Recipes: Potatoes Roasted in Olive Oil, Dill, and Sea Salt
Cauliflower Fried in Butter
Quick Sour Cream Chicken
Music: Tchaikovsky -Serenade in Strings
Potatoes Roasted in Olive Oil, Dill, and Sea Salt
(The potatoes I just threw together. I read some kind of Russian Recipe for Potatoes and Dill, but couldn't find anything too authentic on the internet that didn't involve soup or mushrooms. )
Ingredients:
1 Bag Baby Red Potatoes
Olive Oil for Coating
Sea Salt for Sprinkling
Dill
Heat oven to broil. Set a timer for 15 minutes. This is most crucial. Otherwise, you may forget about them or a student's parent might call and engage you in a frantic search for her son and you will end up with mostly burned potatoes which otherwise would have been perfectly crispy and delicious. The salvaged remains (from the bottom and edges) will prove this to you in a most disheartening way as you throw away the blackened bits.
Cauliflower Fried in Butter
Ingredients:
One Head of Cauliflower (trimmed and separated into florets)
2 Tbsp Flour
Salt and Pepper to Taste
2 Tablespoons butter
Steam the cauliflower until just tender. Coat with flour seasoned with salt and pepper and pan fry in hot melted butter until brown and crispy on all sides.
Before engaging in this, retreat from the frustration anything in your life might be causing, such as lost keys, check books, or students. By no means should you go on a rant about said missing item when it is suddenly discovered to have been hanging out with his wayward friends, lying to his mother, and cutting your class. Any of these actions may lead you to leave the cauliflower in the flour too long so that it gets caked rather than just coated and to subsequently, and in anger, throw it all into the pan before the butter is hot enough. The result? Soggy cauliflower that you have a sense would have been much tastier had you calmly dusted it with flour and salt, added a few tablespoons of olive oil to your butter, heated the pan properly, and browned it more quickly.
"Quick" Chicken
Ingredients:
1 ea average chicken (I just used 5 chicken thighs)
3 tbsp butter
1/2 cup sour cream
2 ea eggs
salt
pepper
Fry the chicken in butter. I took a cue from Julie and Julia and dried my meat to make it brown better. Darned if that wasn't about the only thing that was easy to make happen. Cover the pan and stew the chicken for 15 minutes. Open it and leave on very low heat. Beat eggs and stir in sour cream. Pour the sauce into the pan on low heat, stirring regularly, until the sauce thickens.
Here's my take on this recipe: It was like coating chicken in very moist, creamy scrambled eggs. Scrambled because I might have still been ranting about a student instead of stirring, and eggy simply because the 2 eggs to 1 half cup of sour cream was just too much egg. I suggest reducing to one egg and, if you like sour cream, increasing to 1 cup. I would also get boneless, skinless chicken, since the nice crispy skin I had achieved was sort of boiled out of it by the sauce.
NB: When attempting to recover a failed chocolate vodka, you can try chilling it, and that will take some of the edge off the burn and the chocolate will not precipitate out. You can also try adding ice to it and serving it with some cream, which takes the other edge. However, in the end, the dulled blade still remains and you should buy better vodka.
All said and done, the meal did not taste bad, even the soggy cauliflower was suggestive of better days gone slightly to fat. It was not so good as to put me off my desire to paper cut a certain teenager with his report card, but I did enjoy some for lunch leftovers today.
(My food photography may need some work - but look at that scrambled egg sauce...)
About the book - I have only read chapter 1. The Russians in this chapter seem to see Napoleon as no better than another Robespierre profiteering on the chaos of France. They speak about the "hydra of revolution" which implies that he is simply one head of many, and all bent on destruction. His power; however, is perhaps the greater as he has set himself up above the people whereas at least Robespierre had remained party to the tribunals who eventually engineered his demise. The impression Tolstoy leaves us with from this speech is that there was no delineation between the revolution and Napoleon's upstart wars.
As for the 2 characters you meet in chapter 1, Anna is charmingly and pretentiously called "Annette" and litters her conversation with 3 generations of genteel French phrases. What a cruel ironic blow it must have been to those raised to think of Paris as the center of culture, worthy of emulation, having to see their beloved mentors reduced to the rotten red (to borrow a phrase from Dickens) of the guillotine. And Prince Vasili, "who like a wound-up clock, by force of habit said things he did not even wish to be believed" should prove to be quite the standard, villainous, social grasper. I think I'm going to enjoy reading this book.
About the music: Tchaikovsky, procured by Jay (thank you!), was playing all through the dinner cooking. I don't know how to write about classical music, but it was lovely.
A last note about this project - one person, Eric, has already offered to forward me a recipe. Thank you! I would love to see them. Scouring the internet is tiresome and not always authentic - I am going to make a bookstore trip soon for a Russian Cookbook, but in the meantime, if you know any foolproof (student-crisis proof?) recipes, please pass them on.
Even if the recipes and the books and the parties were all a disaster, I'd still read this for your storytelling. Tres droll!
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