November 23, Pasta Shells stuffed with goat cheese in Smoked Marlin Sauce.

November 23, Pasta Shells stuffed with goat cheese in Smoked Marlin Sauce.

Pictures coming later, technical difficulties in Mexico uploading pictures and videos

After making ham and cheese sandwiches on lonches (flattened bolillos), we spent the day at the beach in Sayulita.  After getting sick on food on the beach two years ago, I prefer to take my own food, when possible.  But when a fellow walked by with a tray of ice and one dozen fresh shucked oysters on it, we could not resist and bought a dozen for 80 pesos.  They were deliciously fresh and by all appearances had been taken from the waters off Sayulita only hours earlier.   So we ate oysters, sandwiches and drank Buena Noche beer.  Buena Noche is Moctezuma Brewery’s wonderful Holiday bock beer.  To my taste it has characteristics of both a dark beer and a light pilsner.  Somewhat like a bock Bohemia, Moctezuma’s best beer, in my opinion.

At around 4:00 p.m. we wandered around downtown Sayulita and stopped at the small grocery store where we purchased a container of crema, a lovely red bell pepper, and more avocados.  Then we walked another block to the fish store.  We thought we would buy some shrimp to sautèe with the shells, but we saw that they had smoked marlin, so we bought about one pound frozen chunk of it for 43 pesos ($3.50).  

As we walked back toward our car we passed a small truck loaded with coolers of fresh seafood.  A man was straddling the coolers with a large shrimp in his hand.  He stopped beside us and we picked six large shrimp that weighed .35 kilo (.77 pounds) and paid the man 65 pesos for them.  Translated into shrimps per pound the shrimp would be 8 to the pound.  Big shrimp

We then drove home and, after a drink and my thawing the marlin and Suzette boiling the leftover chicken to make a chicken stock, we started cooking.  While Suzette boiled the beautiful Sgambaro No. 53 – Lumache pasta shells, I chopped one onion and one-half red bell pepper, two cloves of garlic and about one-half pound of the marlin.  The marlin turned out to be very tender and was the dark red color of aged beef.  After the shells cooled she stuffed the about 1 ½ inch openings with small mounds of the chipotle goat cheese we had purchased the day before. 

Then she sautéed the chopped onion, garlic and bell pepper in olive oil and butter, while I chopped about one-fourth cup of Italian flat leaf parsley.  I asked Luke if he had a preference in wines and he said that he would like a buttery white, so I opened a bottle of Finca Montico Rueda 2009 that I had purchased at the Marques de Riscal Vineyard in Spain in April.   We tasted the Rueda and Luke loved it.  I agreed that it was a very special wine.  I think I paid 8.8 Euros or about $12.30 for the bottle at the Riscal Vineyard.  I don’t know if it is imported into the U.S.  I also like the label which seems to show the acreage where the wine is grown.  The wine had a pleasant fruity front end, a darker minerally middle and lovely finish on the back of the tongue.

After pouring about ¼ cup of wine and an equal amount of chicken stock into the sauce we let covered it and it let cook for about fifteen minutes and then added about 1/8 cup of parsley and cooked it a bit more and then Suzette added the stuffed shells to the sauce pan and lowered the heat and covered the shells and sauce to heat throughout. 

Then Suzette put some olive oil and butter in a pan and put the shrimp into the pan to sautee. The five heads on shrimp filled the pan to overflowing and it required about ten minutes to cook them thoroughly.

 Luke made rice and lentils that he had soaked earlier in the day and while we were cooking he cooked the rice.   As we finished cooking, Luke heated one of the vegetarian chile rellenos in the small toaster oven and when it was hot added to it some of the warm rice and garnished it with chopped parsley.

We then plated up the shells and sauce and garnish them with one of the sautéed large shrimps.

A lovely looking meal (see picture) and the rich meaty sauce was delicious and unusual.  Suzette commented on the fact that we had created a different sort of dish.  Unusual in the sense that it included both a hearty meaty fish sauce with delicate goat cheese filled pasta shells and shrimp.  The goat cheese was rather pasty, so was perfect for stuffing into the shells because it held its shape inside the shells but also mixed with the sauce when the shells were cut and combined with the liquid of the sauce. 

The shrimp were fresh.  The plump chewy texture and briny flavor of a fresh shrimp is really indescribable.  Each shrimp yielded five fork sized bites of tender white meat.  Luke and I shared two and Suzette ate one; and we have three sautéed shrimp and small plate of stuffed shells left as PPI’s.

After dinner Luke shared a chocolate bar with me and we drank a sip of Mexican Solera Presidente Brandy.   

A terrific meal.  I later found out that the U.S. Dow Jones average plummeted over 236 points and I was thankful that I missed that and felt far from the madness of the world of investing, sitting and cooking in this imported Indonesian Teak wood house in the Mexican jungle with all of the conveniences of home.

Bon Appetit