Eating with Bob and Suzette: January 3, 2016 Brunch – Turkey Hash, Dinner

January 3, 2016 Brunch – Turkey Hash, Dinner – Seafood Salad in ½ Avocado

Mike and Kathryn are staying with us for a few days, which is pleasant. It extends the Holiday Season by having friends who we can enjoy conversations and meals with.

For example, Suzette is now reluctant to visit Paris, because of the Jihadi terrorist attacks, but those attacks seem to be minor inconveniences to Mike and Kathryn, who view Paris as their home. It is similar to the recognition that the APD, uses excessive force. We who have lived here for a long time have developed ways of avoiding and coping with that localized problem with a feeling of security within the areas we inhabit.

I did not sleep well last night, getting about four hours sleep, due mainly to the rich food at dinner and large quantity of wine with little water.

Mike and Kathryn woke up or stopped working by 10:00 which allowed me to watch the morning TV news shows and pick the remaining meat from the lobster, which yielded only about 2/3 cup.

Suzette and I had decided to make Turkey Hash with the PPI turkey soup. Suzette drained the remaining broth from the turkey meat and I micro diced about ½ cup of the PPI Yukon Gold potato slices left from last night’s meal, a few PPI sautéed Shishito peppers, and about 1/3 onion and Suzette sautéed those ingredients in a large skillet. When the ingredients combined into a hash, Suzette then fried six sunny side up eggs and garnished the hash with eggs. I had sliced Fano French bread and we had toasted the slices in the oven. I fetched strawberry preserves, lime Marmalade, and butter and we had a lovely breakfast. Among the topics we discussed was how this breakfast was an example of creative use of PPIs.

Suzette and I went to Coronado Historic Site around noon, to see the Dorothy Dunn art exhibit and re-visit the kiva murals. Dorothy Dunn was an art instructor at the Santa Fe Indian School in the 30’s, who helped formalize Indian easel painting curriculum that launched the careers of many famous Indian painters, such as Alan Houser and Pablita Velarde.

The last few day’s cold weather has caused the lettuce we stored in the fridge in the garage to freeze, so after visiting Coronado, we went to Costco and bought Romaine and butter lettuce and a few other things.

When we returned home around 2:30, we took a package of large shrimp from the fridge to add some seafood to the salad we intended to fix for dinner and then rested and I took a nap until 4:00.

At 5:00 we started cooking. We had decided to stuff avocado halves with seafood salad. While Suzette boiled the shrimp, I diced the lobster meat and two tomatoes and some of the shrimp and julienned a cucumber and two carrots. Suzette hard boiled and sliced several eggs and I made a Russian dressing with mayonnaise, ketchup, lemon juice, a bit of relish and a some olive oil.

I fetched the PPI potato soup from the garage fridge, but it had frozen and gone bad so we made extra slices of French baguette and cut a wedge of brie cheese from the 1 kilo wheel of brie I had bought in November and aged.

Kathryn and Mike returned from visiting her father around 6:00 and by 7:00 Suzette composed lovely salads with the ingredients, combining the seafood with the dressing and stuffing the large avocado halves with seafood and then drizzling the salads with the remaining dressing. I had picked a few stalks of chives from the garden that I chopped and garnished the salad with.

I had trouble figuring out what wine to serve with dinner. I started by serving a bottle of Italian white that was not very good with the salad, although it had good minerality and fruit, so I opened the other bottle of rosé de Anjou (Total Wine $10.99), which was a very pleasant complement to the salad because it was drier and balanced the sweetness of the Russian dressing.

Kathryn and we are fans of Downton Abbey, so we tried to time the prep of dinner to be ready for the start of a preview show at 7:00 and then we timed the prep of dessert to be ready for the first episode of season six.

Kathryn wanted more cloud cake, but Suzette and I decided to use the two bananas we had stored in the fridge to make bananas foster. We cut the bananas in half and then into 1 inch pieces and I made a sauce in a medium skillet with Moreno sugar from Mexico (Ranch Market), butter, the zest of an orange, and Bacardi Gold rum. We then Sautéed the banana pieces in the rum sauce and then added some more rum and flambéed the bananas and sauce and served them over vanilla ice cream, which I knew Mike liked very much.