Friday, June 28, 2013

June 27, 2013 East Ocean and Book Club - Ploughman’s Lunch

June 27, 2013 East Ocean and Book Club - Ploughman’s Lunch

At noon I went to get my teeth cleaned and in talking to my dental hygienist of several years, My Lan, that her family owns Cafe Trang. I discovered that Trang is a member of the family that owns the Ta Lin complex and still owns the bakery and sandwich shop next door.  What a wonderful foodie discovery!  As we discussed oriental restaurants in Albuquerque My Lan mentioned a restaurant she liked on Menaul named Ko Ko Ro, after finishing my cleaning that I drove to it, but it was closed; so I drove the short distance to East Ocean for my favorite inexpensive Chinese Lunch.  It is No. 8 on the Lunch menu, “Shrimp in Lobster Sauce” with an eggroll and Fried Rice, except I substitute scallops for the shrimp and sweet and sour chicken for the eggroll.  With hot tea the total cost is $6.50.  I never stop wondering how they suspend the egg clouds in the thickened chicken stock sauce.  It is pure magic as far as I am concerned.  The scallops are cooked in the sauce so they impart to the sauce their briny scallop flavor.

At 6:30 p.m. Charlie Palmer and I drove to tonight’s Last Thursday Book Club meeting.  The book for discussion was Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim.  Our host, Tom Genomi, had set a table full of English foods with a sign that read “Pub Lunch” on a small chalk board.  The table included a large platter with cheeses and meats, Double Gloucester,
(Double Gloucester is a traditional, full fat, hard cheese made from pasteurized or unpasteurized cows’ milk. The cheese, made from the milk of once nearly extinct Old Gloucester cows, traces its origins to 1498 in the City of Gloucester.

Gloucester comes in both single and double varieties. While Single Gloucester is made from skimmed milk, Double Gloucester uses full fat milk. In addition, Double Gloucester is twice the height of Single Gloucester and more flavorful. It is also said that Double Gloucester uses the whole milk taken from two milking or a mixture of milk and cream.)

Stilton and English Cheddar, all from Trader Joe’s, surrounded by rolled up slices of turkey breast and roast beef.  There was a plate with wedges of soda bread and smaller bowls filled with dill pickles, bread and butter pickles and pickled mushrooms.  The drinks included bottles of Shiraz and a Kendall Jackson Grand Reserve Sauvignon Blanc and Reed’s Jamaican Style Ginger Beer, Original Cola, Sierra Nevada Ale, a few other types of beer and pink lemonade. 

The eight members who attended enjoyed a light pleasant dinner before starting the discussion of the book.  After about two hours of exchanging thoughts about the book and its characters and our life experiences that tied to the book’s subject of academia and the characters developed in the book, at 9:30 we were offered dessert that Tom’s wife had made; a lemon ice cream pie, with layers of whipped cream, a lemon flavored ice cream, and perhaps a thin layer of lemon custard or curd filling in a pastry shell that was then all frozen.  Its sweet lemony flavor and frozen ice cream texture was a real treat on one of the hottest evenings of the year.  My car’s outside temperature showed 94˚ when I arrived at my house at 10:00, which is as hot as the worse old hot days in Texas that encouraged me to leave Texas.  I fear global warming is upon us.  Also, the motor on one of my larger swamp coolers is failing and needs to be replaced.  This excessive heat is the event that will finally propel me into action.

Bon Appétit

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