October 14, 2012 Dinner - Grilled Halibut, Butternut squash
puff pastries and sugar snap peas.
A prize winning day.
In the morning Suzette got up and baked a candied quince and apple pie made from quince and apples from Suzete's trees at the Center for Ageless Living. I took her and the pie to the Gutierrez Hubbell
House on South Isleta Blvd. for a South Valley Harvest Festival at 10:00 am. At 4:00 when I picked her up I discovered that her pie ad won first place in the pie
contest. Actually, just before I left to pick
her up, Rose and Richard came by to pick sage and brought us a box of five
slices of lovely puff pastry coated with thin slices of butternut squash. Rose owns Rose’s Restaurant at Mesa del
Sol.
After picking up Suzette, we dropped off a pyrex baking dish
filled with apples and pears from Los Lunas and Taos to the Bean/Alversons and they gave us a spaghetti
squash and eggplant they had just picked from their garden.
Suzette had to shop for Santa Rosa, where she is going
tomorrow, so at 5:00 p.m. we drove out to Costco and shopped for a while and
then at 6:00 p.m. we went home after buying sugar snap peas, asparagus and
Brussels sprouts.
When we got home we wanted a simple diner and decided to use
Rose's puff pastry with squash as a bread and carbo course and steam some sugar
snap peas and grill the Halibut (Costco, Seafood Fiesta $9.99/lb.) in the
manner that Suzette’s like, which is on slices of lemon coated with butter and
lemon juice.
We had received a 2010 Roussanne (a white grape used extensively
in Rhône
white wines) in our order of Wellington
Winery wines that arrived yesterday that I had chilled.
Roussanne has a slight heft to it that I thought would go well with the thick halibut
steaks, with their rich, lovely long flakes of
white flesh.
I took about twenty minutes to grill the thick slices of
fish, in which time I de-stemmed
and steamed the sugar snap peas and
Suzette put the puff pastry slices on a cookie sheet and toasted them in the
oven on convection at around 250˚F until warmed.
The wine and meal were lovely. Every part of it was superb. The puff pastry was soft and delicately
fluffy. The fish was cooked to
perfection so that it was still moist in the middle but cooked through and the sugar
snap peas were steamed to soft but not soggy and relatively sweet for so late
in the growing season. I served each plate with a wedge of lemon to squeeze onto the peas and fish.
For dessert we enjoyed fresh baked almond cookies and apple empanadas
made by Armando, the head baker, at the Greenhouse Bistro and Bakery for the Harvest Festival that were unsold with the
last of the bottle of Roussanne. The cookies were the best almond cookies I have ever tasted, probably because they were made with the fresh almonds form the trees at Suzette's Center for Ageless Living.
Bon Appètit
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