October 21, 2012 Dinner – Spanish Tapas

I worked all day but took a break in the morning to pick some fresh lettuce from our garden and join Suzette for our traditional Sunday morning Bacon, Lettuce and Tomato sandwich in the garden. 

I suggested that we needed to use our last remaining smoked pork cutlet and the lovely pimiento pepper we had harvested from our garden and that meant that we were thinking about the Spanish tapa we had enjoyed in San Sebastian, Spain that combined green peas, Serrano ham, saffron, artichoke hearts and pimiento pepper.  After brunch we checked the open bottle of artichoke hearts in the fridge and we both agreed that the artichokes were old and smelled moldy, so Suzette said she would stop at Trader Joe’s and get a can of artichoke hearts. 

We had eaten our B, L, T sandwich at around 10:30 a.m. and I had nibbled on PPI dishes from last night’s party that Luke heated up at 1:00 p.m. when he made us Chai and we ate a piece of his birthday cake.

 I took Luke to the Rail Runner train at 1:30 p.m. and Willy went to play soccer in the evening before Suzette returned with six 14 oz. cans of artichoke hearts.

We were not hungry until around 7:30 p.m. at which time I chopped the beautiful red pimiento we had grown in our new raised bed garden and fetched the frozen green peas and pork cutlet and saffron and Suzette started chopping and frying the chopped cutlet with chopped onion and pimiento in a large skillet and then added the green peas and artichoke hearts and finally the saffron.  Whammo, we had dinner so I ran to the basement and fetched a bottle of Spanish Montebuena Rioja red wine from Alfaro, near Tuleda, and we toasted slices of sourdough bread and grabbed the butter and retired to the table to shed our workaday world and enjoy a Spanish dinner and watch a Hallmark made for TV movie.  We quickly were lost in Spanish tapas and wine and buttered bread.  The bread tasted great and I wanted something else to eat, so I toasted another slice of bread and melted slices of the fresh Leyden cheese on it I had bought at the Coop last week and had a warm open face cheese sandwich.  Later we ate several more on the slices of Leyden o buttered Kavli hard bread I had bought at the Coop with sips of the lovely red wine.

After another piece of birthday cake, I finally had finished the bottle of red wine and dinner.

This was a dinner driven by a desire to use ingredients but measured by the amount of wine.

Bon Appètit