Saturday, December 24, 2016.
Christmas Eve. Crack In The Cheesecake.
The day's agenda is like some sort of board game, its elements sliding around to accommodate this need or that. The Marys are in town, as are some gifts, ML's dog Bauer, and a few other things. I am on the North Shore with a cheesecake to build and the many elements of the root beer-glazed ham to reduce by about 75 percent. All this after, of course, I make a stop at Acquistapace's supermarket to pick up all the raw materials I need and (much more ticklish) Mary Ann must have for her array of appetizers and sides. Example: Savoie's andouille. Not their smoked sausage, she insists, but andouille.
And she needs frozen spinach for her spinach-artichoke dip. Strange: most of the stores I go to for this are out or will soon be. And here I was thinking that surely everyone has shifted to fresh spinach by now!
I have lunch at the Fat Spoon, where I am the final customer of the day. I have a Reuben sandwich. As popular as that corned beef-melted cheese-sauerkraut on rye is, I'm almost always disappointed by it, even when the ingredients and technique are clearly excellent, as they are here. In this case, the corned beef is sliced far too thick. One bite, and the ingredients all slip out of joint, and you have to decide which ingredient will be ingested on its own in the next bite. I eat only half of it, not because there's anything wrong with the flavors or textures, but because the strata slide too far apart.
The Marys arrive home in mid-afternoon. I was hoping that the cheesecake would be cooling in the oven by three. A necessary step in making cheesecake is that it must be cooled very slowly. If it isn't, a big crack forms across the center. I must leave this in the hands of the Marys, who are already working on their own projects.
It's not their fault, but my cheesecake is not up to my standars. A water bath in which the spring form pan sits sprung a leak, and causes a hole to open to the top of the cheesecake. The water picks up an unattractive brown color from the graham-cracker crust. It doesn't have any effect on the taste, but there's no way I'm going to serve from that side of the cake tomorrow.
The four p.m. vigil Mass attracts a packed and overflowing house. Our program of songs is not a deterrent. I think we sound pretty good. I can't help but thinking how much more I like midnight Mass. But St. Jane's has too many young singers for that to be a good idea.
