Last night, I very nearly brought the holidays to a train-wreck finale. Realizing that I was running out of steam, I pressed ahead with the production of a demoralizingly sub- par dinner for six. Then, instead of sensibly retiring when Kathleen and Fossil Darling left the table — Kathleen to work in the bedroom, Fossil to get to bed on a school night — I vivaciously engaged in a provocative conversation with M le Neveu about Roman Polanski. Kathleen had to break it up, it was so provocative. Then I broke the dishwasher.

Worst of all, I awoke feeling flu-ish. I was on the edge and I wished to stop there. So we did the decent thing and canceled this evening’s dinner reservation at La Grenouille first thing.

There was a bit of misapprehension among the dinner guests: it was thought that I was giving myself a birthday dinner. This made a lot of sense, since I was giving a dinner and it was my birthday. But this was a coincidence. M le Neveu was in town, and Wednesday night was the only time that we could all get together. On top of the coincidence, I piled some rather unwise decisions about the menu (see below) — startlingly unwise decisions, in retrospect. Keep-this-man-out-of-the-kitchen unwise. I can reconstruct “what I was thinking,” but I can’t justify it without recourse to the very fatigue that sapped most pleasure and a good deal of flavor from the event, at least for me, after everyone had left, and I couldn’t figure out what I’d done to the dishwasher.

At least I didn’t sit up berating myself for having failed at life &c. Well, all right, I did berate myself a bit. But I was too tired to keep it up for very long.

I did stay in bed all day today, dozing, or sat in my reading chair. No music, nor even a mug of tea (until just now). Just a lot of ice water and the occasional snack. I read two books, Lauren Grodstein’s A Friend of the Family and Lynn Barber’s An Education. Both are super books. I cleaned up a bit of last night’s debris. Eventually, I made the bed. Gradually, the morning’s mood of complicated, anguished fatigue shaded into plain fatigue.

I have been writing a lot about fatigue in the past few months (so it seems; I may have been at it far longer), and I’m beginning to find the topic boring. I know why I write about it: I keep hoping that I’ll find some way around it, some brilliant plan for the conservation of energy. But even if I do, it’s not going to be through meditations here.

¶ Memoirs of a Cracked Cook

What I was thinking: last Wednesday, I bought a whole tenderloin at Agata & Valentina. I like to have one in the freezer because it’s so easy to slice off pieces thick or thin for various dishes — Filet with blue cheese, for example. I thought — this was the first mistake — that Beef Stroganoff would make an elegant New Year’s Eve supper for the two of us. As indeed it would have done. But I haven’t made frites in a while (certainly not in the kitchen itself; the friteuse spent the warm months out on the balcony), and Stroganoff, easy-sounding at four days’ remove, became rather daunting up close. In any case, the mood of this holiday season was, decidedly: take it easy. So we didn’t have much of anything special on New Year’s Eve. At some point, over the weekend, we had a supper of Sicilian salami, assorted cheeses, and the New Year’s Eve caviar, with a bottle of champagne. The tenderloin remained in the freezer, and my itch to make Stroganoff remained dangerously unrelieved.

Because I’m a dead-tired fool (there is no other explanation), I latched on to the notion that Beef Stroganoff would be the perfect entrée for the somewhat impromptu dinner party. The idiocy of this idea is only intensified by the fact that I’ve never made the dish for more than four people at a time. To do it properly for six (as I learned) would require at least two skillets, side by side; no single pan would ever be large enough to brown the meat properly. So there was that.

Then the friteuse acted up. Or, rather, it turned out that I still don’t know how to use it. It’s the third DeLonghi deep-fryer that I’ve owned, and my least favorite by far. It has an elaborate time-and-temperature setting protocol that is, let’s just say, inflexible.

And did I mention dinner rolls? I’ve been wanting to make dinner rolls for ages, and last night I did. But I started them a bit too early in the afternoon. Something that has never happened before happened: the second rising was so prolonged that the carefully weighed and shaped balls of dough coalesced into an enormous blob.

I will spare you the Caesar frolics. But I’ll note that all the salad plates were clean. 

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
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