June 22, 2014 Lunch Cesar Salad Dinner Eggplant with Garlic Sauce and BBQ Pork and Apricot tart

June 22, 2014 Lunch  Cesar Salad   Dinner  Eggplant with Garlic Sauce and BBQ Pork and Apricot tart

We picked snow peas and fresh romaine lettuce in the morning and made a wonderful  Cesar Salad with fresh Romaine for lunch.  Suzette thawed out the cedar board grilled salmon and we had one of the best Cesar Salads, I have ever eaten, with soft delicious slightly lemon and dill flavored salmon and fresh blanched snow peas and peas from the garden with fresh romaine leaves and slices of Pecorino Romano cheese and a great Cesar dressing.

Also, we processed about fifteen pounds of Megan's apricots in the morning with a bit of the fresh honey from Suzette’s Center.  By the afternoon Suzette had filled eight 32 oz. yogurt containers with apricots ready for baking.  We had also sliced halves of apricots to make a tart.  Suzette made a  pie crust dough using an Epicurious recipe that utilized Riesling wine.  Here is the recipe:

After watching Portugal tie the U.S. tie in their game of the world cup, Suzette finished making the apricot tart and put it in the oven to bake.

We were not sure what to cook for dinner, Suzette was reluctant to cook, until I finally suggested that we make Suzette’s favorite Chinese dish, Eggplant with Garlic Sauce and use up the PPI BBQ pork flavored with Five Spice.  I peeled a 1 lb. American eggplant  and cut it into two inch long cubed slices. 

I then chopped 2 Tbsps. of fresh garlic and about 1 ½ lbs. of the PPI pork and ¾ of a green bell pepper.

Here is the recipe:

Eggplant with Garlic Sauce.

You first make the Sauce:

1 Tbsp. double dark soy sauce

2 tsp. Oyster Sauce

1 tsp. white rice wine vinegar

½ tsp. Shaoxing wine

½ tsp. pepper flakes from hot oil (we reduce this to avoid making the dish too spicy)

½ tsp. of cornstarch dissolved in 2 Tbsp. of chicken stock

Suzette sautéed the eggplant and bell pepper until tender in heated peanut oil.  While Suzette was stir frying the eggplant strips (the recipe calls for deep frying the eggplant strips in 4 cups of peanut oil, but we never use that much oil).

After Suzette had cooked the eggplant and peppers, she stir fried the garlic and then added the BBQ pork.  

Then she returned the eggplants to the wok and stir fried it with the vegetable and meat mixture for a minute and then made a well in the middle of the ingredients and added the sauce and cooked the eggplant mixture for a minute or two while I was stir frying the vegetable dish. 

While Suzette stir fried the bell pepper and eggplant until soft, made the sauce and dish and heated the PPI rice for dinner, I blogged and went to the store to buy a ½ gallon of vanilla ice cream and a bunch of green onions and cut fresh roses from our garden.  I then was called by my brother but soon Suzette interrupted our conversation to mention that dinner was almost ready. 

We piled a mound of rice on each of our plates and then the eggplant dish.  The flavor was sensational, the combination of the five spice flavored pork enhanced by the fragrant sauce on the eggplant and the bell pepper made for a memorable dish.  A wonderful thing about cooking with PPIs is that often PPI enhanced recipes are better than the original recipe.

We poured glasses of Camino Real Riesling and Kim Crawford Sauvignon Blanc and enjoyed dinner while watching the new Lucy Liu Sherlock Holmes series, “Elementary”.

After dinner and the Elementary show, it seemed elementary that we should enjoy a glass of port with our dessert.  Suzette sliced the tart and laid a scoop of vanilla ice cream on each, while I poured out the last of the Mogrado Ruby Port ($5.99 at Trader Joe’s), which was only a ½ glass.

We took our desserts out to the garden table under the gazebo and ate and watched the braver doves fly to the bird bath in the middle of the garden to drink water and the clouds turn golden.  The quiet peacefulness was very relaxing after the hectic weekend Suzette had spent putting on her food event for 100 folks. 

Soon Suzette mentioned that she would like a little more port and suggested that we try the Prager port we had bought in Napa at the winery eight years ago.  I went to the basement and found a bottle of 2002 Aria White Port made with chardonnay grapes and opened it and brought it and a bowl of ice cubes to the table in the garden and we each enjoyed a lovely amber colored glass of the Aria with its tawny, nutty flavor.  We speculated about whether the tawny, nutty flavor was due entirely to the four years of aging done by Prager before bottling or in part from our eight years of cellaring the bottle in our cellar.  Anyway the wine had a rich tawny nutty flavor that is mentioned on the bottle notes, which also mention that Aria is the name of the Prager’s granddaughter.

Bon Appétit