I'm nervous about the dinner party tonight. I've had Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" for like a year and a half and have only made three or four things from it. So I decided that tonight's menu would come exclusively from that book, thinking it would be a good way to get some practice. But now I think that will make for a rather boring dinner: roast chicken; scalloped potatoes; asparagus. Chocolate cake for dessert? How un-jazzy. ("Jazzy" being a word I picked up this weekend at my parents' house when perusing their 1968 "modern" cookbook, which had some of the grossest-looking recipe photos I've ever seen, and hi-larious titles like "Jazzy Meatballs.")
But the party is tonight! My other options for meat were not very promising: expensive cuts of beef that would probably embarrass everyone with their price tag; tongue; veal; pork chops.
This is where my inexperience as a dinner party hostess really shows itself: the menu. (Couldn't it show itself in something a little less showy, like the wine's too bold for the fish?) It's going to be unimaginative in the extreme unless I find some way in the next hour (the farmer's market opens at 10) to, well, jazz it up.
Julia is encyclopedic on the subject of mushrooms, so that is where I will begin.