January 20, 2013 Dinner – Surf and Turf with Baked Spaghetti Squash and Green Salad and Coconut covered cookies covered with lime flavored icing

January 20, 2013 Dinner – Surf and Turf with Baked Spaghetti Squash and Green Salad and Coconut covered cookies covered with lime flavored icing

Debbie and Jeff had invited us to their house to watch the sunset and cook dinner.  We agreed that we would bring a couple of steaks and several shrimp to grill and a bottle of wine and they would create the rest of the meal.  So we left home at around 4:00 p.m. on Sunday in order to go by Trader Joe’s to buy a bottle of cognac and a bottle of wine for dinner.  We actually bought nine bottles of wine for less than $60.00.  We find that Trader Joe’s consistently offers the best inexpensive wines.  We took a bottle we had not seen before for dinner, a 2010 estate bottled Terrenal Tempranillo from Yecla, Spain.   Yecla is a hill top town located in the northern part of Murcia Province in Southeastern Spain in the Yecla Denominacion de Origen.  We also bought an Amontillado Sherry, a bottle of Ruby port, a Spanish LaGranja 50% Tempranillo/50% Granache, a bottle of chianti, a bottle of Mucadet, a 2008 Egri Bikavér (Hungarian origine controllee, named Bull’s Blood of Eger) and a bottle of 2010 Chateau Haut-Sorillon Bordeaux Supérieur (the Chateau is in Abzac, 5 km. from St. Emilion, a new to us bottle) and a bottle of La Ferme Julien rosé.

We arrived at Debbie and Jeff’s house, at the top of Glenwood Hills and probably the highest house on side of the Sandia Mountains, at around 5:00 p.m. and after Jeff made us drinks and we chatted a few minutes, I began cooking.  Last night I had seen a cooking show with David Chang, founder of NYC’s Momofuku chain of restaurants and a three time James Beard honored chef, in which the dish being cooked was air aged beef steak.  David and a grill chef cooked a two to three inch thick porterhouse steak in a skillet and basted it with a sauce made in the skillet with fresh thyme and garlic in melted butter.  I shelled and deveined three large Tiger Prawns for each of us by cutting about halfway through each shrimp from the top.  I asked Debbie if she had butter and garlic and she had already made garlic butter for the steak (I may start calling her Debbie Chang).  We added some dried thyme to the butter and garlic and I heated it to melt it and basted the steak and shrimp with the butter sauce and then a dash or two of a Montreal seasoned lemon pepper Debbie had put out.   

Debbie had roasted a medium spaghetti squash seasoned with salt and pepper and butter and there was a platter of freshly baked ice box cookies that had been covered with dollops of a thick lime flavored icing and flakes of coconut. 

Debbie then made a salad with crumbled blue cheese, cranberries, and slivered almonds.

At around 5:30 p.m., Jeff and I walked outside to the deck to watch the sun set over Mount Taylor and watched the Sandias turn bright gold.  It was a clear day so the light was intense and the colors exquisitely clear. 

Jeff heated up the propane grill and grilled the steaks about 8 minutes on one side and 5 minutes on the other side and the shrimp for about five minutes on both sides.   The steak was cooked to medium, which I prefer, but was a little too well done for Suzette, but the shrimp were plump and juicy.  Both meats were very flavorful due to the addition of the basting and Lemon pepper spice mix.

I sliced the steaks and we poured glasses of the 2010 Terrenal Tempranillo and Debbie plated up our plates with squash and salad and we ate a lovely dinner while we talked and watched the reddish gold glow of sunlight behind the horizon line.  The wine had a flat taste that I now recognize as being associated with grapes grown in warmer climates.  Spain is just like New Mexico in the sense that grapes grow better in the warmer south than in the north, but growing grapes in the northern region puts the vines under stress and that produces wine with crisp fruitiness and character without any baked flavor that must be characteristic of fully ripened fruit.  The Terrenal tempranillo had that baked flattened flavor and we agreed to not buy it again.

After we finished our plates, Debbie filled parfait glasses with layers of honey flavored Greek yogurt and fresh blueberries and pineapple and topped each parfait with pomegranate seeds.  We put a pile of cookies on the table and Debbie made decaffeinated lattes with whipped milk and we settled into a pleasant rhythm of conversation and eating as the sky darkened to black.

Bon Appètit