Great Expectations

My daughter made dinner last week.  This is not any kind of a remarkable feat.  She is, afterall, 13 years old and has mastered the only skill truly required to cook:  she can read.  Still.  It seems like it was 20 minutes ago that I was making airplane noises while I scraped pureed peas off of her lower lower lip with a plastic-coated spoon.  What the hell happened?  Apparently children grow up without your permission.  Who knew?

It didn't help that she pulled my volume of Julia Child off the shelf and decided to make supreme de volaille archiduc.  Really?  Chicken breast sauteed in onions and paprika in a Madeira-cream reduction sauce?  I had figured when I gave her the green light to cook dinner that we'd be dining on Cap'n Crunch.  Of course, as I gingerly turned over about $15 worth of chicken breast, I realized that we still might.  Indeed, I had visions that this poor chicken was destined to make a charred journey from shrink wrap-to stove-to trash.  Secretly, I wondered if I had any meat sauce stashed in the freezer that I could pull out after what I was sure would be a chicken cremation. 

I was mistaken.  The dish was everything you would expect of chicken breasts sauteed in butter and then slathered with heavy cream and booze.  It was amazing.  Eating my words never tasted so good.  My daughter had the whole family practically licking every morsel and drop of it off the plate with our tongues.  

I have often observed that the secret of successful parenting is to simply lower your expectations.  It seems, however, that the real joy of parenting is watching your children exceed them.


Supreme de Volaille Archiduc (something in French)
By Julia Child

1.   Rub 4 boneless chicken breasts with fresh lemon juice and sprinkle with salt and pepper.

2.  Finely mince one medium sized onion (about 2/3 cup).  Drop the minced onion into boiling water for 1 minute; drain, run cold water over them, and drain again.  This technique lets you quickly soften the onion, but by pouring cold water over the hot onions, you stop them from continuing to cook.

3.  Heat 4 Tbsp of butter in a large saute pan until foaming and add the blanched onion and 1 Tb of  red paprika.  Cook the onions over very low heat for about 10 minutes.  Low heat here is critical.  Butter burns really quickly;  if your pan is too hot you can turn your back for a minute and wind up with a black slurry.

4.   Add the chicken breasts and saute until they are slightly golden. 

5.  Move them to a casserole dish and finish them in an oven pre-heated to 400 degrees, about 20-30 minutes.  Julia Child claims that the meat is done when it "is springy to the touch"--whatever that means.  I have to either stick a meat thermometer in it or cut it open peak inside, a fact of which I am not particularly proud, but which I passed down to my daughter.   

6.   Pour into the now emptied pan that you used to saute the chicken, 1/4 cup beef broth, 1/4 cup port, Madeira, or dry white vermouth.  We  used Madeira.

7.  Add 1 cup heavy cream.  Yeah, baby, yeah.  This recipe tastes amazing for a reason.

8.  Add back in the reserved onion and paprika mixture.

9.  Stir the sauce constantly over high heat until the cream boils down and slightly thickens.  Season to taste with lemon, salt, and pepper.

10.  Serve the sauce over the now fully cooked chicken breast and garnish with parsley.  Pair it with anything that will absorb the sauce:  risotto, potatoes, polenta and a fresh green, such as those frozen green peas that languish for months in the back of your freezer.
11.  Ask your daughter when she's making it again.

Homemade Hollandaise

Homemade Hollandaise sauce is better than sex.  OK.  It's not, but it's awfully damn close. Don't be distracted by the little packets of powder in the spice aisle to which you "just add water."  That may work for Jello, but a real hollandaise is slowly simmered egg yolks into which you force feed a stick and a half of butter.  It takes your basic asparagus and turns her into a porn star.  You can lightly steam and salt asparagus spears any day of the week, but every once in awhile dab on some real hollandaise and watch her morph into a centerfold.  Oh baby.  It's a decadence you can taste.  Every mouthful is succulent and smooth, and it will leave you weak with desire--hungry for more of that velvet cream.  Whoever thought that gluttony and lust could be so inextricably linked?   It is pure evil, but if you're going to sin, you might as well make your priest blush when you confess. 

There is no safe sex here.  See you doctor before you partake to make sure your cholesterol levels and blood pressure are in check.  If not, keep the lipitor handy, but don't wholly deprive yourself.  Once you realize what a pain in the butt hollandaise is to make, you won't want to do it often anyway.

Hollandaise--copied (almost) whole cloth from Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking:

1.  3 eggs yolks, which means you have to separate the yolk from the white. It is actually very easy.  Crack an egg and without spilling the yolk, let the white drain into a bowl by using each half of the egg as a little cup into which you keep transferring the yolk.

2. Beat the eggs together until sticky, and then add about 1 Tb each of water and lemon juice and a big pinch of salt.

3. Melt about 1 and a half sticks of butter.  Yep.  Butter.

4. Now it gets tricky.  Add a pat of unmelted butter into the egg mixture, and place on low heat, all the while stirring the egg yolks.  If the heat is too high, the eggs will scramble, and even though Julia asserts that you can quickly plunge the pan into cold water to stop the cooking, I remain skeptical.  I mean, really, how do you unscramble eggs? 

5.  Once the eggs just start to thicken and form a light cream, add another pat of butter.  Turn off the heat.

6.  Get out a wire whisk and constantly stirring with one hand, slowly pour the melted butter in a few drops to a teaspoon at a time.  It takes forever.  At some point, however, the concoction will start to meld into a thick cream.  It will look like almost like cake frosting.  STOP HERE.

7.  If you get greedy and try to add more butter, the concoction will start to separate, and then you have something that looks like bits of fat floating in a pool of grease.  Definitely not a porn star--more like an aged Hollywood starlet with multiple face lifts that still thinks she's a porn star.  Not pretty.

8.  If this happens, Julia has a whole section of the recipe that should be simply labelled "Hollandaise 9-1-1."  Although I won't recreate it here in its entirety, if the sauce separates, take a glass bowl and heat it by rinsing it with hot water.  Add a tad of lemon juice and about a tablespoon of the separated sauce.  Beat the hell out of it until it thickens.  Add more separated sauce and do the same thing.  Keep adding the separated sauce into the bowl until you've managed to reconstitute it.  Once you've gone through this drill one time, you'll curse that you ever thought to add more butter during the initial step.  If it doesn't work, do it again.  I once went through this technique 3 times, but ultimately prevailed and brought back my Hollandaise as if from the dead.

9.  Julia claims that you can freeze the sauce or stick it in a refrigerator for a day or two.  I've never tried to do this.  Actually, by this point I'm typically so frazzled that I've managed to pull it off that I just want to get the damn sauce on the asparagus and be done with it.  But just like sex, don't rush it.  Take the sauce, still in the pan, and set it in a bowl of warm water.  This should keep it warm and fluid. 

10.  Pour some wine.  Make yourself a medium rare steak.  Cook your asparagus--get them crisp and bright green.  Slather with hollandaise.   Life is to be lived, so every once in awhile you are allowed to treat yourself.  When the meal is done and you are flush and sated, go ahead--have a cigarette.