Despite it being an amateurish cliché, blaming your mother and all, I have to insist because it’s completely her fault that that anything less than Julia Child’s coq au vin with brown-braised baby onions and sautéed mushrooms on Tuesday night would be inedible, cruel beyond comparison. You see, she is the one who after reading the post about my unending obsession with Paris and French food, bought me My Life in France, which is akin to putting a loaded, I don’t know — egg beater? in my infatuated hands. I am but 75 pages into the book and I’m ready (and not for the first time) to book my one-way ticket. If nothing else, I plan to hold my breath or at least cut off bacon-and-meat kitchen dallies until my husband sends me to the Cordon Bleu.
The book speaks to me, though. Julia, like myself, was newly-married when she went to Paris and not entirely sure what she wanted to do when she grew up. She fell in love with the French approach to food — making chicken taste more “chickeny,” I believe she said — and had the time to experiment. In case the volume on this site doesn’t clue you in, so do I, and more importantly, I did on Tuesday, bestowed on me by my wonderful corporate overlords in the form of an additional day off.
Of course, being a bit more lazy and recalcitrant that our heroine, I lollygagged in front of the television eating a soggy bowl of Shredded Wheat until nearly 3 p.m. before finally getting up the energy to walk four blocks to the store, thus beginning a dish at nearly 5 p.m. that took many hours to make. But my oh my; it’s not that I should be surprised that a dish of chicken cooked in a sauce of bacon, red wine, beef stock and butter would be outstanding, but I didn’t think my husband would declare it the best chicken dish he’d ever eaten, because that boy, he eats a lot of chicken. (He later abridged this to say that my chicken marsala is his favorite, but I think he’s wrong.)
I liked it even better the second day (last night) when all the flavors had snuggled more cozily into each other, but sadly, we’d greedily picked out all the onions on the first serving. I know that steeping more than a dozen baby onions in boiling then freezing water, peeling them, browning them in butter and then braising them for 40 minutes in beef stock sounds like a miserable process, but I promise you it’s worth your time.
All of this is; her recipes are always ridden with steps that make you question her sanity, as well as yours for following them — for example, this one requests that you boil bacon, which some might remember caused Julie/Julia some hilarious righteous indignation:
Julia has suggested boiling the bacon for the quiche for five minutes. This sounds to me suspiciously like an activity that would prevent bacon from tasting like bacon. But who am I to question. I’ll boil the frickin bacon.
But myself and millions of others follow them because every single time we do, the end-product blows our tastebuds and beliefs about food — chicken, boring chicken! — out of their repetition-induced comas. If this isn’t an honorable exchange of a few more hours of soggy cereal and television bobble-heads, I don’t know what is. Oh right: I got to light the dish on fire with a match, my husband standing next to me with his phone on speed-dial to the NYC Fire Department. Now are you convinced?
[Update: Yes, so. There is really no excuse for it taking me one month and two days to finally type up this recipe for you, except that I am hopelessly forgetful and also, it is 850 words. But it’s here now and I’ll be plenty happy to avoid this procrastination and the ensuing guilt in the future, m’kay?]
Continued after the jump »
