Sunday Meal: Soupe a l'Oignon Gratinée

I made soupe a l’oignon gratinée yesterday, commonly known in English as French onion soup.  It’s a very time-consuming recipe, especially if you make your own broth which I did of course.  I have some great stock I made with gallina in my freezer but I wanted to make this broth using meat. I had been thinking about this dish for weeks but circumstances conspired against actually making it until yesterday. It’s hard for any dish to live up to that kind of expectation and my version didn’t actually blow me away but then again, I can’t say that I have had better, even in France.

To go along with it I made a recipe that I stole from my new favorite bar in the neighborhood, Bar Casa Morrut, Calle Maestro José Serrano 4. Pepe makes some great food in this place and it’s very inexpensive.  One of my favorite tapas at his place is chicken livers fried in bay leaves and garlic.  I hadn’t eaten liver of any sort for a long time as I am the only person that I know who actually eats the stuff. Most of my friends here can’t even stand the smell of it cooking which is a shame because my butcher has wonderful liver, both pork and beef. The chicken livers I bought at the supermarket, higaditos y menudillos (little livers and giblets). I had to look up the word “menudillos” and then I had to look up “giblets” in English. From the online Oxford dictionary:

plural noun

• the liver, heart, gizzard, and neck of a chicken or other fowl, usually removed before the bird is cooked, and often used to make gravy, stuffing, or soup.

Origin

·         Middle English (in the sense 'an inessential appendage', later 'garbage, offal'): from Old French gibelet 'game bird stew', probably from gibier 'birds or mammals hunted for sport'

I never knew. I thought "giblets" was something specific. In the case of the ones I bought from my supermarket they mean hearts. Now I know. "Mollejas" or gizzards are another item people cook with abundantly here in Spain.  All this is generally something most people in America throw away, although it’s more likely they never see it in the first place as it is removed before their chicken is neatly packaged in plastic. I have always been rather old-school in my eating habits and to say that I don’t shy away from strange foods would be an understatement. But it goes way beyond me trying to be macho; I actually like offal, as it is sometimes called.

Bar Casa Morrut Chicken Livers and Giblets

Simply fry the livers in hot olive oil with bay leaves, garlic, ad a pinch of salt. I threw in a finely chopped onion just because I had one on hand.  I made a sandwich with the liver on some amazing bread I buy at the local bakery, chapata con aceitunas y romero. If the French soup didn’t blow me away the simple sandwich certainly did the trick.

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

The only thing I have to say about Jonathan Franzen’s highly successful novel, The Corrections, is to say that reading it is like being forced to listen to a really boring old man tell boring stories, an old man who seemingly hasn’t had a single interesting observation in his entire life, or at least not capable of relating an interesting experience.  To add to this tedium, imagine that you are in a really boring situation while being a captive audience to the old man; perhaps you are waiting to renew your driver’s license.  I walked out of Franzen’s literary DMV at around page 100 (I should explain that DMV stands for Department of Motor Vehicles, a government agency not quite cheery enough to be described as Orwellian).

And of course there is a character in the book who is a writer and also a bit about academia, the two most boring and over-used themes in modern American literature. Note to writers: if you are writing about writers or college professors you need to quit your easy job in academia and get out and fucking find something to write about. Contrast the story of this piece of crap novel with Alone in Berlin which I recently wrote about here.I found myself literally shouting at The Corrections. Why the fuck should I care what kind of paper something is typed on or that the coffee can in which the wife suspects her husband is storing his own piss is from the Yuban brand? I just see this as frivolous detail.

This is the first thing that I have read by the author.  In a Guardian article about ten rules for writing, I thought that Franzen had the weakest examples.

1 The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.

- More like the reader is a creative writing graduate student interested in clever word play simply for its own sake.

2 Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.

- I don't understand this at all. I can't say that I have ever liked or respected a novel because it was "an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown".

3 Never use the word "then" as a ¬conjunction – we have "and" for this purpose. Substituting "then" is the lazy or tone-deaf writer's non-solution to the problem of too many "ands" on the page.

- He has a problem with the word "then" for fuck's sake. I care much more about the scope of a novel than the language.

4 Write in the third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly.

- Many of my favorite books are in the first person. How the fuck can he even say this?

5 When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.

- So writers shouldn't bother with research simply because it’s easier than it was?

6 The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than "The Metamorphosis".

-Does anyone know what the hell he is talking about?

7 You see more sitting still than chasing after.

- Zola would have disagreed. He went out and worked for his stories, discovered them. Zola's observation in Germinal about the horses in the mines being brought down as colts and living their entire lives underground is something you couldn't invent sitting behind your computer.

8 It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.

-He may actually have a point with this one.

9 Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.

-Huh?

10 You have to love before you can be relentless.

-No fucking idea what this means.

In every one of these "rules" it sounds to me the Franzen is trying to be super-clever which is what his writing sounds like to me, a trivial story wrapped up in 24 karat prose.

 Compare Franzen's silly rules with the straight-forward advice offered by Elmore Leonard:

7 Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apos­trophes, you won't be able to stop.

Or how about this priceless tip from Will Self:

3 Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.

I actually learned that one a long time ago from my younger brother and I have followed his rule ever since.

Because You Have to Eat Every Day!

A very simple dish I came up with after cooking a few pieces of chicken the other day and adding some white wine. I was thinking about adding the lemon juice to beaten eggs and add them to the sauce like with Avgolemono soup. Maybe next time. I cut up the chicken as I do when making paella and freeze the parts that I leave out like the back, the wing tips, drumstick tips, and the breastbone. I de-bone the thighs as well as the breast as this just makes the dish a bit more elegant and easier to eat. I used my ginormous new pot for this dish even though it barely fits on my diminutive stove.  

 

Lemon Chicken Pasta

Ingredients:

1 Whole Chicken
2 Zucchinis
3-4 Garlic cloves
1 Glass White Wine
1 Cup Chicken Stock
2 Lemons (juiced)
3 Tbsp. Butter
Flour
Penne Pasta
3 Bay Leaves
Parmesan Cheese
Salt, pepper

First slice the zucchini and sauté it in olive oi,l adding a bit of salt. Take it out of the pot and add more oil, the bay leaves, and turn up the heat.

Cut the chicken into small pieces and partially debone it. Cover chicken with flour.  Fry the chicken pieces and brown well.  Deglazed the pan with the wine. Next add the stock and check for seasoning.  Add the lemon juice to taste.  Then add the cooked zucchini. Simmer for a few minutes and then add the cooked penne but make sure it is VERY al dente as it will continue to cook in the sauce. Add Parmesan to individual servings.

Jerking Off on Facebook

Flesh-eating Pigeons?

This is the crap I write when nothing else occurs to me:

Last week I cut my knuckle slicing ham. Today I pulled off the scab when I was sitting on a bench in a downtown plaza and tried to feed it to a pigeon.  I wanted to prove my theory that these pests would gladly devour human flesh given the slightest opportunity. He didn’t eat it but probably just because he didn’t see it.

How to Freak Out Your Neighbors #708

I was waiting for the elevator with my bike which I keep in the apartment. The little old woman from the floor below me walked in so I gave her the elevator and said I’d wait. I told her that we could fit in together along with my bike but we should probably get married first; it'd be like sharing a sleeping bag. I don’t think that my humor translates well (and I realize that I am being very generous with the definition of the word “humor”). I hope they don’t sell pepper spray in Spain.

 

Urban Aphorism #19

If you are talking on your cell phone and exercising you aren't multi-tasking; you are doing two things half-assed at the same time. Big difference.

Note to Self: Stop Eating!

I won't go so far as to say that I'm fat but I put on a pair of jeans the other day that I should only wear when I am at my fittest. When I bent over to tie my shoes I felt like I was going to pass out. I had to come up for air between shoes like a pearl diver going down twice for a big score.

From 22JAN12:

Leo Messi is so good that he often makes his opponents look foolish.  In his final goal tonight against Málaga—to complete yet another hat trick—he ran down 70% of the pitch and shot past the goalie with what was all but an impossible angle.  The people in the bar where I was watching the game positively burst out laughing, as if Messi had hit the goalie in the face with a pie. You half-expect to hear that Harlem Globetrotter music every time he touches that ball.

P.S. Two humor-free draws for Valencia CF and Levante UD.

Believing Doesn't Make It So

I saw a tourist wearing a "Jesus is Lord" t-shirt...a grown man.  Why not wear one that says "Santa Claus is Coming" instead? Just because I bought a "World's Greatest Grandma" t-shirt at a thrift store in Seattle, and just because I wear it once in a while doesn't mean it's true.