Bruce ate a little lamb

Even if your manage to get away from work on time, cooking seven Julia recipes on a weeknight with no preparation is a bit of a challenge. Luckily we were cooking for my oldest friend St Ives and she had no qualms about patiently waiting, assisting where needed and pouring the wine. St Ives is an English teacher and will no doubt be horrified by any grammatical errors in this post (I suspect she takes a dim view of mid-sentence hyphens, for example). I blame her fascinating conversation for my one major disaster: pouring off the bean water into the garlic sauce I had spent an hour working on, leading to trying to boil off said bean water with thin results.

Le Gourmand was slightly distracted by the new dishwasher, which he lovingly embraced for St Ives' camera. The good news is, it appears to work and the minor dispute we had as to how it should be packed was fairly quickly resolved. Isn't it amazing how having someone else around makes it easier to fight fairer?

Luckily Le Gourmand was also full of praise for the meal. It was nice to have a leg of lamb, even if fear of toxoplasmosis meant that I had to pick the most well done pieces of meat, I tried not to be excessively jealous of the rare meats on everyone else's plates.

Menu
Potage Cremé De Cresson (substituting spinach for watercress)
Gigot De Pré-Salé Rôti
Sauce a l'Aile pour Gigot
Haricots Verts Étuvés Au Beurre (second recipe)
Gratin Savoyard
Oignons Glacés À Blanc
Crème Plombieres au Chocolat

Le Gourmand was mightily impressed by the spinach soup. Concious of the thin nature of the garlic soup, I slightly reduced the amount of stock that I added to the softened onions and wilted, chiffonaded spinach. After simmering, I ignored Julia's entreaty not to blend spinach soup (watercress could be blended, perhaps if I knew a little more about watercress I would understand the distinction) and quickly blended it, trying to leave a little texture. It was a Cream of Spinach soup after all! I then dribbled the warm soup into two egg yolks and cream, continuing to beat until all was combined. I returned the soup to the stove to heat enough to "cook" the egg yolks. Voila!

The lamb involved searing in the oven on high heat so that it was brown on both sides before cooking for about an hour. Possibly as a result of the garlic I had stuck into it, it made my oven very smoky, which was a bit nerve-wracking.

The garlic sauce involved slowly simmering some milk with rice and seasoning. It was difficult to get the sauce to simmer slowly enough despite adding more milk at Julia's suggestion, so eventually I just added the stock, simmered for a while and then pushed it through a sieve. Soon afterwards the bean water incident meant that I had to simmer it for another 15 minutes before adding the meat juices from the lamb.

The beans were great - boiled and then sauteed with butter, lemon juice and parsley. The onions were slowly braised in stock with a herb bouquet. I have become a bit lazy on the old herb bouquet front and just threw in some parsley sprigs, thyme and bay leaf into the stock. Naturally there was some butter involved. As we explained to St Ives, it's hard for Julia not to taste good, given her tendency to add butter and/or cream to so much of her cooking.

Is there any way that gratin might be considered healthy? Probably not, it tastes far too good to be healthy. This version involved thinly slicing the potatoes (super efficiently with the mandolin) and dividing them into two layers which were each sprinkled with swiss cheese, butter and seasoning. Then a cup of stock was poured over it and it was put in the oven. Despite being left in the oven a little bit longer than instructed, it was fantastic. I suspect reducing the butter and substituting low fat cheese would make it a lot healthier but not quite as nice.

Dessert may have been a matter of "here's one I prepared earlier", but there was no other way to manage the Chocolate Plombiere, with its chilling time of several hours. We moved from the table to the couch for the final course. I had drizzled stale sponge fingers with cointreau and then topped this with creme patissiere, melted chocolate and whipped egg whites folded together. All I had to do was grate chocolate on top (easier said than done, I failed Le Gourmand's hand inspection afterwards).

Bruce was probably the least impressed party of the evening. As he grows, he fights my stomach for space and when I have a three course meal, he is clearly not a happy camper. Obviously I am trying my hardest to ensure that he is as fat and healthy as possible so we are at an impasse. Hopefully he will not emerge victorious when I do the glucose intolerance test next week. To pacify him we are heading off into the murky world of baby shopping this weekend.