Monday, May 2, 2011.
Cook Variations.
Mary Ann who insists on making my petit dejeuner every morning, and even when I try to get in there to do it myself (which I now can), she shoos me away. However, thinks that the tiny details I give her about how to do simple jobs like toasting biscuits are absurd. I so appreciate her serving me that I only complain when it's intolerable. Today she microwaved my biscuit for 99 seconds instead of 33. That boils all the moisture out of the thing and makes it impossible to take a bite out of. (Ninety-nine seconds is the timing for the milk for café au lait, and she got the two confused, she said.)
She fixed up a fresh biscuit for me without giving me the evil eye. But I was ready to hear something about my particularities. It's not just her. If you think that cooks and waiters in restaurants are perfectly happy about repairing dishes that aren't what you wanted, you're right--but not about all of them.
This also is a demonstration of how easily a cook can drift away from the standard recipes of his restaurant. When the chef isn't there, the sous will never make anything exactly the way the master would. Sometimes he does it better, sometimes worse, sometime just different. It all averages out, most of the time.
But it's things like The Great Dried-Out Biscuit Massacree that make me certain that this trend for every chef's having four or six or eleven restaurants is not a good one.
The day's more substantial meal was the other half of that roast beef poor boy Mary Ann picked up for me last Thursday from Bear's. Resuscitation of that requires first 44 seconds in the microwave, then four minutes in the toaster oven. This is one of my most useful tricks, and it works well with pizza as well as biscuits and poor boys. The microwave step warms the thing through, but not too much. Then the toaster oven makes it crisp and very hot at the exterior. Not as good as fresh out of the oven, of course, but not bad.
The house is quiet. Mary Leigh went back to Tulane to study for her last exam tomorrow. Then she's moving home for the summer. I have a feeling that this summer will be the last time she lives here for any extended period. She's going back to the dorm in the fall. (A brand-new one, strictly for honor students--what a great idea!)
I think it would be good if we got a house in town for all of us next year. Deciding on that--and on which house--will be like arranging peace in the Middle East.
