Yesterday and today I am working while Rudder is still off. He spent yesterday
working on issues with the Orange Crush (the side steps that weren't quite up to
the wild offroad ride we took, among others), trying to fix the connection to the
washer (ended up having to call a plumber ... and he still can't understand why I
hate dealing with plumbing myself) and, in a rare moment, fixing dinner for me. He
had it on the table within about ten minutes after I got home: chicken breast
medallions and tomatoes in champagne sauce over rice, complete with tablecloth,
candles lit, wine in the good crystal, and ice water in Margi Gras plastic cups.
So OK, he never quite gets that elegance thing down par, but still, champagne
sauce and all, and the food all ready when I got home. He'd added a bit of vinegar
and lime juice, scallions, and all kinds of stuff.
I took one bite of
tomato and barely managed not to spit it out. That shit was nasty. After
some questioning, the problem emerged. Because we'd tasted
href="http://dichroic.diaryland.com/altjahr.html">two kinds of champagne on
New Year's Eve, we had a total of about a bottle left. Flat, naturally, so he
decided to cook with it to avoid waste. He's usually a decent cook, who prefers
improvising to following recipes, but not a fancy one.
Well. The last
time I cooked with wine, on New Year's Eve, the recipe called for three
tablespoons of it, sauteed with butter and garlic. Normally, when I throw wine
into a sauce, I add about a splash of it. Apparently what Rudder did was the put
the chicken and vegetables and the entire bottle of champagne into a
crockpot and simmered it for an hour. I can now report, firmly, that this is not
the proper way to make a champagne sauce.
On the plus side, not
feeling too well a few hours later kept me up for a bit, enabling me to have a
nice long chat with SWooP, so between that and the sweet intentions behind it,the
dinner wasn't a total waste.