#very 2000s in that way. unforch

[fastidious-and-a-mess]

btw to anybody who is also going through something with the x-men rn, y’all should watch wolverine and the x-men. really good cartoon with surprisingly thoughtful and compelling narratives. it feels like a very fleshed out world and watching it, i can tell it was made by people who loved the show and love the x-men.

[apairofcrepeswiththerarestape]

Do you humans remember the website theawl.com? They published some pretty great stuff over the years (though they did reject the one thing I ever pitched to them, a review of every issue of the New Yorker as it came out. This was a project I did on my own in fits and starts over the years) and in their last days they put out a very short piece about a very short part of my favorite Orson Welles movie, F for Fake. F for Fake is a weird kind of documentary that is INSANELY pretentious and about, obviously, fakery. It starts Welles doing magic tricks in full on all black with a cape I'm just about to be very drunk doing Paul Masson commercials in a couple years regalia on a train platform for some kids before introducing the cameraman for crying out loud. If you can handle that level of bs then you will enjoy it deeply. ANWAY, the part that Rick Paulus (who is someone I have probably read before but because I'm intellectually quite lazy and do not necessarily take note of whom I'm reading in a magazine or on a website (with a few exceptions, I'm looking at you Jill Lepore and David Roth)) I do not remember reading) writes about takes place, in pretty late period Orson Welles style, while he's eating lunch in some mediterranean cafe. He interrupts himself making a point to the people he's at the table with to ask the waiter to take away the bowl of mussels he consumed and "bring me the steak au poivre, thanks a lot."  This moment lodged that phrase "steak au poivre" in my mind for years, that moment was a better advertisement than Paul Masson or those poor people who asked Welles to sell peas ever got,. So when I discovered that steak au poivre was a thing in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking it was a no brainer, I had to make steak au poivre. SO I DID IT, I MADE THE STEAK AU POIVRE OR MORE BORINGLY, PEPPER STEAK WITH BRANDY SAUCE, AND THE FAT PRETENTIOUS GUY WAS RIGHT TO ASK FOR IT IN THAT MOVIE BECAUSE IT WAS SO GOOOOOOOOOOOOOD.

When shopping for a dish where steak is in the title, no doy, the main thing you need to get is steak. As I've said in the past I like to go to the fancy supermarket to get meats because at least I have some idea where it's coming from and that assuages my guilt about eating meat (unforch it also accentuates my guilt about gentrification so it's kind of a wash!). All this guilt assuaging and accentuating made me forget the steak types that were suggested in Mastering the Art of French Cooking so I just went with three pieces of steak meat that did not involve the word "chuck" or "stew" or "round". I also picked ones that were only medium expensive, though they did also have a rating of 4 next to them in the parlance of the fancy supermarket so that means that I got to feel 4 times as superior as someone who bought regular meat. This dish also features cognac, a substance that I've avoided ever since going to a mid 2000s birthday party focused on drinking a beverage called an "Incredible Hulk". It was a very fun party.  The next day, however,  I felt like my brain had been put in a food dehydrator while my body had spent the night strapped to the rear wheel of a city bus. With such limited expertise in the subject, purchasing the cognac was a but of a puzzle. I went to a fancy liquor store but wasn't going to pay $70 for a bottle of fancy stuff that I probably wasn't ever going to drink but then I went to a more regular place and they only had hennessy. The hennessy at least came in smaller, less expensive portions so that was the choice, even if I never used the stuff again $12 wasn't much of an investment. I also purchased a shallot and that was that.

The big thing about Steak Au Poivre is the pepper, otherwise it would be just a regular french style steak with a slightly fancier pan sauce. It is not whole pepper nor is it ground pepper, for Steak Au Poivre you want cracked pepper and cracked pepper must be something you make by hand. Now we do not own a mortar and pestle, the optimal pepper cracking instrument that is also a signal that someone has a little too much money to spend on kitchen stuff (look, I'm sure some of you have them because they were gifts or whatever but nobody uses a mortar and pestle more that like twice a year), so I just used a bowl and the bottom of a bottle, it was fine. The cracked pepper acts as like a delicious caramelized crust for the eventual steak, ground pepper is too fine and whole peppercorns will break your teeth apart. Once I was done cracking my pepper (2 tablespoons worth) and drying my steaks off with paper towels, I coated my fancy steaks in my not cracked in a fancy way pepper. I did not sprinkle it on, I did not rub the steaks into it, I got that cracked pepper in my hands and massaged it into the steak. The book says to do it with "your fingers and the palm of your hand" which like just say your whole hand but whatever, I really got that pepper on there. I then covered the pepper encrusted steaks with wax and let them sit for a half hour, which is the minimal amount of time allowed by Julia Child who suggests 2-3 hours optimally which I would've done if I hadn't decided on this dish sometime in the afternoon before I cooked it. While the meat was getting all pepper flavored I minced the shallot and then read some blogs about baseball and then half hour was up and it was time to cook.

The french style of cooking steak is pretty simple, heat up a bunch of butter and oil (1 1/2 tablespoons each) till it pretty dang hot then throw the steaks in there for 3/4 minutes on each side, then you are done cooking your steaks. This is what I did and holy moly it made my house smell insanely good, which made me happy the rest of the prep was short because living in a home that smelled that good without being able to eat would have been torture worthy of a Black Mirror episode (if like your phone made that smell because you didn't get enough likes or something, I don't know, I saw four episodes of the show (the pig humper one, the one where the lady goes to jail for not getting enough likes, the video game one where like a dude's mom calling him kills him or whatever, and San Junipero (which was actually really good!)). After the steaks were done I set them aside and sprinkled them with just a pinch of salt each. Then I dumped all the leftover fluid out of the pan and threw the minced shallot and another tablespoon of butter in there, scootching them around to mix with all the leftover steak cooking chunks that were left in the pan. After that I dumped a half a cup of beef broth (I will win my war with the thing of beef broth I bought two weeks ago!) to loosen up more of those chunks and cook down. This cooking down went on for a couple of minutes before I dumped 1/3 cup of hennessy in there to finish the sauce. I cooked that whole mess for about 4 minutes till the booze burned off and then took it off the heat and swirled in 3 more tablespoons of butter. Then it was time to eat the steaks until I died.

Though it is possible that I'm the first ghost who writes about food on social media, I did not, probably, die from eating Steak Au Poivre, BUT IT WOULD HAVE BEEN A PRETTY GOOD WAY TO GO! That steak was aokdaiofnaonsunurfnnfninsdkfnjh, like I was incapable of making regular known language words and just turned into a mewling ball of meat enjoyment. I don't think I could eat this after eating an entire bowl of mussels but other than that it lived up to and surpassed the expectations I had based on the way Orson Welles said it (which makes me think I have a pretty messed up expectation system when it comes to food!). So go forth and make and eat the Steak Au Poivre aka Pepper Steak with Brandy Sauce! It's so much easier that it's fancy french name would have you believe! BUT FOR SURE CALL IT STEAK AU POIVRE AND NOT PEPPER STEAK WITH BRANDY SAUCE BECAUSE YOU STILL WANT CREDIT FOR MAKING SOMETHING THAT SOUNDS HARD TO MAKE!

#tdandjulia #steakaupoivre #peppersteakwithbrandysauce #theawl #fforfake #orsonwelles #rickpaulus #jilllepore #davidroth #soundsfancycookseasy #iwoulddie4u #thebesthingivemadesofar #firstghostfoodwriter