All
these years later, it still annoys me that Julie Powell was the one
to come up with such a genius idea first. Granted, I would have only
been in my early twenties and still in the Navy when she came up with
the idea to spend an entire year cooking every recipe out of Julia
Child's masterpiece of a cookbook, and then blogging about it, but I
wish she had never gotten around to is so that I could have been the
one to do it first.
I
was reading through my copy of Mastering the Art of French cooking
the other day before it was time to go out to the barn and do the
evening chores. I have been trying to find a way to use up some of
our excess eggs. Our laying hens have been giving us over a dozen
eggs everyday, and I can only eat so many fried or boiled eggs. Any
eggs that we don't use we end up scrambling up and feeding to our
herd of barn cats (what the fuck should you call a group of cats?
Herd sounds ridiculous, but flock is worse, and I highly doubt gaggle
would be appropriate... our gaggle of barn cats...). Anyway, I can
poach an egg, and I like the flavor (one of my favorite recipe for
poaching an egg comes from a classic German cookbook, I can't think
of the name at the moment, but the recipe is for poached eggs on
toast with a mustard and butter sauce... delicious) but it is an
awful lot of work to poach an egg. I understand that must come out
sounding like complete and total laziness; if Julia Child and Julie
Powell can find the time to poach eggs during their day, why in the
hell can't I? Fair enough, I don't have an answer for that,
especially when I find the time to hard boil eggs for deviled eggs at
least twice a week (mmmm... deviled eggs). I am so off topic... so
there I was, reading Mastering the Art of French cooking trying to
find a way to use up our excess eggs, and I couldn't believe how many
recipes I found in that cook book that would help me use up all sorts
of the produce and other such stuffs that we have been producing on
this farm, but haven't been putting to the best of uses.
One
example: cooked cucumber; who would have ever dreamed of roasting a
cucumber and then drowning it in a cheesy bechamel sauce? I wouldn't
have, but now I can't get the idea out of my head. My uncle brought
down some of his over abundance of cucumber harvest the other day,
and after making the most kick ass batch of Sweet and Spicy Curry
Refrigerator Pickles ever, I still had half a dozen left over, and we
planted about fifty or so cucumber plants ourselves this season that
are just now starting to produce a crop (this time next week I will
be ass deep in cucumbers, water baths, and pickling brine)... so
finding an interesting, classic, and completely different way of
preparing a cucumber other than as an ingredient in a salad, is
awesome.
But
then I came across the souffle section, and I believe I may have
found the solution to my egg problem. I have never tried making a
souffle before, so I am bound to mess it up the first few times, but
it doesn't bother me that it takes five eggs per batch, because if I
mess it up a dozen times... we were going to end up feeding most of
the eggs to the cats anyway.
To
sum up an out of control story... Julia Child might have saved me
from wasting and losing a lot of product this year... but Julie
Powell has made it so that if I share all of my experimental
shenanigans with you all I will be nothing more than a copy cat...
but there is no way I would cook my way through the whole book
anyway; I hate fish, and I don't produce it on the farm... but with
Julia Child's help, I should be able to transform what I do produce
on this farm into a culinary orgasm of awesome.
Sorry
I have been away from the blog so much as of late... I know how
important it is to regularly keep you guys updated (especially in the
infancy of this project) if I am to have any hope of keeping your
interest. I promise to try harder... but anyone who is reading this
is probably some form of farmer/homesteader themselves and is well
aware of how interesting, and busy, and hectic this time of year is.
For instance... yesterday morning I was walking the three gardens
with my dad, and when we got to the tomato plants we discovered that
the tomato worms had finally found them. We spent about an hour
hunting them down and crushing them, but we also had oats that were
ready for harvest so that we will have grain to feed our growing goat
herd this winter (finally, a reason to correctly use the word herd in
a sentence), and tomorrow morning I will have to go back out to the
garden for a more thorough hunting. I love tomatoes, and I will
murder every last one of those bugs... Either way, now my apology is
off topic; I will try harder to update more often. The end.
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