April 16, 2016 Lunch – PPI Miso Noodle Soup, Rio Grande Brewery, Dinner – New Recipe Deconstructed Eggplant Parmesan. Grilled Eggplant with Mozzarella and Penne Pasta in a Tomato, caper, onion, garlic, Artichoke heart, and Mushroom Sauce
Today was the first day of this year’s Farmer’s Market Downtown at 8th and Central. Suzette wanted an almond Croissant, so we went at 8:15. I bought a loaf of French whole wheat bread two croissants and a cinnamon bun for $16.50. Each croissant is $3.50. We walked around and talk to a lady growing lovely oyster mushrooms about growing mushrooms and Chispa Farm’s Eli about marijuana business.
We then went home and Suzette made us cups of coffee and heated the croissants and we had a wonderful French Breakfast.
I worked until 1:45 and heated up the PPI Miso Noodle Soup for lunch. It was just as good today as yesterday, perhaps even better since its flavors had had a chance to blend for a day and the seaweed soften.
I ate it with fresh cilantro and hoisin Sauce.
Suzette came home at 5:00 and we went to the Gruet Reception at Rio Grande Brewery on 2nd St. Just south of the freeway. Justin was the host. He had drawings every twenty minutes and gave out tickets for glasses of free champagne. Rio Grande Brewery carries Gruet’s wines on its menu. We had never been and enjoyed meeting some new people. The free champagne was Gruet Blanc de Noir. I had three glasses between 5:30 and 7:30, so I was feeling a little light headed. After an hour Barb and Megan sat down beside us. It turned out that Barb is Ed Haddaway’s wife and has an interest in seashells. She is also leaving to walk the Camino Santiago next week and had attended the special dinner Suzette held at the Bistro with a presentation on the Camino Santiago a few months ago. When I said I liked Ed’s work, she called him on her phone and we had a chat. Interestingly, he is from Fort Worth and attended Arlington Heights High School. It turned into one of those repeatedly small world evenings.
At 7:45 we said goodnight and went home. We were juiced up and wanted to cook. Suzette wanted to use up all PPIs. We decided to make a deconstructed Eggplant Parmesan because we had a fresh eggplant.. We found an open package of fresh Mozzarella slices. I sliced an eggplant and Suzette brushed the slices with olive oil and then sprinkled them with salt and pepper. She the grilled them and when she flipped them placed slices of fresh Mozzarella on the grilled side to melt.
While Suzette was cooking the eggplant I made a fresh tomato sauce. I went to the garden and picked a handful of oregano and a clump of garlic. I cleaned and chopped the garlic plants and de-stemmed about 1 T. of oregano leaves. Then Suzette sliced two Portobello mushrooms and ½ onion and put butter and olive oil in a large skillet and sautéed the onion, I put the garlic into the pan. Then I chopped 1 ½ tomatoes and put the diced tomato and oregano in the skillet. Then I added 2 tsp. of capers. I then removed the leaves from one of the two artichokes I had cooked on Thursday that I had bought at Sprouts for 2 for $3.00 and cleaned the fuzz from the heart and diced it finely and added it to the sauce. The sauce was not very saucy, so we added some water to allow the ingredients to go into solution.
Suzette then added the bag of PPI Penne Pasta to the skillet. I added a bit more water so the ingredients were wet enough to coat the pasta. After fifteen minutes of cooking we had a lovely healthy vegetarian meal ready. I opened a bottle of Aquino Chianti Reserva (Trader Joe’s $5.99) and poured glasses of wine. I am continually amazed by the quality and moderate prices of Trader Joe's wines. This chianti had the assertive tannins of a great wine, yet was very drinkable and complemented well the rich flavors in the fresh tomato sauce.
Willy joined us for dinner. It was almost 10:00 when we finished dinner, so we all watched Saturday Night Live. Larry David did his usual wonderful Bernie Sanders imitation for the opening monologue, which imitated the Democratic Party debate that occurred between him and Hillary Clinton this week in Brooklyn.
I ate a couple of dark chocolate truffles (trader Joe’s 2.99 for 8oz.) with a small glass of grappa.
I went to bed at 11:15 after reading a New Yorker article about the melting glaciers into the Himalayan north of India and Nepal.
Bon Appetit
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