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I'm doing a reading of this play I wrote on Sunday the 23rd. It's fun and weird and dumb in the right ways (I hope!). Come out to beautiful Ridgewood, Queens to find out if my hopes are in vain!

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Hosting this show Friday! Tickets here!

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The New York Review of The New Yorker for April 6th 2020

Hello! This week was surprisingly busy! As we move into the part of life when you have scheduled video calls with other humans so you don't feel like you live on an island which is your apartment and the laundry suddenly needs to be done and that requires a bucket and now there is less time to read The New Yorker! I apologize for the delay. Also we got Animal Crossing and it's simulacrum of the regular world is soothing, horrifying, and addictive. ANYWAY, let's talk about this issue!

COVER

I was pretty down on Chris Ware for his work last week and guess what? I THOUGHT THIS COVER WAS FINE. You probably shouldn't be handing your phone with gloves in a hospital though.

TABLES FOR TWO

Woof, this one really caused a lot of consternation in the old brain pan. Hannah Goldfield writes about the restaurants that are trying to make do with delivery in this age o tha rona. On one hand, I love restaurants and want them to stay open and for the people who work there to get paid and be able to live (as a former and hopefully future food service worker I have a bit of skin in the game), but reading about the lush meals that are being delivered/picked up makes me feel a little queasy! Like if you have the money to be ordering in all the time why not just give that money to people and learn to fucking cook something every now and then. The number of people put at risk every time these people want take out from Carbone or whatever is insane. Maybe if you love a restaurant so much just give them money and tell them to make food for people that have a little bit more need than you? I don't know, I ordered wine delivery last week so maybe I should be measuring my own neck for the guillotine.

TALK OF THE TOWN

We lead off with the traditional Trump is bad/stupid/doing terrible things articlet (this is not a typo, I'm trying to make articlet a thing), it was fine.

Next a thingee about people trying to find ways to make a cheap ventilator which was only depressing because the government paid people to try to do this and then those people had their work basically thrown in the trash. There was a whole ProPublica article about it which I just tried to google but about 6 other articles about how fudged the whole ventilator world is came out and I was too bummed.

Then a jammer about Alex Jones who is only worth attention when he's going on a strange nonsensical rant about how he's a man filled with blood or whatever. He's apparently scamming people with bs supplements to prevent the corona virus which is NOT A SURPRISE.

After that something about how people are buying guns, EVEN LIBERALS! How fudging shocking! Everybody in this little thing sounds like a moron.

Finally, something about how theaters are trying to stay open through streaming content, which is admirable. Unfortunately the performer featured in this piece plays the ukulele, hands down the worst instrument in human history. If you'd like to hear a good song played in a way that makes you go "hmmmmm, I like this song but for some reason this version is only making me angry" then the fucking uke (as it is often referred to by people who I immediately try to leave the vicinity of) is for you! Anyway, I hope that Caveat (the club featured in the thing, a place where I have not seen many people I know perform because I am lazy) stays in business but that ukulele mentioned in it is smashed against a wall or rock.

CORONA VIRUS CHRONICLES

I read this article but could not remember anything about it.

COMIC STRIP

This was fine if kind of boring. Again a cartoonist talks about how terrible they are. I swear  I like comics, maybe just not New Yorker comics?

SHOUTS & MURMURS

Did not read.

ANNALS OF MEDICINE

Well this was pretty miserable to read, Eyal Press writes about the consequences of Alabama not expanding medicare funding. This article is filled with heartbreaking stories of people who lack means falling ill and dying and it pretty much seems like it was Alabama's fault. THE WORLD IS REAL COOL RIGHT NOW. This was a very good if extremely sad piece.

A REPORTER AT LARGE

This was not a real rainbow of a follow up! Rachel Aviv tells the tale of Sharon (or Sharoni) Stern, a sad person who thought they had found something in the world of Butoh dance but eventually killed herself. JESUS NEW YORKER EDITORS! CAN YOU GIVE ME A BREAK! Anyway, this story is very sad even without me really knowing what Butoh dancing really is (though someone once told me about how moving it was and then I looked up a video of it and it left no impression (even though I know many dancers I have little to know facility for speaking about it), I do remember telling that person that it looked "cool" because I think I was trying to impress them? I'm pretty sure my trenchant analysis failed that mission). The two other main people in the article, Katsura Kan (the Butoh instructor who Sharon fell under the influence of) and Tibor Stern (Sharon's dad), seem like real jerks!

LETTER FROM YANGQUAN

Did not read.

FICTION

Oh man do I love George Saunders. His ability to tell stories that illustrate the ills of our current reality by showing us ones that are slightly shifted never fail to get my brain working.The stories combined with the challenge of his linguistic tricks that somehow make the stories more emotional (rather than the usual linguistic trick reaction, which make me say "wow, what a cool linguistic trick") also blows my mind. This story is no different, though it is less weird than the usual fare. Presented as a letter from a grandparent to his grandson dated sometime in the near future, it tells the tale of a world who's apathy towards the slow slide to authoritarianism (which, uh duh, we're in the middle of right now!) went unchecked and how those who were/are not directly affected by it will allow it to continue. It made me sad! 

A CRITIC AT LARGE

Elizabeth Kolbert talks about how pandemics shaped human history (this was the subhead of the article so you can probably figure that I do not have a lot to say about it). I don't remember a lot of the article but I DO remember thinking "oooooh, this is INTERESTING" while I read it, so there's that.

BOOKS

Jill Lepore Jill Lepores the hell out of life living alone during our modern emergency and it made me sad (man, this issue made me sad A LOT). Lots of sad stuff about chimpanzees in here if that's your thing (and I hope it isn't you sick FREAK).

BOOKS

Sheila Heti on the letters of Tove Jansson. I never really got into Moomin as stories but Jansson's lines were always really fantastic to look at. I always feel like a real dummy when a book of letters is reviewed because if I ever become famous a collection of my emails will consist of so many of them that read like "look at this video of Kelsey Grammer falling off a stage!" or "here's another version of this comedy bit, I changed the word fuck to fudge, what do you think?" Anyway, Tove sounds cool but I will not be reading a book of her letters.

BOOKS

Did not read.

THE THEATER

Did not read.

MUSICAL EVENTS

Did not read.

POP MUSIC

I had not heard of Yaeji (I rarely hear of good new music. I've definitely entered the age of my life where I'm mostly listening to reissues to stave off the possibility of outwardly liking something current that turns out to be ultra corny) but Hua Hsu made me interested enough to check out her record and it's pretty great so far! Thanks Hua Hsu!

THAT'S IT! A real bummer of an issue for this bummer of a time! Hopefully next week will be more fun! Probably not though! See you next weeeeeeekkkkkkkkkkk!

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The New York Review of The New Yorker for March 30th, 2020

Hello! Welcome to the relaunch of the New York Review of the New Yorker, a series where I, humble New Yorker subscription haver TD Sidell, attempt every week to read and review the New Yorker! This is an old on-again off-again project done last in 2015 (I think) which always crops up whenever I have very little to do. SURPRISE being out of work and trapped at home leaves very little to do SO HERE WE ARE AGAIN! This issue was pretty much a bummer through and through and had waaaaaayyyyyy to many references to Camus' The Plague (I lost count after the 4th, jeez, READ ANOTHER BOOK NEW YORKER STAFF WRITERS) so let's get into talking about this bummer!

COVER

Hey everybody! New York is all cooped up in their homes! Busy landmarks are all but abandoned! This is what this very well executed but pretty banal cover says to me. Artist Eric Drooker has cursed this one poor human with sweeping all of Grand Central and if you haven’t been there, it’s huge. Pretty mean there, Eric. At least this unknown person has something to do all day instead of reviving old projects that were mildly amusing at best AND gets to be in quiet Grand Central which actually seems kind of nice. Ok, mixed meanness and nicesness there, Eric.

TABLES FOR TWO

During this project’s hiatus The New Yorker has gone through a lot of changes. Gone is the Financial Page and in its place is this restaurant column that also at one point had a bar section but that too has been done away with. Usually I read this section thinking “this place sounds nice” and then never eat there. Occasionally there will be an article reviewing a place I’ve gone to or know people who work at and then I’ll read it with glee or anger depending on the complicated algorithm of my opinion of the place/people who run it/people I know that work there and Hannah Goldfield’s. This week it’s more of a state of restaurant world in this time of pandemic told via the goings on at the Num Wah Tea Parlor, one of my favorite places in New York. Turns out EVERYTHING SUCKS!

TALK OF THE TOWN

The thing about talk of the town is that it usually follows a pretty simple formula: the first bit is about politics, the a little slice of life piece, then something about a celebrity or the internet doing something interesting, then something vaguely about the arts, and then a wildcard. Sometimes the order changes but generally these are the things, a few little articlets that are perfect for a short train ride or a wait in medical office of some kind. This week though, OH BOY, do they seem extra dumb.

The political piece, by David Remnick, is about how terrible the president is handling this whole thing, which is NO DOY! increasingly, in this time of ultimate bullshit, it becomes hard to read these types of articles with anything less than a shrug. Everything Remnick says is totally correct but what’s the fucking point? WE ALL KNOW WE HAVE A TERRIBLE PRESIDENT WHO IS TRULY TERRIBLE AT EVERYTHING BESIDES PROMOTING HIMSELF. Having a columnist in a the freaking New Yorker point that out to me with specifics is a real snooze.

Next is a shortie about how terrible delivery people have it now. This is pretty hilarious because I've seen how people who read the New Yorker tip so I feel like 50% of the folks reading this little jammie would be like "yeah, that's fine"

After that a thingee about a kid from Mercer Island, Washington (an upper class suburb just outside Seattle) who made a covid tracking website (not the one I use, I'm all covditracking.com for my getting even more depressed by the second news) that got popular. Now, I grew up in Seattle and knew a bunch of kids like this AND THEY WERE INSUFFERABLE. Like calling cheap fouls while playing pickup basketball at the JCC insufferable. Also, Mercer Island sucks and is built on a landfill.

Then an extremely dumb meditation on toilet paper, the less said about it the better.

Finally a thing about a couple multimedia artists who made a thing where you randomly talk to people on the phone. I've relaxed my previous stance on multimedia artists recently (my previous stance was that they were pretty much awful) but it's hard to even get through even the first paragraph of this without rolling my eyes completely into another dimension. The sentence that did me in was "He had just returned from a two-year trip abroad, during which his algorithm dictated where he lived, taking him to Dubai, Taipei, and rural Slovenia." Aaaaanway I assume that invariably you get connected to someone jerking off when you use their phone thing.

THE POLITICAL SCENE

OH BOY! Susan B. Glasser writes about Never Trump Republicans, or at least one Never Trump Republican's attempt to rally other republicans to their cause. This had a real laugh to keep from crying vibe. The subject of the story was a former PR person who spent their career working for a cutthroat firm that worked against corporate regulation. While I'm not certain of the exact tactics of this firm, I AM sure that it involved lying and obfuscating like they were getting paid for it (which duh, they were).  The irony of someone decrying the acts and tactics of our extremely wet baby president when they themselves paved the way for those acts and tactics throughout their entire professional life is so rich it gave me brain gout. Anyway, SHOCKINGLY, this person spent a whole bunch of money and nothing changed! Ha HA HAAAAAA (sob).

SHOUTS AND MURMURS

Did not read.

ANNALS OF CULTURE

JILL MOTHER FUDGING LEPORE EVERYBODY! J comes through with a history of contagion fiction and even though this piece is patient zero for the pandemic of The Plague references in this issue (that was a little much, I know) it still sparkles. This was a great one.

LETTER FROM CHENGDU

Peter Hessler on his life in the lockdown of China. Weirdly I found this piece very soothing. Maybe it was all the different descriptions of the way people wore their masks? I DON'T KNOW! I kind of fell asleep reading this one.

COMIC STRIP

Chris Ware, much like Miller High Life, is something that I really loved in the early-mid 2000s but now have really lost my taste for. His self deprecating misanthropy schtick seems pretty boring now! Especially coming from a very successful person!

OUR LOCAL CORRESPONDENTS 

I was really dreading Adam Gopnik's piece about New York during the time of Corona, even more so when I checked its length in the table of contents. Luckily it has a lot of photos by Phillip Montgomery. Some of those photos were very affecting (empty subway car/shelves at grocery store/classroom/restaurant, person diligently cleaning Port Authority), others less so (hand inside of plastic glove, rich person looking forlorn from windowsill of very fancy apartment), and one which was kind of both (stockbrokers on the phone outside the stock exchange (boring as hell but one of the dudes has a jacket with the word "Pasta" stitched into it and he's either selling pasta futures (which would have been a good thing to invest in seeing as how my body is now 65% pasta) or he's a stockbroker named like Tony Pasta or whatever and believe me, if I ever get the fuck out this I'm sure as shit unleashing on the world my character "Tony Pasta, Stereotypical Italian Stockbroker" who only invests in gabagool but somehow makes tons of money doing it.)). Without looking at the words I cannot remember any of the stories from this article though!

FICTION

I used to never read the fiction in the New Yorker but now I do. Even though I do have a degree in English and World Literature and should be able to tell you more about this story besides that I was bored by it, I cannot! It's possible I was bored because there was so much talk about tennis in it and oh boy I do not give a fudge about tennis!

ON TELEVISION

Doreen St. Felix gives us more of the what is ______ now that Corona is happening with television filling in the blank. It was fine.

A CRITIC AT LARGE

David Denby spends a few pages talking about how horny Harry Houdini was.

BOOKS

Casey Cep tells me more things amount Mormonism that make me go WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

BOOKS

I've never heard of Anna Kavan before but if I ever get to go to bookstore again I'll buy a copy of Ice because Leo Robson made her sound cool and kind of mean and fucked up and I like that in authors.

THE THEATER

Did not read.

Also did not read any of the poetry or laugh at any of the comics.

THAT'S IT Y'ALL! Another one of these in the "books"! Will I keep doing this? Probably! See you next week! Probably!

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PALS! I messed this week's recipe up! Not to an inedible degree but for sure I put too much of something into another thing so my opinion on the dish being good or not is somewhat invalid. I could make a ton of excuses as to my screw up: we had someone coming over so I rushed, I was making something else fancy that required more of my attention because the thing I was making from Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child was just an hors d'oeuvres, it was hot and nobody thinks that well when it's hot. I'm sure all of those things made some contribution to my fudge up but in the end it was because I did not pay enough attention while making this thing!  Also because the words Teaspoon and Tablespoon are spelled very similarly! What's up with that!  This is an important measurement distinction! yet we use two words that that only two letters apart! This is like if we did, like, inches for inches and then, like, incethes for feet! Now wouldn't that cause a bunch of uncool mix-ups! It makes no dang sense! Anyway, you can probably figure out my screw up by now but let's talk about it! let's talk about how I fudged up some Amuse-Gueule Au Roquefort aka Roquefort Cheese Balls - Cold aka Roquefort Appetizer! 

Obvs I had to get cheese, but then I also had to get more things because these cheese balls are not just cheese rolled into balls, a thing that would probably be just fine without any ornamentation. These cheese balls from Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child needed some butter and green onions and celery (which I boldly tore just two ribs off of a stalk for because I will not be met with a floppy ass celery stalk in my fridge ever again!) and parsley and breadcrumbs. It also required some other stuff that I just had in the house. I got almost everything from the fancy grocery store except for the cheese which I got from the even FANCIER grocery store that is very small and has like 35 things in it. I go there when I want to get some fancy stuff but sometimes I see people like buying their for real like everyday groceries in there and it blows my dang mind. Like, if this is the place where you are getting your milk, where do you get your toilet paper? Anyway one of the 35 things in the store was the fancy blue cheese that I got for this recipe. The shopping was easy except for the part where it's still very hot here and I was afraid that my groceries would slip out of my hand because every inch of my body is sweating 24-7 (like even the space between my fingers! I've never had sweat there till this summer, is it because I'm old now? Fellow olds, did you notice new sweat places as you aged into irrelevance?).

Once I had all the elements together in my kitchen all that was left was the mooshing and the rolling. Looking at the blue cheese I was doubtful about how I was going to moosh it since it seemed pretty solid if crumbly BUT I WAS WRONG, it mooshed up real nice. I mooshed it with 4 tablespoons of butter till it was a smooth paste (also my basketball nickname). Then I dumped in 1 1/2 tablespoons of minced green onion tops, 1 tablespoon of minced celery, a pinch of cayenne pepper a couple cranks of the pepper mill and a tablespoon of cognac. EXCEPT WHOOPS! IT WAS JUST SUPPOSED TO BE A TEASPOON OF COGNAC. This is something I should've gotten from context clues because the instructions called for a few drops of worcestershire sauce or a teaspoon of cognac and it would be insane if the options were a few drop of worcestershire and a TABLESPOON of cognac. Unfortunately much as it occurs when I go to party that I was invited to just because people were being polite, I MADE THIS REALIZATION TOO LATE! The cognac was in there with the cheese and everything else and I had no choice but to forge ahead and try to salvedge my balls (I'm very sorry I said that).

The moosh was more watery than I would've liked because of the excess cognac, so I beat in another tablespoon of butter to try to get it to a rollable and it kind of worked. I very messily rolled out a bunch of things that were kind of like ball shapes that were roughly the 1/2 inch in diameter. I did not measure because my hands were covered in watery cheese ball moosh and I didn't want to ruin my very nice collection of rulers (j/k only a massive nerd would have a collection of rulers, cool guys like me have a massive collections of weird coffee mugs that they won't let anyone drink out of. I still didn't want to ruin my one ruler though). Once they were all rolled out I attempted to roll them in a mix of 1/2 cup of breadcrumbs and 2 tablespoons of mixed parsley, they did not roll super well because of their watery oblong shape. I got them covered in the bread and parsley as best I could and them put them in the fridge to try to help them be less watery and then I was done!

The cheese balls were just fine.! There were just three of us eating and there were like 23 balls so yes there are still uneaten cheese balls stinking up my fridge with their slowly decaying blue cheese selves. I'm sure they would've been better if I had read the instructions correctly but what isn't that true of. They were edible and not sickness inducing and that is the baseline for success in this project so GOOD JOB BY ME! Also a further lesson teaching me to slow down and take my dang time and do things right which is always welcome. Yes this is me trying to find some bright spots in a kind of big fudge up but when life gives you lemons and whatnot. In this case though I gave myself the lemons and so I made lemonade that had too much cognac in it. ANYWAY, if you're having a big party and want a thing that's easy to make and you can read instructions correctly I say give Amuse-Gueule Au Roquefort aka Roquefort Cheese Balls - Cold aka Roquefort Appetizer a try! See you next week!

#tdandjulia #masteringtheartoffrenchcooking #juliachild #amusegueuleauroquefort #roquefortcheeseballscold #roquefortappetizer #fudgeups #thereshouldbedifferentwordsforteaspoonandtablespoon #whatiffeetwereincethes #thetryannyofcelerystalks #thefancystore #oldbodynewsweat #mooshin #mycollections #imveryfunatparties

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Rice is, at best, fine. Rice is a fine thing to put other things on top of but I always found it to be kind of a disappointment when lined up against the majestic noodle or the exotic couscous in this startchy things that you put other things on top of to make good category. I'm not angry with rice, not at all, I do not wish to banish it to ends of the earth like I might with spaghetti squash or american cheese, it is fine where it is. Most of the time though, where it is is not being cooked in my home, even though we have a perfectly fine rice cooker taking up space in our appliance cabinet. We do have rice in our house though and also a lot of onions from our CSA so I decided to try out a recipe that is pretty much rice and onions because, oh boy, that sounds very weird to me and also maybe I've been wrong about rice all along? Maybe eating just rice isn't a sad weird thing that makes me sad to think about? Maybe eating rice by itself can be great and awesome? To figure this out I made Soubise aka Braised Rice and Onions! AND GUESS WHAT? MY QUESTIONS GOT ANSWERED!

I had the bulk of the items for the dish but I still needed the three different kinds of dairy that were required. Luckily the store I went to also had the digestive enzyme that I use to combat my dairy problems so I could safely make a dish that includes cheese, butter, AND whipping cream. Regardless, buying whipping cream sucks! There was no size of whipping cream that I could purchase that would not end in sour whipping cream being in my fridge in a couple weeks, I only needed 1/4 cup for crying out loud. Who uses this much whipping cream? Am I supposed to be using this much whipping cream on a regular basis? Is the rest of the world awash in whipping cream requirements that I haven't been told about? Because I for sure do not need really any whipping cream other than for this dish. I suppose this is why people would go to their neighbor's house to borrow a cup of sugar or whatever but unforch this is not something we do in my building, the only thing I know about my neighbors is that almost all of them have pets while we were expressly forbidden to do so. Anyway, if you want some free whipping cream and can come to Ridgewood Queens, I've got the hook up. I got the cheese (gruyere) and the butter and the too much whipping cream and my digestive enzyme and one yellow onion (we had three onions and the recipe called for 2 pounds worth and I've figured out that one yellow onion is about a 1/4 pound. Hopefully when we end up in a The Road styled ruined hellscape weight measurements will be made with yellow onions) and went home to make some rice and onions.

Cooking this stuff was very easy, so easy that I was able to also make steak at the same time and for the first moment in this project could see a way to make an entire meal from Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child in our tiny New York apartment. This thought was a little frightening. Regardless, I had to blanch the rice which was easy but also annoying because once again Julia Child directed me to blanch a small amount of stuff in a ton of water. In this case it was 1/2 cup of rice in 4 quarts of water, 4 QUARTS OF WATER! Perhaps I'm a real blanching dummy but that seems like too much water for such a small amount of rice. Perhaps some blanching genius out there can set me straight on proper blanching proportions. Though it seemed ridiculous I did it anyway because, as we all know, I'm a tight ass rule following nerd of the highest order. I brought that 4 quarts of water with 1 1/2 tablespoons of salt in it up to a boil and then dumped in my 1/2 cup of rice. I cooked it for five minutes, drained it, and then set it aside still feeling puzzled as to why I had to use 4 QUARTS OF WATER for the task.

During the whole rice fiasco I had sliced my four onions thin and set them aside while I melted 4 tablespoons of butter in our dutch oven. I then tossed the onions around in that butter, coating them nicely. I will maintain that the smell of onions being cooked in butter is one of the finest in human history and why there is not a scented candle or car air freshener of it is a mystery that is beyond comprehension. Once the coating had coated I dropped my blanched in a puzzling amount of water rice in there along with 1/2 teaspoon of salt and about ten cranks of pepper. I stirred it all together a couple of times then covered the dutch oven and put in our country of origin unknown oven which I had preheated to 300 degrees. I left it in there for an hour, stirring every 20 minutes or so, during which I grated probably more than the required 1/4 cup of gruyere (I felt pretty good having restocked on my digestive enzyme) and measured out 1/4 cup of the whipping cream that will certainly sit in the back of our fridge until it just becomes a solid. I took my rice and onions out of the oven added the both the haphazardly and precisely measured dairys as well as two more tablespoons of butter and a little salt and pepper to taste and then I was done.

HOLY SHOOT GUYS THIS STUFF TASTED AMAZING! It blew my damn mind! Rice and freaking onions! I suppose really the dairy did a fair amount of heavy lifting flavor wise too, but this dish was mostly just RICE AND DING DANG ONIONS! Though later I came to realize that this dish was harmful to my gastrointestinal tract in a way that could not be overcome by my beloved digestive enzyme (I will spare you the very strange and gross details (dm me if you want them you gross monsters)) IT WAS WORTH IT! It was rich and creamy and salty and delivered on the promise of its excellent cooked onion smells! Was I wrong about rice? EH, KIND OF! I mean plain old rice is still extremely boring! But this stuff certainly made me think it didn't have to be!  You should make this my e-buds! MAKE THE SOUBISE AKA BRAISED RICE AND ONIONS! SEE YOU NEXT WEEK!

#tdandjulia #masteringtheartoffrenchcooking #juliachild #soubise #braisedriceandonions #ricequestions #riceisfine #riceandonionsandcheeseandcreamisgreat #measuredinyellowonions #digestgold #gastrointestinalpain #itwasworthit

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I did not super enjoy last week's recipe! I also did not enjoy finally throwing out the leftovers a few days ago! They were extremely disgusting! And there were a lot of them! Turns out that a home of two cannot eat dessert for ten before said dessert becomes haunting reminder of the impermanence of all things! I’ve found though that when I run into (and by run into I mean make by own choice) a recipe that bums me out I go back to my culinary lodestar, heaven’s starch, the potato. I also hadn’t made a potato dish since I figured out that the knob on our oven was 2016 polling data level of inaccurate (sorry guys, the personal is the political and my oven is very personal). ALSO, it was a night that was not 100000000000 degrees with 200000000000% humidity AND we had gotten a ton of potatoes from our CSA. ALL THIS COMBINED to lead me to an all time favorite dish, the only for special occasions in my house growing up, Gratin Dauphinois aka Scalloped Potatoes with Milk, Cheese, and a Pinch of Garlic aka Cheese Topping from the Dauphine Region! I was very excited to finally make this but I had run out of my regular pills that had allow me to digest dairy without pain for me and anyone in my localized area but had bought some generic lactaid so it was role of the dice! As I said, we got a bunch of potatoes from our CSA and this dish is legit just potatoes, milk, butter, cheese, salt, and pepper so shopping was a breeze. I walked to the fancy for our neighborhood supermarket I picked up milk and cheese as we had the rest of that jazz at home. I went with gruyere because I like it and it is from Switzerland and that's how I'm interpreting "swiss cheese" now. No holes, I know, but can we all agree that what is thought to be "swiss cheese" is kind of gross to cook with. On a hot sandwich? Very good! Baked in an oven? Kind of a nightmare! Also my nod towards swiss, Jarlsberg, isn't even from Switzerland, it's from dang Norway! I wasn't even faking getting swiss cheese right!  Anyway I got the gruyere and some whole milk and then the generic lactaid and a face mask at a local pharmacy because I thought I'd try those out now and then went home. My partner was home so we split up the duties on prepping the 2 pounds of potatoes, I washed and peeled and she cut them into 1/8 inch slices (I didn't measure because we have a relationship based on trust). We soaked them for a little while in some cold water for a reason that I'm sure was important but I cannot figure out because we just drained them and then I had to dry like a bazillion 1/8 inch potato rounds with a towel. While I did that my partner rubbed our usable on top of the oven and in the oven baking dish with a half a clove of garlic. Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child is really into leaving you with half cloves of garlic and it is very very cool. Next she rubbed the pan with 1 tablespoon of butter and then she grated 1 cup of the gruyere. I was still drying potatoes when she finished, I understand the importance to drying some foods so they cook properly but I very much do not enjoy doing it. Then it was time for everything to go into the economically buttered but wastefully garliced baking dish. The half the potatoes went down in the dish first, then half the cheese, then 1 1/2 tablespoons butter, then what was actually 1/2 tablespoon of salt because of some sort of very specific learning disability that prevents me from reading the difference in the abbreviations of tablespoon and teaspoon, and then a few cranks of the pepper mill. I repeated the process, minus the salt, then boiled a cup of milk and poured it over everything. I turned the burners on the stove and let it all simmer for a minute before putting the dish into the top third of an oven set to 425 degrees. We let the potatoes go for 25 minutes and started watching the season finale of Claws, a show that both makes me never want to go to Florida and allows me to mention Dean Norris' "Sex Gifs" tweet (perhaps the greatest tweet that remains online now that the legendary beans in a movie theater one has been deleted) multiple times per episode. After 25 minutes I looked in on our potatoes and decided they needed 5 more minutes, during which we watched more Claws. After a full 30 minutes I took the potatoes out and they looked like I wanted to live inside them for the rest of my life. THE POTATOES WERE SO SO SO SO SO SO GOOD! I wished we had made double the recipe because we finished those potatoes before the end of Claws (what a cliffhanger! Also, seriously, please make Dean Norris say "Sex Gifs" next season) and they would've made for some excellent leftovers. They were salty and cheesy and potato-ey and had some great texture stuff going on. They brought back memories of special occasions in my family and those memories were not that I had to sit across from my uncle who's breathing was very audible and chewed with his mouth open (an offense that got me sent to a seperate room to eat in and is still crazy annoying to me in other people to this day (OH MY GOD, maybe my punishment for doing it has led me to hate it in others? Perhaps, HOLY MOLY, our most bitter memories as a child imprint upon us the behaviors that anger us the most as adults? OH SNAP, maybe I took one semester of psychology in college!?)). If you are even remotely interested in potatoes or cheese or both I HIGHLY RECOMMEND MAKING THIS DISH! IT IS EASY! IT IS DELICIOUS! Go forth and make Gratin Dauphinois aka Scalloped Potatoes with Milk, Cheese, and a Pinch of Garlic aka Cheese Topping from the Dauphine Region! But probably wait till it isn't so hot out and also till you've gotten your regular digestive enzyme back because the generic stuff from Duane Reade is much less effective! SEE YOU NEXT WEEK! #tdandjulia #masteringtheartoffrenchcooking #juliachild #gratindauphinois #scallopedpotatoeswithmilkcheeseandapinchofgarlic #cheesetoppingfromthedauphineregion #potatoismylodestar #imperminance #enzymediadigestgold #yougetwhatyoupayforwhenitcomestoyourguts #gruyereisswiss #onesemesterofpsychology #claws #deannorris

[apairofcrepeswiththerarestape]

I do not like sweets and other than the occasional creme brulee on my birthday I've never really gone in for dessert either (the childhood mnemonic that instructed one on the difference in spelling between dessert and desert never worked on me as two helpings of dessert sounds terrible). Usually sweets just make me feel gross and not in the way that like savory stuff makes me feel gross which is actually kind of enjoyable. I'm not into cookies or ice cream or cake (why eat boring ass cake when you could have pie) or candy bars or chocolate, I'm a salt dog through and through. There are A LOT of desserts in Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child though and some of them do not seem like nightmares that would leave me writhing in pain on my living room floor cursing myself for dancing once again with that cruel demon sugar. Many of them even feature fruits that are currently in season and require very little actual cooking which is nice because our tiny slanted apartment kitchen gets very hot. So this week I went into that sweet heart of darkness and made some dang dessert (I remember the spelling by thinking that dessert has two s's)! With some dang seasonal fruits! That dessert is called Peches Cardinal aka Compote of Fresh Peaches with Raspberry Puree which directly translates to Cardinal Sins! Ooooooooohhhhhhhhhh this dessert is going to hell according to the teachings of religions that have been the excuse for centuries of violence! So naughty!

I shopped for this recipe according to the directions in Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child without reading them thoroughly. This was unwise as said recipe is for 10 people and my partner and I are only two people and extra dessert is, as I've said, gross. Also this recipe ended up being pretty expensive! So I ended up having way more food than I wanted AND paying a bunch of money for it! I AM VERY SMART! I really felt as if I had taken that mythical test where there was a direction to not answer any questions on the test and failed it. Did anyone else ever hear about this almost certainly apocryphal  test while in school? I never saw the test with my own eyes but it existed like some sort of test boogieman that teachers talked about to scare you into reading directions. It is amazing how much teaching was based on fear when I was a child. ANYWAY I had to buy some fruit so I went to slightly fancier grocery store in my neighborhood and bought 10 peaches, a thing of vanilla extract, and a quart of raspberries. All these things cost more money than I expected them to, this was possibly due to me being unable to gauge how many raspberries were in a quart and so I bought a lot. I still made a face when I saw the total at the checkout counter, a face that I tried to hide immediately because jesus dude you saw the prices of things don't put that on a cashier. I took my sticker shock and my fruit home and got down to business.

Making this dessert took much longer than I thought it would, so long that I ended up not even tasting it till midnight, well after my partner had given up on having dessert and went to bed. There is a lot of sitting and chilling and cooling in this recipe that I should've been more aware of but I'm a go go New Yorker who's addicted to the rat race and has meetings with an anthropomorphic pizza slice on a delayed subway or whatever (actually I did not read thoroughly because I'm lazy and easily distracted). It started simple enough with me simmering 2 1/4 cups of granulated sugar and 2 tablespoons of vanilla extract in 6 cups of water till the sugar dissolved. I added my 10 peaches, I used the requisite 12 inch saucepan so there was lots of room and then brought it back up to simmer. I was then instructed to "maintain just below a simmer" for 8 minutes, I did not do this because it is impossible. Instead I kept is simmering for 8 more minutes and then turned off the heat and let those peaches sit in their syrup for 20 minutes and while it smelled great it looked kind of gross.

Next I had to make the raspberry puree and it was slightly more complicated than it sounded. I was pretty sure I'd just have to dump a bunch of raspberries in a blender and press the button that says puree, but guess what? IT WAS MORE WORK THAN THAT, which is kind of bulllllllllllllstuff! Like the blender says puree and this is a puree! Why are words lies! Wah wah wah! After I finished the fit that brought about these very petty thoughts I got down to that extra work which, guess what? TURNED OUT TO BE VERY SATISFYING! Forcing raspberries through a sieve using the bottom of a plastic bowl is very relaxing! Very messy but very relaxing! And the puree was very pleasing to look at! It had a great, um, raspberry color? That's really the best I've got when it comes to color naming, I understand that thing then the word color is not super descriptive but as I've said, I'm extremely lazy! I put my raspberry mess into a blender with 1 1/4 cup of granulated sugar, set it to "ice crush" (the highest setting which is weird because it doesn't seem like it should be), and blended the hell out of it for 2 minutes or so. What came out was a nearly too sweet for my sweetness averse palette raspberry puree. I celebrated my ability to not fudge this up completely by cornily singing Raspberry Puree to the tune of Raspberry Beret ("Raaaaaaaspberry Puree/The kind I made in our crappy blen-der") and then I put the puree in a bowl to chill in the fridge.

By the time I was done with emotional raspberry puree journey the peaches had soaked for their requisite 20 minutes and it was time to drain them and peel them which was, just as the words made it sound, very gross! The peaches were coated in their syrup and still pretty warm, placing them on a rack over my sink they looked pretty alien. The syrup had made the skin loose and and easy to peel except for the parts of the peach that were not submerged in the syrup, these parts of the peaches were extremely hard to skin! I felt like a real dolt about it! I did my best though to peel the peaches, which through that process became even more alien looking, and I then placed them into a long glass serving platter. Then they also had to chill in the fridge for a while. This was the point where my partner went to bed and I sat up up with my peaches and raspberry puree for another hour or so. When the peaches and raspberry puree were no longer hot and chilled respectively I combined them in the serving dish and let them cool together for a little while and get even more alien looking. I waited and hoped they wouldn't hatch.

Later, late into the night, I took one of the peaches out and put it in a bowl and poured some of the puree over it, it looked only slightly less like it was going to crack open and spawn something that would attach itself to my face, then I grabbed a spoon and dug in. It was pretty good. The next day, after leaving them in the fridge for around 24 hours, I ate two more and my partner had one and they were just as good. Not good enough for us to eat the other 6 peaches that are currently sitting in our fridge soaking in raspberry goo and perhaps spawning life, but good. If you were going to a party, perhaps one for an HR Giger fan, this would make for an excellent dessert to bring, don't just make it for yourself at home. THIS IS A PARTY DESSERT ONLY! So go make this for like a late summer BBQ for goths or something! See you next week!

PS If you enjoy these weird food ramblings, I'm hosting a comedy cooking show on Sunday August 12th at a gallery in Chinatown called Essex Flowers. It's called Everybody Gets Soup, starts at 7:30pm, and is free! So come by, see some comedy, and watch me sweat all over myself with fear!

#tdandjulia #pechescardinal #compoteoffreshpeacheswithraspberrypuree #cardinalsins #masteringtheartoffrenchcooking #juliachild #notoneforsweets#dessertsbyhrgiger #readllthedirectionsfirst #thepureesettingisamyth 

[apairofcrepeswiththerarestape]

Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child is filled will all sorts of anachronistic bull fudge that no one would ever undertake again in a million years unless they were doing a project like this. Perhaps the most anachronistic bull fudgey fudge is the idea that one could make giant ass meals with courses and hors d’oeuvres and desserts in big houses with chairs and tables and accurate ovens that aren’t slanted so sometimes you have to rotate your pans to make sure things cook evenly rather than the tiny hovels that most of us cook our spaghetti eaten over the sink in. Luckily this project is just about making one of these things at a time because if I had to make a whole party out of this nonsense I’d lose my dang mindgrapes. There is no section in of Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child that better illustrates this anachronistic bull fudge than “Cold Buffet” which imagines a world where there’s a whole other spread of cold food that you eat on your couch in front of the tv before you get to hot food that you eat on the couch in front of your tv. I mean we watch a lot of tv on Sunday nights (you can eat a lot during the Claws->Sharp Objects->Succession->Last Week Tonight almost four hours of power (in this case power means the power of my body integrating with my couch)) but if I make all the food beforehand then that’s my whole Sunday! I did want to dive into the cold buffet section as my partner was busy and it was hot and the thought of cooking in our hot tiny slanted kitchen just for myself was a little too much to take. I turned to the first thing in that section and made it! It was Champignons a la Grecque aka Mushrooms a la Grecque aka Mushrooms like a Greek Lady! And it was pretty good! Though I would not suggest eating it alone for dinner! Calling this dish Champignons a la Grecque is kind of deceptive, I mean no doy the main ingredient of this dish is mushrooms but it would not be anything without the Court Bouillon that the mushrooms are cooked in. The nice thing about Court Bouillon is that it composed of mostly things one might have in their kitchen already and that it tastes very good. I pretty much only had to pick up some mushrooms to make this whole thing happen, since the bouillon is just regular ass herbs cooked in water. I did have to get celery seeds and a lemon too because despite how many lemons I buy I always need to get a lemon. It also seems like there is always a rotten lemon in my fridge or in our hanging wire basket where we put unrefrigerated produce (we have not settled as a household if lemons should go in the fridge or not so we just switch back and forth randomly). Was I given a low level curse by a bruja (also, please, my fellow white people, stop calling yourself brujas! There's a super long history of dumb ass white people magic bullshit for you to spend your free time fudging around with! Go like, do a celtic chant around a lake or something (though constantly needing to buy lemons would be a perfect petty white bruja curse!))? Probably not! I got the lemon and the celery seeds and the mushrooms, 1 lb of plain old common mushrooms, from the local grocery store and carried them home bagless because I thought it might look cool (it probably didn't)! Making the Court Bouillon was easy as hell! I put 2 cups water, 6 tablespoons olive oil, 1/3 cup of lemon juice, 1/2 tablespoon of salt, 2 tablespoons minced shallots, 6 parsley sprigs, 1/8 teaspoon each of celery seeds/fennel seeds/dried thyme, 12 peppercorns, and 6 coriander seeds in a saucepan and tuned on the heat. It seemed pretty arbitrary and was extremely annoying to use 12 peppercorns and 6 coriander seeds but if you start questioning these recipes right off the bat it’s a real slippery slope! I could just be throwing whatever garbaggio I’ve got in this stuff. I simmered all these very accurately measured items in the covered saucepan for ten minutes and then the bouillon was done! AND HOLY MOLY IT SMELLED REALLY GOOD! From there I dumped my one pound of mushrooms into the broth, tossed them around, and let them simmer for another ten minutes. I took my mushrooms out with a perforated spoon and set them aside so I could boil down the bouillon to an "almost syrup" (again, this is my nightmare instruction). I probably did not let it go long enough because I'm a deeply nervous nelly so the bouillon was not as thick as I hoped it would be, still I poured it over the mushrooms and sprinkled a little minced parsley over it and it was done! These mushrooms tasted excellent! They reminded me of the marinated mushrooms my parents would get when they spent all sunday watching cooking shows in the tv room! This was a practice that I deeply hated because those shows had nothing to offer a 4-17 year old me! Co-incidentally one of those shows was Julia Child! Spooky, right? Or maybe it is not spooky but just annoying that we are all very dumb when we are young and wish we were not! And then we look around at young people and want to shake them and tell them to be less dumb but they don't even know that they're dumb and us telling them that they're dumb will only make them act dumber in retaliation for our old decrepit asses telling them anything! Or maybe we want a chance to correct our own dumbness and look at younger people as an opportunity to do so! Is this why people have children or become teachers? BEATS ME! Woof! That got a little intense! Anyway I ate a bunch of these mushrooms and they were very good and then there were some leftover and when my partner came home she ate some and she agreed and then later I finished them and drank the bouillon that was left in the bowl because it too was very good! I know that was gross! So go ahead and make these dang  Champignons a la Grecque aka Mushrooms a la Grecque aka Mushrooms like a Greek Lady! You don't have to make a whole big meal out of it, just like, put them in a salad or something! See you next week!

#tdandjulia #masteringtheartoffrenchcooking #juliachild #champignonsalagrecque #mushroomsalagrcque #mushroomslikeagreeklady #differenterasdifferentmeals #ourslantedkitchen #claws #sharpobjects #sucession #lastweektonight #sucessionisthebestofthoseshows #nomasblancobrujas #lemoncurses #almostsyrup #memories #youthiswastedontheyoung 

[apairofcrepeswiththerarestape]

TDANDJULLIETES, the last couple of weeks have not really been a great time for this project! I had to bake, something I'm evidentially not very good at, and nearly shattered myself making mayonnaise by hand, which was a fool's errand and possibly whitest thing I've ever done (and I've seen Pearl Jam many times). I needed an easy win, so I turned my eyes to something simple, just some damn steak cooked in butter. I had some great steaks thanks to my friends at Home Place Beef (look, if you find this pandering obnoxious send me some free stuff and I can start repping whatever you like!) so it was simple choice, plus I had friends coming over and for once I wanted to talk to people rather than listen to them from talk about things from the kitchen where I was closely watching some onions brown or some such bs. I did want to impress these friends a little so I picked a slightly fancier steak cooked in butter recipe than the basic one in Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child. That's how I came to make Bifteck Saute Bercy aka Pan-Broiled Steak, with Shallot and White Wine Sauce! IT WAS VERY EASY AND THAT WAS A DAMN RELEIF!

I had to buy two shallots for this thing and that was it! I had the steaks already! I just had to defrost them and this time I put them on a plate rather than just on the refrigerator shelf thus preventing it from looking like a real Dexter situation in there (remember when Dexters walked the earth? I still think of that show when I tie my shoes, also how did that guy stay so thin when he ate ham and eggs for breakfast every morning?). I had butter and white wine and salt and pepper too so I was relaxed as hell before I made this. I was so relaxed as hell that I spent all day outside the house rather than pacing and looking at the recipe over and over to make sure I didn't forget anything. Unbeknownst to my guests, I breezed into my apartment merely a half hour before they were due to arrive (they were late, I wouldn't mention it if they hadn't said that actually in France it's polite to be late) with the knowledge that cooking this whole mess would take 20 minutes tops. I was cool and calm and unfortunately covered in horsefly bites but that is not really germane to this whole thing other than to let you know that you should never go outside.

I chopped up my shallots and and dried off my steaks, who knew that when I started this whole thing I'd spend so much time drying meat? I had no idea that one even had to dry meat in the past, most of the time I felt like cooking meat was pretty simple; remove meat from package (usually paper or plastic but occasionally that package is an actual cow), place meat on or in or near heat source, wait. Anyway, I dried the two steaks I had picked out of my lush Home Place Beef box (don't be gross), a strip and a ribeye that cumulatively weighed the 2+ a little bit pounds that were required from the recipe, and set them aside. I did not trim off the excess fat on the steaks as instructed because I was tired from being outside all day and if I'm going to eat some steak I might as well get some the delicious fat that comes with it. Our friends showed up and it was time to cook them.

Cooking steaks in butter is great and I have no idea why I've ever done any other way of cooking them. All you do is get 1 1/2 tablespoons each of oil and butter and then get that hot in a pan and then put your steaks in there. You can leave it in for a short as 3 minutes or as long as you want really depending on how much you want to cook them. I threw my very very dry steaks into that hot pan for 3 minutes and then flipped them over for another three minutes because I like some rare steak sometimes. Also people were over and one of them was instagram storying me and I did not want my nervous cooking stance displayed on the internet (why do you think these are never videos) so I wanted the whole thing over before. I removed the steaks from the pan and set them aside so I could make the sauce. I had a brief moment of panic as I could not find a vessel to pour the hot cooking fat into but then I realized we had many bowls and bowls are vessels. I blamed my relaxation for my mental lock and made a note to be more uptight next time. Next I dumped another tablespoon of butter into the pan with shallots and cooked that up for a minute. Then I poured in a 1/2 cup of white wine, scraping up the meat cooking leavings with a rubber spatula as it cooked. Now the recipe calls for one to boil the wine down rapidly but I'm very paranoid about ruining the fancy pans we got as a gift so I chickened out on the rapidly part of boiling it down. Eventually the stuff in the pan gained the mysterious viscosity of "almost syrup" and I took it off the heat. I stirred in 5 more tablespoon of butter because LET'S FUDGING LIVE and some parsley to offset the previous statement and then the sauce was done.

I poured the sauce over the steaks that had gotten a little cold because of my pan ruining fear based sauce making delay but you know what? IT DIDN'T MATTER, THE STEAKS WERE GOOD AS HELL! Cook your damn steaks in some freaking butter! You're making steak anyway ya big dummy! Ride that buttered steak all the way to the grave! We had a great time eating and talking and drinking the many bottles of wine that were brought and then they took me out to a local tiki bar and I drank too many tiki drinks and one of us got really mad about french fries and made another one of us got up to the food counter and tell the food providers about it and despite my slight embarrassment that person was right and we got some free fries and I was a little too drunk and then I wobbled home and felt like garbaggio for around 2 days afterwards! BUT THAT'S THE MARROW OF LIFE MY FELLOW DEAD POETS SOCIALATORS! So this is not just an endorsement of Bifteck Saute Bercy aka Pan-Broiled Steak, with Shallot and White Wine Sauce but also of having people over even if you all eat around a coffee table in your living room! SO DO BOTH OF THEM! MAYBE AT THE SAME TIME! ENJOY FOOD AND FELLOWSHIP! SEE YOU NEXT WEEK!

#tdandjulia #masteringtheartoffrenchcooking #juliachild #biftecksautebercy #panbroiledsteakwithshallotandwhitewinesauce #homeplacebeef #sendmestuff #aneasyone #nevergooutside #whendextersroamedtheearth #LETSFUDGINGLIVE #toomanytikidrinks 

[apairofcrepeswiththerarestape]

We got a CSA, I KNOW! After 5 years of living in New York and a lifetime of being a middle class white person it's about dang time right? And yes, ALL THE JOKES HAVE BEEN TRUE! We have more lettuce than we know what to do with! So many root vegetables! What am I, Dr. Root Vegetable over here? I'm like 20% root vegetable now, right? Anyway, much like our big box of beef (from the wonderful people at Home Place Beef, still looking for more sponsors out there) I wanted to work all of these actually very delicious vegetables into this whole project. This last week we got a lot of beets and I knew there had to be a plethora of beet recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, but I was totally wrong! There was only one! And that's how I came to make this week's recipe, Salad a la D'Argenson aka Rice or Potato and Beet Salad! I do not know why this salad has it's name! I don't know who or what D'Argenson is or why a beet salad is named after her/him/them/it! Regardless, I thought this would be one easy recipe but I was wrong! It was one recipe that hid two other recipes one of which was fine and one that sucked and I'll never do again and cannot believe that anyone does in real life! What the fudge am I talking about? READ ON MY TDANDJULIETES (this is what I'm calling you all now)!

I decided to go with the potato version of this because of my longstanding and oft cited potato affection and also because rice salad sounds super gross! Especially when you consider that this salad has copious amounts of mayonnaise in it! I suppose it would've been more adventurous to make a rice and beets and mayo salad but I'm only good for one recipe that sounds super gross every couple of months and I did the cooked cucumbers one six weeks ago. Sorry to all the people who want me to eat gross garbage! All I needed to buy for this thing was 2 pounds of potatoes and some eggs, we had everything else we needed at home because of our lush CSA bounty. I brought my 5 potatoes without a bag and 6 eggs in a package up to the counter of the grocery store, looked on as the cashier weighed the potatoes in two batches because I didn't put them in a bag, then put them plus the eggs into my non-New Yorker tote (of course we have one but enough already with the New Yorker totes everybody! We all know you only read Shouts and Murmurs) and shuffled on home.

The first step on this journey to the center of potato and beet salad was obviously cooking the 2 cups each of potatoes and beets, I boiled, diced, and set them aside without incident. After that the first of my two sub recipes revealed itself, I had to make a vinaigrette! This was also not hard, making my own salad dressing was one of the first cooking things I ever learned. A long time ago I lived in a crazy red walled apartment with an older roommate who cooked and smoked constantly, their food was also a little too spicy for me to handle, I think all the smoking had deadened their taste buds. Regardless, they were horrified to see that I had brought some sort of Paul Newman monstrosity into our apartment so they took me aside and taught me how easy it was to make your own salad dressing (though I will say the phrase "make your own salad dressing" is in retrospect very gross, I'm sorry I said it!). My other roommate at the time did a lot of heroin and often nodded out on the couch, I just thought he was very tired, I was very dumb about many things besides salad dressing. Anyway the Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child version of vinaigrette is very simple you take 2 tablespoons of wine vinegar, 1/8 teaspoon of salt, 1/4 teaspoon dry mustard (you can omit this if you like but I do not know why you would, mustard rules), and beat that all together till it all dissolves. Then you slowly drip in 6 tablespoon of olive oil, beating all the while, and then add a pinch of pepper and you're done. Alternately you can just dump all this stuff in a jar and shake it around for 30 seconds or so but I wanted to stay as hands on as possible, I would regret this dedication later. I dumped my boiled potatoes and beets as well as 4 tablespoons of minced shallots in a bowl with the vinaigrette, covered it, and set it in my fridge. This all marinated for about 24 hours during which I did many things, none of which are your dang business (j/k I cannot remember what I did during that time, my life is very boring!).

I woke up the next day feeling very good! All I had to do was boil a little CSA cauliflower, grate a little carrot, make some mayonnaise, put it together with the marinating vegetation and I'd have a nice salad to bring to the dinner party I was going to later. Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child offers a lot of different choices when it comes to this salad, you can add 1 cup of meat or other vegetables or pretty much whatever to it. As long as you have the beets, the potatoes, the shallots, the vinaigrette, and the mayo you can go nuts with the rest. Having prepared everything else, all I had to do was make the mayonnaise and that's just some eggs and oil mixed together, easy right? NO! THIS WAS NOT EASY! THIS IN FACT SUCKED! Now, there is a recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child that allows one to make Mayonnaise with a food processor and I do have a food processor and I definitely should have used that food processor but I wanted to stay hands on with this AND IT WAS VERY DUMB OF ME! I SHOULD HAVE USE THE TECHNOLOGY OFFERED BY OUR MODERN SOCIETY AND LEFT BEHIND THE DARK AGES OF MAKING MAYONNAISE COMPLETELY BY HAND! I'm sure you want to hear about how bad it was for me so keep reading.

The gory details go a little like this, I started by warming a mixing bowl with hot water then wiping it dry, cracked three egg yolks into it, then beat them till they were sticky. I then added a tablespoon of wine vinegar, 1/2 tablespoon of salt, and 1/4 tablespoon of mustard, I beat that all in and was feeling pretty confident. Then came adding the oil, Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child really emphasizes that this is the most important part of the whole thing. Though it suggest that beginners to homemade mayo stick to only using 1 1/2 cups of olive oil, my oily hubris caused me to go all the way up to 2 cups even (I have moderate oily hubris, I did not attempt the maximum allowance of 2 1/4 cups). At first I was very careful, dripping the oil into the eggs slowly just as I was instructed, beating the whole time, watching it, making sure the oil was being absorbed. It was going well, it was starting to look like mayonnaise, but then my vigilance slipped a little and I started to pour more of the oil in. I was impatient, do you know how long it takes to drip in a half a cup of olive oil? A LONG DANG TIME. The mayo was still looking like mayo though but then it got harder to beat, so I dripped in a little more vinegar (this was the remedy according to Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child for a mayo that was getting too "stiff"), and then I got real wild with the oil. I started really dumping it in the mix in large glugs out of my measuring cup and it seemed fine but would keep getting "stiff" so I added more vinegar. Eventually I was out of oil and everything seemed fine but then I stopped beating and turned my back for a moment and when I turned back around what was once a promising batch of home made mayonnaise was now a bowl of grossness. It was disheartening.

There is a remedy for rescuing a turned mayonnaise in Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child but I felt like such a dope that I only halfheartedly tried it, it didn't really work anyway. I had used the bulk of my olive oil and eggs so starting over required a return to my local supermarket, leaving my bowl of failure on the kitchen counter (later I would dump it all in the toilet since it was far too viscous for our kitchen drain and much too liquid to throw away in our very nice trash can). I returned home and luckily my partner had finished work so she could help me retry the cursed condiment, and she did. The second attempt at mayonnaise was much more successful but only slightly less tedious. I did not rush, I did not over pour the oil, but I did feel like I would be beating that dumb garbage for the rest of my natural life, it was like forever in there. After the moon waxed and waned and a baby learned to walk and summer had come and gone I finally finished beating in all of the oil, the concoction both tasted a looked like mayonnaise and then I finally rested in the retirement home that I had been moved to during the process because by then I was old and grey. I minced 4 tablespoons of parsley and then finally this damnable mayonnaise was done with.

I dumped the mayo into the marinating stuff and the salad was done AND IT WAS GOOD SALAD! The mayo was a little bitter because I used cheap olive oil I think! Otherwise though is was tasty and despite my infirmed and aged body I was able to carry it to our friends' house and they liked it too!  Which was great because if they hadn't I might've cried because the whole mayo affair had left me pretty emotionally brittle! So yeah, you should make this salad for picnics or parties or whatever but DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES hand make your own mayo (also a very disgusting turn of phrase)! You can certainly make your own mayo but use the tools given to us my humankind's ingenuity! LIVE IN THIS MODERN WORLD! DO NOT PINE FOR THE OLDEN DAYS! EVERYBODY DIED QUICK WITH TERRIBLE TEETH BACK THEN! So yes, I do endorse making Salad a la D'Argenson aka Rice or Potato and Beet Salad! And if you make the rice version let me know because it sounds pretty nasty! See you next week!  

#tdandjulia #masteringtheartoffrenchcooking #juliachild #saladaladargenson #riceorpotatoandbeetsalad #theerecipesinone #neverahandmakethemayo #itwaslikeforeverinthere #thismodernworld #oilyhubris #ricesaladsoundsgross    

[apairofcrepeswiththerarestape]

Food buds, I've never been one for baking, I don't really like sweets and it seems very exacting. Like with regular (as in not doing a project where you follow recipes to the best of your ability as a part of some sort of quest to... learn more about myself? Learn more about food? Make something good to share with people? Fill up the hours in my life before death takes me into the void? I should really figure out why I'm doing this whole thing) cooking you can just make adjustments along the way or fudge up and discover a whole different facet of a dish, but with baking it's like you screw around and end up with a plate full of trash that will sit lonely and untouched in the break room of your office. People will tell you that it was nice to bring in cookies but every time you go back to refill your water bottle you'll see them siting there, uneaten, and know that your coworkers were just being kind. You'll know that they've all talked about it too, how bad your baked goods are, or else someone would've tried them right? How has no one tried them? How are there still just 7 cookies on that plate! Also I'm very much not into dude bread baking instagram. How many loaves of homemade sourdough loaves cut in half photos do I have to look at for crying out loud! I get it, you bake bread and the bread has lots of holes! Keep your damn holes to yourself! I know it's tough getting older, my dudes, and we all need projects (I'm not really one to talk) but seriously, why can't you get into roots rock or DSA or crossfit (j/k please don't show me your crossfit photos) like the rest of our cohort? All this has contributed to my baking avoidance, I mean that and also the fear that I would be terrible at it. I knew that one day I'd have to take on at least one of the many baking recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child and this week I did! I made Galettes au Fromage aka Cheese Wafers! And remember way back in the beginning of this project where I predicted that there'd be a week where I ended up crying on the floor covered in flour? THIS IS THE CLOSEST I'VE GOTTEN!

All I needed for this recipe was cheese and butter because that's pretty everything that's in these wafers. There's also flour but we have that, as well as the eggs and salt and pepper and cayenne that's also in there. I did have to go the fancier supermarket that's in our neighborhood, the one where you can drink a beer and eat cheetos while watching a World Cup match (the beer was good, I tried not to think about how long the cheetos had been sitting there, but also CHEETOS ARE GOOD), because as you should know by now the cheeses at our closest supermarket are trash. The recipe AGAIN asked for swiss cheese or a "mixture of cheeses" I got Gruyere because it is a cheese that is not gross that is from Switzerland and Jarlsberg because I felt guilty about not a cheese with holes in it. Then I was done shopping, this would be the most chill part of this whole thing.

Basically all I had to do before baking these cheese wafers was grate the cheese and put all of the ingredients together in a bowl and like moosh them up. I feel like my first mistake came in the cheese grating. We have in our home a pretty standard box grater and that offers three different sizes (gauges? volumes? shapes? levels of coarseness?) of grated cheese to make but Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child offers no guidance as to which of these cheese shapes to make. When I think of a grated cheese my mind drifts to the bags of orange weirdness that we would use to top our after school boboli's with over at my friend who's family must've, like, owned a boboli factory with all the boboli's they had (we did not boboli in my house). With those wistful days of trying to be convinced that His Boy Elroy was a really great band in mind I immediately went right for the largest of shapes (cheese bits? dairy forms? fart blobs (for my lactose set)? We really need a better cheese grating vocabulary), this may have been the error that doomed this fateful trip upon the good ship Baking Some Cheese Wafers (it's a cargo vessel).  Once I had made my grave grating gaffe I mixed the 1/2 pound of cheese with a half pound of butter, a 1/2 cup of flour, 1/4 teaspoon of pepper, a pinch of cayenne pepper, and come salt to my taste which is surprisingly not very salty into a mixing bowl. I mooshed it all around with my hand and it felt wrong, not just my hand which felt super gross but also instinctually this mix did not feel like something that would make into a nice looking wafer of cheese, it felt like it would look like something that sat in a breakroom for an entire week before someone just had the mercy to throw it away. It felt too lumpy, like I should've used the smaller holes on the grater. Unforch you cannot unmoosh a moosh up and you can't ungrate a cheese and then grate it again with a smaller hole size on your box grater and I did not want to go out and get some more cheese so I pressed on.

Making the wafer shapes themselves was also not really cool or fun, the moosh was very sticky so the instruction to gather up a tablespoon sized bit, roll that bit into a ball, and then flatten into a 1/4 inch thick cake was almost impossible. I finally got a shape that I could squint at and then use the word cake to describe so it was time to do a test wafer. I took my sad cheese moosh and put it on a lightly buttered baking sheet then put that baking sheet into an oven that was heated to 425 or at least something close to that. I left it in the oven for 12 of the instructed 10-15 minutes because after 11 I could smell my potential cheese wafer starting to burn and it took me a minute of panic and sadness to remove it from the oven. What came out was like a burnt stiff doily that reeked of singed cheese, this was obviously not what a Galette au Fromage was supposed to look or smell like. This was just a test, however, and Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child had some solutions for me: "If it spreads out more than you wish, or is too fragile, knead in 1/4 cup more flour and make another test." This is what I did, I added more flour to my moosh and tried again, this 1/4 cup of flour only marginally improved things. While the doily was less burned it still did not look like anything anyone should ever eat. It was then that I realized I had no idea what a cheese wafer should look like, so I went to google and looked up Gallete au Fromage, the search's return could only be described as disheartening. It seemed impossible that my moosh would ever look anything like the images produced by our blue-red-yellow-blue-green-then-red overlords. I was determined to finish these wafers though and also determined to at least make something solid that I could throw in the trash rather than have a weird bowl of moosh that I would be concerned about disposing of until I just decided to throw in the toilet. I added more flour and made another test wafer and while it looked nothing like any of the photos I'd seen, it passed for a cookie and I knew that this was my best chance. I took all my moosh and turned it into 1 tablespoon sized cake shapes and put them on the baking tray. I brushed my sweet deformed angles with a mixture of one egg beaten with a 1/2 teaspoon of water and topped them with more cheese (this time grated to the second smallest size) and put them in the oven. Twelve minutes later I had some sort of thing.

Of course by the time I finally decided to do the actual baking my standards had lowered some. The instructions for the recipe implied that I would need two baking sheets but I only have one baking sheet so I managed to get all of my moosh blobs onto it. This meant that once I removed the baking sheet from the oven I didn't have individual wafers as much as a topography of cheese wafer planet. A planet that was certainly the most appetizing of the series of moosh experiments but still far from what the internet had shown me. I got out my spatula and separated them into cookie size shapes and let them cool on a rack. They were fine, they tasted fine, mostly they tasted like butter and flour and the little bit of cayenne pepper that I put in the moosh. I ate a couple and my parter ate a couple, these are not wafers you could or should eat a bunch of at once. She took a few to work, I'd eat one every now and then. By the end of the week the plate sat on our counter, wafers in tact, a reminder of how much I dislike baking. I threw them away. WOOF! That got a little dark there at the end! What is this the fiction section of the New Yorker? ANYWAY, do not make these dumb wafers! They are bad! Or at least I am bad at making them! I will not try again because even if I made them right I'd have too many very delicious cheese wafers that would only make me feel sick to eat! SO don't expect me to make Galettes au Fromage aka Cheese Wafers for your party! I won't do it! See you next week!

#tdandjulia #masteringtheartoffrenchcooking #galettesaufromage #cheesewafers #bakingisnotforme #breaddudesofinstagram #imreadingthenewyorkerfictionsectionagain #moosh #NOTHANKS 

[apairofcrepeswiththerarestape]

New #mugsbytd going up on @dksomethings soon

[apairofcrepeswiththerarestape]

Summer is here my epals so you know that means, time to get that swimsuit body ready, at least that's what the dude who hosts the 9 minute power plank workout video I do once every two weeks tells me. I, however, am ignoring him as well as the very young in shape person who once told me that "you make abs in the gym but keep them in the kitchen" while I was eating a bagel by continuing this project during which I've already consumed one entire cow's lifetime butter output so far. Also I think six pack abs are not possible for my old broken body, even if I work out all the time I feel like I'd top out at Jack Palance with his shirt off. As a sop towards health I did decide to make fish this week, so that is something, right? Fish is healthy, right? It feels healthier I guess? You never see a fat fish (yes I did just do a google image search to verify this and it seems like there are a lot of fat goldfish but that's really more about their owners), I mean whales are pretty tubby but they're not actually fish. The fish section of Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child is mostly like lobster and scallops and whatnot but there are a few like real fish recipes in there and that's how I got to this week's dish Thon a la Provencale aka Tuna or Swordfish with Wine, Tomatoes, and Herbs aka Tuna Provencal aka Tuna from Provence!

Despite the name of this dish having the word tuna in its french iteration, Julia Child gave me the option of using swordfish and I like swordfish so I decided as I was going to the fancy supermarket to get fish I would use swordfish. This was a good decision because swordfish was on sale at the fancy supermarket, though it didn't totally matter because even with the sale SWORDFISH IS DANG EXPENSIVE! I mean the tuna was even more expensive but still I needed to buy 3 pounds of fish meat so perhaps there was no fish available that would not have put a dent in my pocketbook (though this is my fault for buying a very dentable pocketbook, look the guy at the store said tin was the "metal of the future" how was I supposed to know he was putting one over on me? I know I shouldn't have let my subscription to Metal Fancy expire last year but you know those weekly issues were just piling up on my nightstand and besides everyone a Metal Fancy tote now anyway!). Luckily the other components to this thing were not too expensive: a pound of tomatoes, a yellow onion, and some tomato paste. I stuffed it all in my backpack and went home to cook this expensive fish in a way that hopefully wouldn't ruin it and send me into a guilt spiral about spending so much and money and how wasteful I am that ends with me googling which kind of burlap sack I should wear all the time.

  Before I got to even the first cooking of all these things (of course this was another classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child cook a bunch of stuff once and then cook it all again which is my life now! Whenever I'm done doing whatever the heck this thing is I'm going to buy a slow cooker and throw things in there for like a month) I had to marinate my swordfish. I got out a knife, removed the skin, and cut my 3 pounds of swordfish into pieces that could fit into the marinating vessel. That marinating vessel was a glass baking dish that I had put 1 tablespoon of salt, 2 tablespoons of lemon juice, 6 tablespoons of olive oil and 1/8 teaspoon of pepper into. I then put my very reasonably sized pieces of swordfish in there, basted them with all that mess, covered the whole thing in wax paper and placed it gently in the fridge for about 1 hour and 45 minutes. I periodically (every 20 minutes or so) basted and turned the fish which was equal parts gross and fun depending on how much I thought about raw fish sitting in a pool of liquid that had a real alien embryonic hue to it. After my glee/horror basting cycle was over I took my large fish bits out of the alien baby juice and dried it with paper towels, then it was finally time to cook things.

To start I had to peel and juice my pound of tomatoes and for the first time it felt more like a chore than anything else. I think about halfway through the pound I stopped having fun and starting worrying that I might be peeling these tomatoes forever. Maybe the joy or removing the skin from a thing has left me? I certainly hope so, it was starting to get a little weird. Then I had to brown my marinated fish in 3 tablespoons of olive oil for a "minute or two" on each side and it smelled great. I set the fish aside again and threw the onion, which I had minced previously, in the skillet for 5 minutes then added the tomatoes, 2 cloves of mashed garlic, 1/2 teaspoon of oregano, 1/4 teaspoon each of thyme and pepper, and a few of cranks of a pepper mill. This all continued to smell very good. I put the fish and then the tomatoes into my appropriate for both the stove top and oven baking dish which is a product that was harder to find than I thought it would be. I covered it all with aluminum foil, turned on the burners, got it simmering, and then it was oven time.

Now y'all regular readers know about our oven temperature issues, I did not know we had them until I finally bought an in oven thermometer and then a very much knew that we had very big oven temperature problems. This recipe called for a little bit of oven temperature fiddling that was not going to happen. I placed my covered in foil simmering fish and tomatoes mess into a very accurately pre heated to 350 degree oven and that was fine. After 15 minutes I poured in a cup of dry white wine and was then instructed by Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child to turn the oven down to 325 once the fish was simmering, this was not going to happen. Even if I could've determined when the fish was simmering in a closed oven there was no way I could adjust my janky old oven to 325, the knob is as accurate as of my estimation that a photo taken by the self facing camera on my phone will be flattering. I turned the knob down to a point where I guessed it would keep things around 325 for the last half hour of cooking and prevent this fish from visiting gastrointestinal horror on me or my guests. After that half hour I removed my swordfish hunks and cooked down all the vegetal matter and its corresponding juices till there was about a 2 cups of stuff in the baking dish (this was, as always, a totally wild guess) then I stirred in 2 tablespoons of tomato paste. Unforch, tomato paste comes in cans that are much larger than two tablespoons so now we have this very sad half can of tomato paste covered in foil in our fridge where it will live until we finally decide to throw it away, which I hope does not end up being metaphor for the end of my life. I stirred in the paste and let that simmer for one moment, which was the exact direction in Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, do not ask me how long a moment is. I took it off of the heat and beat in a paste of 1 tablespoon flour and, of course, 1 tablespoon butter and finally 3 tablespoons of chopped parsley which I think is there to make you feel better about the butter. I spooned some of the sauce over the fish and then we all ate it.

This dish was very very good, the swordfish was slightly drier that I would've liked but there was ample amounts of sauce to mitigate it. The slight dryness also ameliorated any of my oven temperature based poisoning fears so that was nice. No one else really mentioned the slight dryness but I'm sure they were just being polite or it's possible that I'm overly critical of a thing that tasted very good, who knows what's happening in this nutso brain of mine! It also felt like it was not super bad for me which is a nice change of pace with this book! I would def make this again after I've saved up enough money for 3 pounds of swordfish or tuna from the fancy supermarket and you should too! Make Thon a la Provencale aka Tuna or Swordfish with Wine, Tomatoes, and Herbs aka Tuna Provencal aka Tuna from Provence! Enjoy Thon a la Provencale aka Tuna or Swordfish with Wine, Tomatoes, and Herbs aka Tuna Provencal aka Tuna from Provence! Show off your Thon a la Provencale aka Tuna or Swordfish with Wine, Tomatoes, and Herbs aka Tuna Provencal aka Tuna from Provence to friends! See you next week! #tdandjulia #thonalaprovencale #tunaorswordfishwithwinetomatoesandherbs #tunaprovencal #tunafromprovance #shirtlessjackpalance #fatfish #cookeverythingtwice #marinateeverythingonce #metaphorfortheendtimes #expensivefish 

[apairofcrepeswiththerarestape]

My dear dear readers, I recently had a birthday, it was great! I had a party which was very fun and attendance to it was almost certainly not a test to see who is my actual friend and who is a fraudulent faker (if you were not invited it was merely because I did not want to subject you to this not at all real test of friendship (but also I told everyone who was invited to bring whomever so blame any mutual friends of ours))! I got many great gifts but the one that relates to this project the most was ten pounds of beef from a dear old pal who runs Home Place Beef, a fantastic farm that sells grass fed and finished humanely raised beef out in Montana. This week I made some of that beef! Does that make Home Place Beef the first TD and Julia sponsor? Not until I mention Home Place Beef a third time, j/k I was sent this beef unconditionally! Though if people want to send me free things, please go ahead! I will take $$$ or products in return for mentioning things in whatever the hell this thing I'm doing is (unless you or your products are trash and then I'll just take your money or products without saying jack about you at the least or revealing your trashness to my very extensive fan base at the worst! SO WATCH OUT TRASH PEOPLE MAKING TRASH PRODUCTS). I did not have a ton of time this week so the best thing to grab from my birthday beef box (just keep whatever you're thinking to yourself) was ground beef. I know, I've already made hamburgers for this project but guess what? Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child has TWO  hamburger recipes, so nice try close readers of these posts who want to bust me for fudging things (are there any actual people out there who are doing this? If so, thanks for reading so closely but also let's talk)! So I made Bitokes a la Russe aka Hamburgers with Cream Sauce! For which is there is no direct french to english translation because Bitokes seems like some sort of made up word that is neither French nor Russian! 

Shopping for this was even easier than when I made burgers before because I already had the beef as it had been shipped to me (by the good people at HOME PLACE BEEF, I would link to their website but that is not possible in 2 of the 3 platforms I publish this on, so just google it!). All I had to do was defrost two of the 1 lb. ground beef tubes that were sent my way which was easy because I had the foresight to move two of said beef tubes from the freezer to the fridge the night before I was to cook these burgers. I did not, however, have the foresight to put those beef tubes on a plate or something beforehand so when I moved my now very nicely defrosted meat tubes to a cutting board my fridge had a real opening scene to the first Blade movie (the fourth best superhero movie ever, yes I will fight you on this) look to it (do not worry partner who is reading this, I thoroughly cleaned up all the blood). All of that came after though, before I made blood ritual in my fridge I purchased some whipping cream and an onion and some eggs at the shop down the street and that's all I needed because we had everything else in house.

I WILL bore you on the details of prepping these burgers again because you know what, I'm waaaaay better at mincing (the cutting of things way I mean, I've always been excellent at the walking around daintily) than I was 3 months ago. I'm also better at measuring how much 3/4 of a cup of minced onion is. AND I'M A VERY PROUD PERSON. So I did these things, I minced and measured 3/4 of a cup of onion and then threw that all in a pan with 2 tablespoons of butter and let that cook on low for 10 minutes. I set them aside to cool for a minute while I measured out 1 1/2 pounds of beef by cutting one of the 1 pound meat tubes in half, look I'm better at mincing and measuring but I'm not getting scale out (actually I don't think we even have a scale at our house, which when written sounds a little bit like the body positivity version of "I don't even own a TV"). I squeezed out my tube and a half of excellent meat (sent to me by the fine folks at Home Place Beef) into the bowl of softened onions along with 1 1/2 teaspoons of salt, 1/8 a teaspoon each of pepper and thyme, one egg, and two tablespoons of butter. I went to town mixing this all together with a rubber spoon for a few minutes after which it was time to make this mass of animal products and spices into burger shapes. I'm also much better at making burger shapes than I was 3 months ago because while these 6 burgers were not completely uniform, they were certainly much more burger shaped than the 3rd year art school beef sculptures I made last time around. I rolled my burgers in a 1/2 cup of flour proudly, shaking away the excess of course, and then it was cooking time.

I cooked the burgers pretty much the same way as last time, in a tablespoon each of butter and oil, but this time I only cooked them for about 2 minutes on each side because I was not cooking for a child and wanted this beef (from, of course, our friends at Home Place Beef) to really shine. It did shine too, just from behind the veil of the creamy sauce that I made to put on top of it. I made that sauce by dumping all the fat out of the burger cooking skillet and then pouring 1/4 cup of beef stock in there. I boiled that stock, scraping all the burger cooking residual chunks up till it I judged it to be the abstract form of "syrupy", then poured in 2/3 cup of whipping cream, and then kept the boiling party going for another minute or so. Next I tossed in some salt and pepper (a little too much salt actually), a pinch of nutmeg, and a little bit of lemon juice (Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child calls for "drops" of lemon juice which what does that even mean? I put multiple drops in there and thought that when I meet Julia Child in the afterlife (j/k there is no afterlife, just the void!) I will have some dang questions for her) before stirring it all up. I turned off the heat and then swirled in 3 more tablespoons of butter and 2 tablespoons of minced parsley which of course I had because my life is all butter and parsley now. 

Lemme tell ya (I started with the lemme so I had to end with the ya, even though it hurt me to do so) THESE BURGERS WERE GOOD AGAIN! Even in a cream sauce that I thought would make me feel super disgusting because it was like 10000000 degrees outside the day I made this! I even ate the leftover burger (please do not do the math that reveals how many burgers I ate the night I made this) a few days later and it was just as good! It's possible that the burgers were even better this time around thanks to the fantastic meat I got from Home Place Beef (which actually, according to their website, only ships to Seattle and Los Angeles so sorry I pumped it up so much to my East Coast readers! (also see what kind of product placement I can do here? Send me free stuff and also $$$))! ANYWAY, go ahead, don't be scared, make the Hamburgers with Cream Sauce aka Bitokes a la Russe! Even in summer! See you next week!

#tdandjulia #bitokesalrusse #hamburgerswithcreamsauce #madeupwords #homeplacebeef #everybirthdayisatest #productplacement #sendmefreestuff #bladeisthefourthbestsuperheromovieever #ad #betteratmincingbetteratshaping #burgermath

[apairofcrepeswiththerarestape]

Y'all spring is here! The sun is out! Flowers are blooming! I feel a sense of shame as I look at other people's instagrams of being in like parks or whatever while I sit at home writing/watching parts of I, Tonya on Hulu/telling myself that I need to be out of the house by 1 but actually leaving the house at 2:30! It also means that there are many vegetables out and around and insides of stores and also in those shame inducing instagrams. Between that and the friends from last week that were sick and could not come over and experience the delicious cauliflower but this week were not sick but were still vegetarian, I needed something from Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child that was springy. Unforch there are no regular salads in the book as far as I can tell but there is a dish that is pretty much hot salad! Ratatouille aka Eggplant Casserole - with Tomatoes, Onions, Peppers, and Zucchini! Ratatouille has no direct translation but is related to the french word for "to stir up". I personally would have preferred that as the english version of the recipe so I'm going to say I made Eggplant, Tomatoes, Onions, Peppers, and Zucchini All Stirred Up. No I have not seen the movie but I have been on the ride based on the movie at Walt Disney Studios Paris and it was great (no I did not ride the Rock 'N' Roller Coaster starring Aerosmith, yes that is a real thing)! 

 What you have to buy for hot salad is vegetables, because other that salt and olive oil and fire and cooking tools that is all this dish is. I went to the fancy grocery store because instead of having no choice in eggplants, as was the case at the grocery store down my block, I wanted to be paralyzed by my choices of eggplant and briefly I was! There were like 4 kinds of eggplant at the fancy grocery store and I stood there dumbfounded for at the selection like I was in the third act of an indie dramedy about sad upper middle class white people living in Los Angeles (for a second I thought a Duplass brother was going to walk up, tap me on the shoulder, and tell me to channel the feeling of my favorite succulent dying). I really wanted to get the very cool looking stripey eggplant but I totally chickened out because I'm a rule following nerd. I ended up getting a regular ass eggplant that weighed exactly 1 pound which is exactly what the book told me to do. I also got 1 pound of zucchini even though as I child I despised zucchini, really all squashes were super gross to me. I think it stemmed from a meal where I was served "spaghetti squash" and my mind shut off after I heard the word spaghetti, so I was sorely disappointed and blamed it on all squashkind. Along with the zukes (me and zucchini are cool now, so I can call it that) I got a head of garlic, a yellow onion, two green peppers, a pound of tomatoes, and just however much parsley they give you in a bunch (could I just peel off a few sprigs from that bunch? Am I just contemplating this now? See, I AM a rule following nerd) and THAT WAS IT! I stuffed it all in my backpack without plastic bags even though I'm sure the fancy grocery store has biodegradable ones and prayed that my belongings wouldn't be covered in crushed tomatoes on my train ride. 

 All these vegetables needed to be prepped to hell before the actual cooking took place, so prep them I did! I peel the eggplant and cut it into slices 3/8 inch thick, 3 inches long, and 1 inch wide, I did the same to the no longer gross to me zucchini. I mean, actually I did my best to keep these measurements but after a while I just got tired so they were all roughly the same size. I tossed my vegetable shapes into a bowl with a teaspoon of salt and let that sit for a half hour. While those salted themselves I went to work on the other parts of this hot salad. I peeled and juiced my tomatoes, still creepily enjoyable, also was it weird that this time I did it while Goodbye Horses played in the background (hey it's an excellent song!)? I also sliced the onions and and green pepper and then mashed a couple of garlic cloves and then all of my hot salad elements we almost ready to become hot. Before the hottening could begin though I had to drain and dry my eggplant and zukes and this was a huge pain in the ass! 1 pound of eggplant and 1 pound of zucchini makes for many 3/8 by 3 by 1 inch slices, all of these had to be dried by hand. One of the few things that I knew about food before I started this was wet eggplant before cooking made for slimy eggplant after cooking so I knew I had to be diligent in this very boring pain in the ass activity. After what seemed like the lifetime I was done drying all the pieces and it was finally time to make these cold veggie chunks considerably warmer. 

 Could I just throw all this stuff in a pot and let it cook? NO! Of course all these vegetable pieces had to be cooked on their own and then cooked again because Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child is all about letting you know that french people had and have a lot of time on their hands. Luckily, I could do all the cooking in just two cooking vessels rather than the parade of pots and pans necessary for a lot of these recipes (MY DISHPAN HANDS!). First I had to saute all my tiny and very very dry pieces of eggplant and zucchini, in 4 tablespoons of olive oil for just a minute on each side which was fun (just kidding, it was very tedious! Also it was impossible to cook each on both sides for just a minute unless I had some sort of stopwatch for each individual piece or cooked them one at a time, both of those choice would be insane!)! I set those aside so I could replace them with the sliced onion and green pepper which I sautéed for about 10 minutes, during which I probably read about Westworld theories (I think the one human guy might be a robot guy!), then I stirred in the two mashed cloves of garlic and some salt and pepper to my taste which is NONE OF YOUR DAMN BUSINESS. I sliced the pulped and juiced tomatoes into 3/8 inch strips then laid them on top of of the other stuff in the pan, I salted and peppered again and tried to find something to cover it all with. In a pinch I went with plate even though seconds later I realized we had a cover for that pan because I am very good at planning things. I sat in my regrets for 5 minutes then took the plate off of all that cooking vegetation. I then basted all that mess with the juices it had rendered which was fun and also a little gross now that I write it out. After I basted I turned up the heat and boiled that biz, which will be the name of my business seminar for small Irish restaurants and dermatological practices, until almost all that liquid was gone. THEN IT WAS FINALLY TIME TO PUT ALL THIS STUFF IN A DANG POT. 

 Like I was creating one of those coke bottles creatures filled with sand at the state fair (You know the ones you'd put googly eyes on and like a golf tee for a nose and maybe a treasure troll like shock of hair at the top? Is this a reference that you understand? One of the deep subgoals of this project is testing the unanimity of state fair experience) I had to layer all these cooked vegetables in the pot. First went one third of the tomato/onion/garlic/pepper mixture, then 1 tablespoon of minced parsley, then half of the eggplant and zucchinis, then another third of the tomato mix, then another tablespoon of parsley, then the rest of the eggplant and zucchinis, then the rest of the tomato mix and then finally one more tablespoon of parsley. I covered my stratified vegetal mix and simmered for 10 minutes, then I took the top off (of the pot you pervs), leaned the pot on its side and basted that mess with its rendered juices (no way to stop you pervs from going wild with that one). I turned up the heat and cooked everything for another 15 minutes, basting every now and then as the mood struck me (and it struck me OFTEN (actually Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child instructed me to baste several times so I did it, it was not in any way whimsical)), till pretty much all the juices were cooked off besides a couple of spoonfuls. Then, at last, my ratatouille was done. 

 AND MY RATATOUILLE WAS GOOD! I felt bad though at the end because I realized that this whole thing didn't have any butter so it was probably the only vegan dish in this whole book and I didn't even invite over the one vegan who we're good enough of friends with to invite into our apartment! Sorry unnamed vegan friend! You missed out (well not really since you had no idea it was happening) on some delicious hot salad! Anyway, this was very tasty and not slimy and goopy like I thought it might be. It was, however, a lot of work! Maybe too much for hot salad! If you are a vegan though and need to make something French for your Bastille Day party (it's coming up!) this would be great for you to make! I will probably not be making this any time soon though! So I would say to you, non-vegans, this one doesn't quite have to ROI that you might be looking for in cooking! But do make RATATOUILLE aka EGGPLANT CASSEROLE- WITH TOMATOES, ONIONS, PEPPERS, AND ZUCCHINI aka EGGPLANT WITH TOMATOES ONIONS, PEPPERS AND ZUCCHINI ALL MIXED UP aka HOT SALAD for your vegan pals! They will probably like it! SEE YOU NEXT WEEK! 

 #tdandjulia #ratatouille #EggplantCasserolewithTomatoesOnionsPeppersZucchini #allstirredup #hotsalad #disneylandparis #aerosmithrollercoaster #mesmerizedbyeggplants #ifcaliforniaissogreatwhyareallthepeoplesetinmoviestheresosad #manysteps #terriblemeasurements #westworldrumors #puyallupfair #sorryveganfriend

[apairofcrepeswiththerarestape]

There are some vegetables that must be cooked and then there are some vegetables that merely SHOULD be cooked, this week I made a vegetable that falls into the latter category. I prepared the eternally last thing left on the crudite plate cauliflower. When eaten raw it has an absence of taste, like some just as insane but with much less vision Dr. Moreau had forced a stalk of broccoli and a packing peanut to mate. I'm sure that someone will pop in to tell me that actually cauliflower is great raw but that has not been my experience and this whole thing is about MY EXPERIENCE so you can take your cauliflower opinions to the island of that other Dr. Moreau and tell him, maybe he'll make you his Val Kilmer or whatever (I didn't watch the movie (or read the book)). ANYWAY cauliflowers are VERY GOOD when cooked and could only be better when cooked in the style of most things in Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, this of course meaning with a ton of butter. This recipe does contain a frightening amount of butter, like so much that George Gouge (as we know the first butter maker to work in an American butter factory which of course was opened in 1856 is beautiful Campbell Hall, NY, we've all been there and know that) would be like AYE CARAMBA! SO THIS WEEK I MADE SOME BUTTERED TO DEATH CAULIFLOWER! I made CHOU-FLUER AUX TOMATES FRAICHES or in mostly english Cauliflower Gratineed with Cheese and Tomato! Gratineed means "cooked with a golden crust of cheese", SO IN COMPLETE ENGLISH I made Cauliflower Cooked with a Golden Crust of Cheese with Cheese and Tomato! A little wordy I guess! WORDY AND FUDGING DELICIOUS I TELL YOU!

Almost everything in the recipe is in the name so it was easy for me to shop for this stuff. The title track to this delicious food record (that's a new metaphor I'm trying out!) was a dang cauliflower, but unforch Mastering the Art of French Cooking gave me the insane assignment of picking up an 8 inch head of cauliflower. Last week I could understand, kind of, being asked to purchase cucumbers of a certain inch in length, cucumbers can be described as long or short, but a cauliflower is like a big or little kind of thing. Like if someone brought a giant cauliflower to your house you wouldn't be all "wow that's a 12 inch cauliflower!" At least I hope not. You'd be like "that's a big cauliflower!" I know that big or small are not like super accurate measurements but a 8 inch cauliflower is even less descriptive! Cauliflowers are pretty much round! Was I supposed to measure the diameter? The radius? Should I have brought a protractor? I just took what the cauliflower gods gave and grabbed the first not too wilty head, measurements be damned. I also grabbed when ended up being more than the required 1 pound of tomatoes but not by much, more butter, and a wedge of parmesan cheese. The recipe asked for some swiss cheese as well. Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child often calls for swiss cheese and it blows my mind because it's the worst of cheeses (outside of american cheese which is trash and mostly plastic and I will say that to every one of your whining "but it's the only cheese for a grilled cheese sandwich" faces so go ahead and @ me) and French people know their damn cheeses! I've been to France and seen it with my own damnable eyes! Anyway the swiss cheese at my local grocery store is trashiest of the trash as it is not just generic to a grocery store chain swiss cheese but generic to a DIFFERENT grocery store chain than the local one that we shop at! So I asked my angelic partner to bring home some non trash swiss and she did and then I had all the stuff I needed to cook this cauliflower straight to hell!

I thought prep for this dish would be super easy, I picked it mostly for its easyness because I thought we were having guests that night so I needed something I could whip up in a pinch as I was coming home from the ceramics studio. Luckily for us our guests cancelled (not lucky for them because they got sick! Please get better my sick friends! Unless you were faking so you wouldn't have to come over! In that case I hope you vomit into your favorite shoes so much that you have to throw them away and then whenever you shop for shoes you remember the perfect pair you had and how you ruined them by LYING!) because the prep for this dish took FOREVER. I had to peel and juice and cut up the tomatoes into 1/2 inch strips, which was fun and easy and once again reminded me a little too much of skinning an animal or a person (maybe it's because Silence of the Lambs has been on HBO recently. Also the title sequence in that movie is GOOD! The font they use is excellent (do you know I once asked a designer at a party what his favorite font was just to make small talk and he said "they're actually called letterforms" and years later he got dumped by his girlfriend!).), but the real time suck came (do not (be gross)) when I had to blanch that dang cauliflower. Why did it take so long you might ask? Because Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child instructs you to blanch one head of cauliflower in 7 quarts of water! 7 QUARTS OF WATER! Which is 28 cups of water! Which is more water than one should drink in an entire day! Do you know how long it takes 7 quarts of water to boil in order so that one might blanch one fudging head of cauliflower? A LONG ASS TIME! I also put 1 1/2 teaspoons of salt into that water for every quart of water that I put into the largest vessel we had in the house. I this did by pouring 7 teaspoons of salt and then 7 1/2 teaspoons of salt because I was absent from that day of math. After I had grown a long grey beard and the leaves fell from the trees and my page a day calendar had many days pulled off of it the water finally boiled so I dumped my cauliflower cut into florets into it. They blanched for twelve minutes which was like a second for me at that point because my sense of time and space had been grossly altered. I then removed them from the 7 QUARTS of boiling water and rinsed them with cold water and I was done prepping mostly.

I also had to grate some cheese, a 1/4 cup each of swiss and parmesan, and mixed that with a 1/4 cup of breadcrumbs, I used some panko that I had in the house. I also had to butter my baking dish (again, don't) and preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Finally I had to melt a half a dang cup of butter which is basically an entire stick of butter and while that felt a little wrong I knew the results would be very very right. I put all this stuff into the buttered baking dish like this: blanched cauliflower in the center, peeled/juiced/sliced tomatoes around that, salt and pepper and half the melted butter on top of that, then the panko/chesse mixture, then the rest of the melted butter. I threw it in the top third preheated oven and waited the requisite half hour. Sorry this part was pretty boring.

What wasn't boring was HOW GOOD THE CAULIFLOWER WAS! It was good and soft and crunchy and buttery and cheesy and everything that was promised in its name! The still out of season tomatoes were also good! As was that golden crust of cheese! The two of us in our house fully ate all of it despite the recipe saying it was for 4 to 6 people! I feel very bad for my friends who were sick who missed out on this! Unless, again, they were lying about being sick! Then I'm GLAD they missed it those lying liars who lied! Though I'm sure they were actually sick and it's only my paranoid abandonment issues that caused me to even think that they're lying! So friends of all stripes, go out and make some dang CHOU-FLEUR AUX TOMATES FRAICHES! AKA CAULIFLOWER GRATINEED WITH CHEESE AND TOMATOES! AKA CAULIFLOWER COOKED WITH A GOLDEN CRUST OF CHEESE WITH CHEESE AND TOMATOES! See you next week!

#tdandjulia #choufluerauxtomatesfraiches #cauliflowergratineedwithcheeseandtomatoes #gratineedmeanscookedwithagoldencrustofcheese #redundantnames #8inchcauliflower #protractorsinthesupermarket #amerciancheeseisgross