Becky, my Godmother, loved to cook and made it look effortless. After we made the potatoes, she whipped up a Bananas Foster just to give me a brief demonstration (I'm not ready to try that one on my own yet, especially not in my small kitchen). Everything, of course, turned out delicious.
Coming off of a successful rendition of the Onion Soup, I felt that this would be another notch to add to my belt of cooking successes. Though, I should mention, as not all of you are aware, the smell of onion lasted for almost a week in my apartment, and when I traveled to Texas for Becky's memorial (which I will mention was flawless), all of my clothing smelled of onion and needed to be aired out.
My dear Mme. Diat had taken ill, so I'd be doing this one with different aid. My sister and my other best friend stepped in to help with a few tasks as I orchestrated the meal. The plan was to have the cheesy potatoes with some steamed broccoli.
Becky emphasized the value of using a food processor on the potatoes, showing me how thin and even the potatoes could be. Unfortunately, I do not own a food processor (ergo, the Not-so-Palatable Pesto Disaster of 2008), so I set to work cutting the potatoes. Needless to say, my slices were rather thick and uneven. After a potato and a half, my hands were aching so my sister stepped in and finished cutting the final potato. I had my friend take care of the garlic. Knife in hand, she did her best to get the pieces of garlic as small as possible. Just to finish painting your mental picture of this scene, all of this is taking place in my living room as my kitchen doesn't have any counter space and is quite small.
While my sister was finishing up cutting the potato, I filled the large saucepan with half and half, a little salt, and some pepper (we couldn't figure out what peppercorns were and where to obtain them). The mixture, along with the potatoes went onto the stove and was left to boil. After reaching its boiling point, I poured the contents of the large saucepan (I feel like there's a better name instead of large saucepan) into a more shallow pan (I didn't have a gratin pan and Mother said a brownie pan would suffice), added the cheese, and popped it into the oven for an hour.
Needless to say we didn't eat until almost 9pm, but no one complained since the apartment smelled great. When the timer went off we anticipated the cheesy greatness that we were about to ingest.
What came out of the oven looked a little like skin and melted cheese. My sister inspected the situation and deduced that the 'skin' look was just the cream forming a skin (for lack of a better word), and that underneath it, the meal would look like the beautiful photograph in Jacque's book. For all intensive purposes it did. Sort of.
We sat down to eat, carved our portions from the brownie pan (literally had to carve it, the potatoes weren't coming out without a fight) and added the steamed broccoli to our plates (I bought the steam in the microwave in the bag stuff since I wanted to focus on the potatoes, and 5 minutes in the microwave couldn't be that difficult). There was bad news and okay news. The bad news was that the broccoli was cold and soggy, so much for 5 easy minutes in the microwave equaling broccoli perfection. The okay news, the cheesy potatoes were, well, okay.
Truth be told, they weren't as cheesy as the photograph or my memory let on. They also had completely fallen apart upon contact, perhaps they were over-boiled?
As much as my dinner guests (thankfully they were few in number this week) assured me that it was good, I was unsatisfied, I didn't do this meal justice. I will tackle it again at some point, and next time, I will be victorious.
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