Alan and Kim
Leszinke had a memorial reception for Sam Hassan at 11:00 on Saturday, which
included the gastronomic or hedonistic high point of the weekend and celebration of St. Patrick's Day, because they opened
a bottle of Royal Salute gifted to them by Sam a few years ago. I have never drunk Royal Salute; a
special bottling by Chivas Regal of their best 21 year old Scotch in honor of
the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953, so the scotch is presently 81 years old. Bottle is not exactly the correct word
because the scotch was bottled in a brown glazed ceramic crock bottle. Needless to say I have never tasted a better
scotch. It was smooth and yet assertive
and got better the longer we talked and let it sit open during the 30 minute eulogy
and toasts to Sam. Needless to say it was the
best scotch I have ever tasted. Kim had also baked a lovely carrot cake that I enjoyed with cups of Celestial Seasonings' Toffee flavored tea.
After the memorial/wake and a Polish
dog at Costco I headed to Sprouts to buy more corvina, mushrooms and eggplant and Nantucket Shoals to buy a 1 lb. bag of frozen crawfish for $14.95.
Sunday evening when I returned from the Law Library, we decided to cook the corvina in a Spanish and Panamanian manner with palm hearts and sundried tomatoes (Costco)
and slices of red bell pepper and onion and garlic.
So I sliced about 3 Tbsp. of onion and we crushed and rough cut six small cloves of garlic and Suzette cut up some sundried tomatoes and 2 palm hearts and a red bell pepper while I snapped 12 stalks of asparagus and put them in the
steamer with water on the stove, ready for Suzette to heat when ready.
Suzette sautéed
the corvine, bell pepper, onion, garlic and palm hearts in butter and olive oil and then added about ½ cup of white wine to
the skillet. While she was sautéing the
corvina I asked, what she thought we should drink and she said, “This is a Spanish
style dish so I think a light red would be good", so I went to the basement and fetched
a bottle of Spanish La Granja (50% grenache/50% tempranillo from Trader Joe’s
$5.99) and opened it.
It only took
about ten minutes to cook the corvina and sliced ingredients and steam the asparagus
and heat the couscous, so almost as soon as I poured the wine Suzette was
plating the fish and sautéed ingredients on a pile of couscous and we turned off the heat under the
asparagus and plated them for a totally wonderful meal.
After diner we watched a funny Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sadler movie and
I ate a few bites of blue cheese with more of the wine. Then later I fetched
the fruit cake from the basement and had a couple of slices of it with a cognac and Courvoisier.
So at 3:00 a.m. I awoke with a throbbing
head and took Tylenol and drank a couple of glasses of water.
Saturday evening we ate PPIs for
dinner. Suzette ate the cabbage and corned beef she had brought home from the Greenhouse Bistro and Bakery and I ate the last of the French Onion
Soup. Happy St. Patrick's Day
No comments:
Post a Comment