science of Good Food (Joachim/Schloss. It’s not Harold McGee, but it’s not bad at all, and remember; we’re workin’ with what we have at hand here) that cold is best unless you intend to use the water itself.
So, slice and pat dry the tomatoes and mushroom. Mix with the wilted spinach and shallot and some salt and pepper. Melt some more butter, like a tablespoon, in the spinach pan. Butter up a couple of bowls. Beat two eggs in each. add half of the spinach mixture and some parmesan. In they go.
Meantime, chop up some parsley and a green onion and some fresh thyme. Add half of that to the cup or so of leftover mashed potatoes you have in the fridge from Friday night’s filet mignon with panko-bluecheese crust. You channeled Joel Rubichon while making them; his are said to be the first cookbook recipe to contain more butter and cream than potato. Butter butter butter.
Melt still more butter over medium low with a couple of twigs of thyme. Press the potatoes into patties and stick ’em in there.
Mix the other half of the herbs into sour cream.
Pour pink dry Italian sparkling wine over a candied hibiscus flower in a flute along with a bit of the syrup from the flowers. Debate with your girlfriend the merits of pink vs. white sparkling wine in this drink. She favors white, and you like pink.
Concede defeat.
Poke the goddam Oeufs. They seem a little runny. In the meantime, drain and brush the excess sugar and salt off of the three-pound piece of pork belly you have been marinating in the fridge for six hours. Think about the perfection demanded by Thomas Keller vs. the more stick-it-in-there-and-shrug approach of David Chang.
Plate the meal; rectangular plates with the sour cream in tiny sake cups. The potato pancakes get finished at the truffle station; a smear of truffle butter, a scoop of jarred truffle and mushroom tapenade, a pinch of truffle salt.
Serve and talk about that article in the New Yorker about Michelin reviewers. Curse your technically imperfect, overcooked eggs.
And Bently’s dead. Ran over by a car on the cold road yesterday. His owner came over last night to tearfully tell us. It was widely known that Killer and I loved Bently. It was widely known by Bently and I that he was really my cat, in spite of the technicalities. He walked onto our deck one day three summers ago and bit me, the little shit. Later my wrist turned all purple with infection. I got fucking drunk last night. Bently.
Friday, December 18, 2009
YIN AND YANG
And then she got me the new Momofuku cookbook. Keller and Chang, the yin and yang of cooking right now. Well, we have already ordered our three-pound slab of pork belly for this weekend’s attempt to make Chang’s famous buns.
We have eaten those buns, which we at Mango Pudding Blues believe to be justifiably famous, at Momofuku. Twice. Once on the same weekend as we ate Kellar’s food at Per Se.
Well, it’s been a very good year.
Saturday, December 12, 2009
TOUS LES MATINS DU MONDE
I was downloading (legally! Paid for ’em and everything!) Jordi Savall records and the new
In C Remixed this afternoon when Killer burst in with a bottle of cava and a present for me; Thomas Kellar’s
Ad Hoc at Home.
“What’s the occasion?” I asked.
“I like your spirit,” she said.
Could life be finer?
And yesterday after work popped in to the neighbourhood Italian deli for some parmesan for the mushroom risotto I had promised her. My fromaggier, an amazing fellow, surprised me completely by congratulating me on my new radio show. Turns out he’s a longtime listener of the station, so he caught it and recognized my voice. And he had a new truffled cheese for me to buy, a truffled pecorino. It’s an adequate substitute for the
Boschetto al Tartufo to which I am addicted but is so hard to get here.
Radio show? Ah, I didn’t tell you, dear reader, even though my new radio show is a beam of beautiful bright light in my life, because of my obsession for anonymity. For to tell you of the show would be to reveal my true identity. Suffice to say I play world music for three hours once a month or so, filling the hearts of my listeners with nearly unbearable delight.
You may e-mail me here, at the above link, with an essay of no fewer than 300 words as to why I should tell you and a link to listen. I will consider your application, but I promise you nothing.
Sunday, December 06, 2009
EL BULLI
Our plan, y’see, is to put in for a reservation at El Bulli for 2010. Me and my brother and my girl and his husband. The odds against us gettin’ it are astronomical, and if we get it we can’t afford it, but the food gods tend to look sweetly upon me.
For instance? Once, on a spring friday night in New York city, the Killer and I lit out from our wicked love nest at the not-quite-completely-open-then Standard Hotel for a little walk. We were headed uptown with the idea that we’d perhaps take a cocktail at the bar at the Modern, the lovely Danny Meyer restaurant in MOMA. I had a hankering for their Modern Cocktail: cilantro infused gin and cucumber, I think.
An aside; a beautiful book of cocktails from Danny Meyer restaurants came out this year, and Killer plucked it from the library so I could enjoy the Modern Cocktail at home. I eagerly infused a bottle of Bombay Sapphire for 24 hours with the instructed amount of cilantro, turning it an amazing green. And it was completely awful. It’s still somewhere in the bottom of my freezer. So Danny Meyer; you need to adjust that recipe in the next edition. And you owe me a bottle of gin.
Anyway, the food gods; so we’re strollin’ uptown and we get to the Modern, but the cracks start to appear in my plan, as cracks so often do in plans of mine; for one thing, the bar is completely packed. Duh. Friday night. So much so that I feel compelled to ask the two hostesses at the little podium whether we can actually cram ourselves in there to take a drink. For another, our stroll took us longer than expected, so now it’s dinner time and we’re hungry and without reservations anywhere.
We walk through the packed bar and I become increasingly dismayed. I love the place, but I hate being crowded whilst trying to enjoy a pricey libation. Killer is getting cranky, as she does when her blood sugar is low. Our perfect cocktail is turning into a disaster.
Desperate times, so I suddenly lurch back through the room to the podium, leaving Killer momentarily alone in the crowd, for the most desperate measure.
Hostess one: Hello.
Me: Er, hi. I don’t suppose you have a table in the restaurant.
Hostess one (affects highly practiced smile/grimace that they’re trained to deliver to fools who show up without reservation at one of the hottest restaurants in New York City on a Friday night): I’m sorry sir, but –
Hostess two (who was, until that moment, dealing with someone else, and who snaps her head around to look at me, interrupting her comrade): The two of you? For dinner? We’d love to have you.
Yep, we got a perfect table right in the corner overlooking the sculpture garden, and had one of the finest meals in our little lives there. Completely brilliant. And why we got the table, I’ll never know. I’d like to think she liked the look of me with her steely, professional restaurant eye. But probably she just had a cancellation moments before. In any event, I slickly slipped her a $20 on the way out and thanked her, and for one tiny little moment, my stomach full of truffles and my head full of grappa and bordeaux, I felt like Robert DiNiro.
Also: I had to borrow a jacket from the house! Amazing! She said to me, after telling me she had the table “Now I have to ask you a personal question; are you wearing a jacket under that overcoat? Because jackets are required in the dining room.”
I said no, thinking for a moment that our hopes were dashed. But no! She crisply dispatched her comrade, the one who tried to deny me, off to the back to fetch a jacket! Just like in an old Bing Crosby picture.
So yeah, the food gods smile on Mango Pudding Blues. El Bulli, here we come.
One day I’ll tell you the one about the best sushi in Tokyo.
