Dinner and Angels

I made dinner last night. You can say that so many different ways, can’t you? Dinner is a million different things, its possibilities renewable every day. Could be fish sticks from the box, popcorn, a casserole from the freezer, nothing at all. Dinner is evocative, laden. (Sidebar: In the mid 1990s, I auditioned for the National Theatre School in Montreal with a monologue from Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. I cobbled together dialogue from the character Harper’s fight with her husband, Joe, and my opening line was, “I burned dinner last night.” God, I loved that play. I saw on it Broadway, with MARCIA GAY HARDEN playing Harper, and that pretty much sealed the deal.)

But last night, I did not burn dinner. Last night, I decided to try out Rishia Zimmern’s recipe for “Chicken with Shallots,” from the March 23 edition of the New York Times magazine

Just something about all those ingredients — chicken, shallots, white wine, tomatoes, butter — merging together in a single pan appealed. I don't really need to explain why, do I?

You sprinkle the chicken thighs with flour and salt and pepper, and then brown them well in butter, and the aroma that rises from the pan is the reason that we are not vegetarians and do not keep kosher.

Then, you set the meat aside and caramelize, oh, a dozen-plus shallots in the butter and the chicken fat, all the while inhaling. I once heard that the difference between amateur and professional chefs comes down to shallots and butter. Makes sense.

(“Not my dinner,” says Harper to Joe, whom she suspects of being a homosexual. “My dinner was fine.”)

If you’re so inclined, you pour yourself a glass of white wine from the bottle that you’ve opened in order to deglaze the pan.

And when the shallots are good and caramelized, you refrain from eating more than a few from the pan before adding the wine, some Dijon mustard, and tarragon.

And the chicken.

(“Your dinner. I put it back in the oven and I turned everything up as high as it could go and I watched it until it burned black. It’s still hot.” She's pissed. And also a little high.)

("Very hot.")

You’re supposed to let that all simmer, covered, for half an hour, but I mistimed the meal slightly and we were all hungry, so I skipped to the next step, which was to let it simmer, uncovered for 15 or 20 minutes. in order to reduce the sauce. Nobody noticed.

Then, you add the tomatoes.

The tomatoes!

Then, you compare your version with the version in the magazine and find it satisfactory.

Zimmern suggests serving this dish with fresh crusty bread from the bakery, and I have to say that sounds like a fantastic idea, but we didn’t have that, so we went for brown rice, with a side of broccoli.

And it was divine.

("Want it?" says Harper. When I did the monologue, I played that line straight up, sincere, like maybe Joe might actually really want his blackened dinner and she would go get it for him and take a few more pills while she was in the kitchen.)

Yes. Yes I do.

Toes poking through the snow

“Oh, I just wish I could get back into bed and sleep for the whole day.”

Rowan said that this morning as he stared out of the frost-covered window in my bedroom. We’re doing our best to hit the ground running after Christmas break, but this is hard, because the ground is frozen solid and covered under several feet of snow, and, frankly, all I want to do is crawl back into bed and sleep until winter is over. At least, I want to crawl back into bed and sleep until the mass of freezing air from the Arctic that has descended over Northwestern Ontario has found somewhere else to settle, taking with it the -45°C-with-the-windchill temperatures that have become the norm over the past couple of weeks.

At least the sickness slowly subsiding. We were a viral/bacterial buffet here over the holidays: me with that double-ear/sinus infection (I am pleased to report that I have caved only once — once! — to a Q-tip craving in just over a week!), Rachel and Isaac with head colds, and Rowan with, oh, pneumonia (although, really, if you ever saw poster child for pneumonia, it would be this kid; barking cough aside, he tootled around the house as usual, making every stray bit of detritus on the floor into his own personal soccer ball. I twigged into the fact that he actually might be sick for reals when Rachel took the boys tobogganing one day over the break and Rowan lay down at the bottom of the hill to catch his breath. We have been known to occasionally be a wee bit too lax when it comes to taking the kids or ourselves into the doctor, and after our latest round of ignoring what turned out to be impetigo, I managed to squeak him in to see the doctor on the Saturday before New Year’s. Say what you will about antibiotics, but I am grateful for them and for a doctor who works on Saturdays.)It’s cold. We are blow-drying the frozen pipe in the basement bathroom. That is not a euphemism. The car doors have frozen shut, as have the seatbelt buckles. They just won’t pop up. That is not a euphemism, either.

To survive, I am cooking food in mass quantities. In a fit of organizational fervour, I sketched out a two-month meal plan for January and February, one that relies on cooking a big batch of something each weekend. On Sunday, to kick things off, I prepped eight meals’ worth of chicken souvlaki and roast chicken, and whipped up a huge batch of tomato sauce — the freezer is full, although this didn’t stop us from making pizza bagels yesterday for dinner (with said homemade sauce!), which Rowan deemed not a “real dinner” before eating his in its entirety as I mostly did my best not to engage him in that particular argument until his stomach was full and he dropped it.

Yes, lists and plans and cooking. I found this in the bottom of the cereal cupboard this morning, a written reminder of every single thing that had to get done before school.

I’m also surviving by remembering what lies underneath all the layers of winter. Like the garlic I planted in October — it’s getting ready to burst out of the ground in a couple of months. I’m counting on that. And sure, on the surface I’m wearing a toque in the house and four sweaters plus microfibre long underwear (oh yes, top and bottom). But underneath all that, I am here to tell you (well, all of you except my father and my brother, who should stop reading this paragraph right now) that I am choosing, every day, the laciest, prettiest, least practical and sexiest matching sets of lingerie I can possibly find. (This, of course, is the upshot of my online lingerie shopping binge of February 2011, and my slightly more restrained online lingerie shopping binge of last month, about which I will write more here one day.) I painted my toenails yesterday, because even though nobody except me in the shower will see my feet outside of wool socks for the next three months, I want to know that something pretty — something bright red — lies in wait.

Spring will come. It will. Until then, we are eating soup and souvlaki and cuddling up against the cold, with the bright red of our toenails keeping us just a tiny bit warmer.

Marble cake

Someone turned nine. And requested a marble cake with custard filling to mark the occasion.

Found a devil's food recipe on Epicurious, and we made a double batch — half with the requisite cocoa, half without.

We drizzled the batters into two different pans. This was my favourite part. Very Jackson Pollock-esque.

This was Rowan's favourite part.

Isaac had been in the tub during the cake baking, but he came down all clean and shiny in pajamas and got in on the batter action.

And further in.

And even further. he Had change his pajamas afterwards.

Meanwhile, the cakes  baked. And cooled.

And were stacked one on top of the other with vanilla custard in the middle.  Rachel and her sister made the custard, drawing on their British roots. They assured me that it would hold between the two cakes. And did.

Chocolate icing.

Sprinkle disaster!

The  icing hardened too quickly for the sprinkles to stick. Bah!

So we found some Smarties and got the job done.

There's a huge secret stash of leftover cake in my freezer right now, if you happen to be in the neighbourhood. It's good. Come by.