Holy Fuck, I Have to Cook That?! + Memorial Drink: Lemon Drop

[xraytheenforcer]

The shit I do for money!

I gotta prepare a 5-course gourmet meal tomorrow night. The caveat: I'll get paid over a thousand bills for the article I write about the experience afterward. The hitch: I gotta set myself up for failure by picking really time-dependent or finicky dishes for the entire thing. Like, blinis and souffle and duck.

And I can't make up my own recipes as I go -- I gotta stick with the French Laundry cookbook, and try to pretend like I'm an ovary-enhanced Thomas Keller. (fuuuuuuck) I spent Sunday making fecking chive oil, fer chrissakes. I've got 6 Magret duck breasts (overnite delivered today) in the fridge. I've roasted eggplants, mulched mint, stewed cherries in bourbon, and tried to prepare as much in advance as possible. But tomorrow is gonna SUCK.

For the record, here's the (general) rundown of food:
Amuse: tuna tartare with chive oil and lemon confit + served on something crisp, TBD
Appetizer: Blinis with three accompaniments - paddlefish roe + creme fraiche; spiced eggplant with roasted sweet peppers; stewed cherries
Main: Duck a l'orange with spaetzle, braised endive, something (roasted carrot? parsnip? red onion confit?)
Cheese: Humboldt Fog; Corsignano Nero
Dessert: Chocolate souffle (and, if that fails, homemade ice cream -- my ace in the hole!)

And then there's the little palate cleansers (lemon sorbet with champagne) and whatnot. I may replace the braised endive with fresh mache. Fresh figs? Perhaps. Anyway, I wish I could stay home from work tomorrow (I'm just gonna fuck off at 4pm or so) and prepare.

Finally, a Memorial Cocktail for Alyne. We drank these after her memorial service. See, the town where she lived (and my cousins still live) is small. Small enough that at 3pm on a Thursday the mayor and 15 other guys are all in at McGee's drinking, the bartender buys us extra rounds when she hears that we're in for the Bishop funeral, and the funeral director shows up 1/2 an hour later (totally randomly) and buys the whole party a round. What were we drinking? Lemon Drops. Alyne loved 'em.

Lemon Drop
1.5 oz vodka
3/4 oz lemon juice
1 tsp sugar

Shake over ice, strain into a sugar-rimmed cocktail glass. Get blind drunk with cousins you only see once a year.

Comments

[rudbekia.livejournal.com]

Damn, woman, I thought that thing was already done! I even got the book about the experience for Christmas last year. But hopefully you'll come out with some edible foodstuff along with the cold hard cash.

Mmmm. lemon drop.

[xraytheenforcer.livejournal.com]

christ, I wish. It's slated for the January issue as of right now.

[pippingeek.livejournal.com]

jeez, how much is this gonna cost just to do, between the ingredients and the time spent...? on the other hand, duck and spaetzel are some of my favorite things. those, and steel wallets and 45 adapter cufflinks, but i been interweb shopping, and i digress. i don't even know what a blini is, so no help there, but i can drink many lemon drops with heidi this week, assuming i am back on the sauce by then..

[xraytheenforcer.livejournal.com]

blini -- pancake make with potato batter.

[blanchemains.livejournal.com]

So what time should we get there for dinner? Seven-ish? Can I bring a bottle of wine? Do I need to dress for this?

It sounds very yum.

And, okay, so sue me- but I love Lemon Drops.

[xraytheenforcer.livejournal.com]

7:30. Dress casual. Wine optional, but appetite (and sense of humor) required. it's gonna be an adventure.

[d-arte.livejournal.com]

Can I come too?

[xraytheenforcer.livejournal.com]

more the merrier.

[catrionamacnair.livejournal.com]

Wow, that sounds awesome. Complicated too, so you pwn at brave cooking [when I read a complicated cooking book, it usually comes down to 'uhm, ok, are you all fine with salad, bread and some ice cream? Or pizza?'. Anyway, I hope you have fun while cooking, at least in the moments between throwing things against walls and being horribly stressed :)

The Lemon Drop name amuses me, being a Harry Potter reader. Who knew Dumbledore was encouraging his students and colleagues to drink? ;)

[xraytheenforcer.livejournal.com]

LOL. Dumbledore was a closet boozer. ;-)
After this dinner, I am eating sushi for a week.

[d-arte.livejournal.com]

hopefully takeout sushi.

[kama-police.livejournal.com]

but you get paid if you fuck it up, yes?

[xraytheenforcer.livejournal.com]

oh yes. it has very little to do with success or no -- or to say, the point of the article is that the writer tries something that has a high potential to be embarrassing, and we have to write about our experiences. Past writers have 1) posed nude for a life drawing class 2) taken a pole dancing class and then performed in front of a crowd and 3) belly dancing? I think?

Only way I don't get paid is if I fuck up the writeup afterwards.

[isis-newton.livejournal.com]

What's spaetzle, precious? It all sounds v exciting. You'll enjoy the challenge, I'm sure. Good luck with everything! Just try not to get too tipsy whilst cooking. I did this yesterday cooking a roast dinner and ruined my roast potatoes. :( This is a serious crime.

Writing about food always sounded like an awesome combo of two of my fave things, something I thought I might fancy as a career one day...then I became a scientist.

Lemon drops sound grand to me.

[xraytheenforcer.livejournal.com]

srunk cooking...dear gods, not tonight. heh.

spaetzle is a southern-german/swiss dumpling. Basically, it's dough ribbons that you boil for 5 minutes. Not difficult, but you can't make 'em and let 'em sit for too long or they get rubbery. Kinda like the blinis, actually.

have a lemon drop tonight. you know you want to!

[guppyur.livejournal.com]

Huh, we do our lemon drops a little differently where I'm from. (And in Rochester, come to think of it.) For us it's just a shot of lemon vodka (preferably Citron), served with a lemon with sugar on top. You take the shot and then bite the lemon.

[xraytheenforcer.livejournal.com]

I think that's a newer recipe. My grandmother would definitely not be doing shots in the 50s or 60s -- and citron vodka is a pretty recent invention.

I've seen a variation that employs cointreau, but I stuck with the simplest.

But yours sounds pretty good, too.

[misunderstruck.livejournal.com]

That sounds like the version of a lemon drop I had out in Indiana, except with plain vodka.

[yagathai.livejournal.com]

1) Happy freakni' birthday!
2) Spaetzle? There is nothing difficult about cooking spaetzle! I would have picked Beef Wellington, personally, as a challenge instead of duck, but that's probably partially because I like beef more than duck. Anyway, best of luck!

[xraytheenforcer.livejournal.com]

thankee

Spaeztle ain't hard, no, but there's the "I must make everything all at once" element to the duck, the sauce, the spaeztle, and the endive. I chose a mixture of technically difficult (souffle) and temporally taxing (duck, blinis) because, well, because I want some of this to be edible.

[odiedragon.livejournal.com]

So when do we get the update you promised? :)