I picked Harry up at 8:20 and we went to the IRS
Headquarters on Montgomery for my tax audit.
My auditor, Nicole, was very business-like, but very
pleasant, if that word can be associated with a tax audit by the IRS. The result was that I did not owe any additional
tax, which made me so happy I took the rest of the day off and made a pot of
Vietnamese noodle soup with the beef Kabab from the Souder/Graf’s garden party
Sunday evening and some Vietnamese beef balls, sugar snap peas, an onion, a yellow
crock neck squash, a large Tbsp. each of pho flavoring and brown miso, two
sliced mushrooms and four sliced okras and Vietnamese rice vermicelli and watched
Chelsea v. Aston Villa with Willy. When
the match finished the Pro Challenge bike race from Colorado came on and I
watched it. It was almost a repeat of the last Saturday of the Tour de France this summer, but with a flat finish; Jentz Voigt went out on an attach from the lead group with about 10 miles to go and the peleton caught him within three kms. of the finish and Peter Sagan won the sprint finish.Then I worked some and took a bike ride at 5:30 p.m.
For dinner I wanted to fry the fresh sardines I had bought
at Ta Lin ($1.69/lb.) on Tuesday and do something with mushrooms, because we
still had the chanterelles and porcinis, we bought in Taos last weekend. I looked in several cookbooks and finally
found a sautéed mushroom recipe in José Andrés’ “Tapas” Cookbook that looked
good.
When Suzette got home around 8:00 p.m. she suggested that we make pasta to go with the mushrooms and fish. So she started a pot of water boiling. I cleaned and removed the heads from the sardines.
Suzette went to our driveway and picked a handful of purslane and de-stemmed it. Then she dusted the sardines with panko and flour and salt and pepper and sautéed them in olive oil and butter and one clove of garlic.
I had cut the stems off the mushrooms, so they would sit
flat on the pan and sliced the three remaining porcinis into flat thick
slices. Then I heated about 3 Tbsp. of
oil in a large skillet and placed the mushrooms in the skillet. The recipe said to turn every minute, but we
turned the mushrooms about every three minutes for about three times. Then I ran to the garden and got some sage,
basil and marjoram and chopped it and threw it into the mushrooms with the five
cloves of sliced garlic and the purslane.
After another minute I poured about 2 Tbsp. of Spanish
sherry into the mushrooms and flipped them again and cooked them for another few
minutes. I then fetched the bunch of
Italian Parsley I had bought at Ta Lin and removed the leaves from the stems
and chopped about 2 Tbsp. of it and threw it into the mushroom pan. Then
Suzette drained the pasta and tossed it with the mushrooms in the large skillet. I fetched a bottle of Chateau de Nages rosé
from Costieres de Nimes ($9.99 at Total Wine) and we were ready to eat.
I must admit that the porcinis (the dark capped mushroom on the right in the above picture) did not taste much different than the white mushrooms after they were sautéed in the same ingredients, so it was a waste to use the $15.00/lb. porcinis in this recipe (unless you are leaving town on Sunday and need to use them).
We ate on the patio and fileted the sardines as best we could in the low light and removed as many bones as possible and found that eating any small bones was not a problem after they had been thoroughly fried.
We loved the meal. As
Suzette said, “What can be bad about fried fish.”
The rose was wonderful; smooth tasting, yet full of flavor
and light enough to be a good complement to both the light fleshed sardines and
the mushrooms and pasta. It is one of
the best French rosés I have tasted in a long time.
It was a beautiful evening and after I had begun reading in bed, Suzette came and got me go out and look at the moon, which was surrounded by an amazing halo of light that appeared to be graduated in tone from light in front of the moon to the darkness of space around it.
Willy and Suzette then took a walk in the moon light, while I went to sleep.
Bon Appétit
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