February 5, 2015 Lunch Beef Pho Noodle Soup Dinner Bobbie Flay Chicken Surprise and Ratatouille

February 5, 2015  Lunch  Beef Pho Noodle Soup   Dinner   Bobbie Flay Chicken Surprise  and Ratatouille

I made a Pho noodle soup for lunch with the PPI grilled steak from last week, adding to it egg and rice noodles and two beef meatballs, plus a handful of sugar snap peas, a chopped large Mexican green onion, 1 heaping Tsp. of pho flavoring and 1 heaping Tbsp. of Red Miso plus a dash of Chinese Rice Wine and sesame oil.  When the soup was ready I added a squirt of Hoisin Sauce.

I wanted sautéed chicken thighs for dinner so I thawed out four of them after lunch.

I had planned to sauté zucchini squash and ½ onion and add lemon, but when Suzette arrived a bit after 6:00, we decided to make the Bobbie Flay Chicken Surprise with its delicious sauce because it was a quick way to cook chicken and did not want to have a sweet sauce and a tart lemon juice on the squash because in my opinion their flavors would clash.

I remembered that we had an eggplant and converted the squash and onion I had sliced thinly into ingredients for ratatouille by adding an orange bell pepper, the other ½ of onion and the eggplant.  I knew the chicken sautéed rather quickly, so I decided to try to accelerate the cooking time on the ratatouille by slicing everything thinly.  This worked.  Everything cooked more quickly for two reasons; first, the thinner slices softened more quickly due to their thinness and secondly, because they were thinner, they yielded their juices more readily to form a sauce and lots of liquid that speeded the cooking of the whole dish.  The benefit of this method of slicing the vegetables is that I did not have to add additional water to get the vegetables to break down, so the final result produced a more uniformly textured ratatouille with a more pleasant vegetable flavored sauce.

Suzette made the Mint Sauce for the Chicken Surprise with a new jar of honey that was recently given to her by her farmer, Jefferson, who is a bee keeper and discovered this honey in a hive in Socorro that had not been removed for over 10 years.  The honey had a very dark color and a rich sweet flavor.  

Suzette made a ½ recipe of the sauce using fresh mint grown inside the house and parsley from our covered garden bed outside.  She also opened a bottle of olive oil we bought in Portugal in April at the Quinta do Tedo winery.  We visited the Quinta do Tedo winery on a day trip to the Douro Valley of Portugal from Oporto.   The winery sits high on a hillside above the convergence of the Douro and the Tedo, which is a small tributary of the Douro about 70 miles inland from Oporto. 

The main characteristic of good virgin olive oil produced under optimal conditions (the ability to avoid the introduction of air, which creates oxidation, just as it does with wine) is its absence of flavor, like fresh oysters or Dom Pérignon Champagne.  The benefit of using relatively flavorless olive oil is that it allows the flavors of the ingredients in the sauce to shine through; in this case the fresh parsley, mint and especially the honey.

Suzette wanted a bottle of light red, so I went to the basement and fetched a bottle of La Granja 50% Tempranillo and 50% Grenache blend from Rioja, Spain.  It was light in color and texture but did not satisfy me like the more complex Tuella from Portugal did the other night, so I am now thinking of upgrading our standard red from La Granja ($4.99 at Trader Joe’s) to Tuella ($6.99 at Trader Joe’s).

For dessert we each ate a bowl of Blue Bell Mocha Almond Fudge ice cream (Albertson’s $3.99/half gallon).  I doused my ice cream with a splash of rum and Suzette garnished hers with toasted pecans.

Bon Appétit   

P.S. Last night was a meditation night and Suzetre did not arrive home until almost 6:30 so I made a quick dinner of Cesar salad, which we ate with a bowl of  PPI Red Beans and Rice.  Quick and delicious.