March 31, 2016 Lunch – PPI Crab Imperial, Dinner – baked Pink Grouper with spicy Shrimp Sauce and Broccoli
Today was a throw together day for food. I was on deadline for filing motions in the big water case, so I reheated the last of the Crab Imperial and ate it between edits with my client for lunch
We were invited to tour Ultra Health’s marijuana growing facility in Bernalillo at 4:00. Willy drove us out at 3:45 and we retuned at 5:00, rather than go to a 6:00 reception, because Suzette had gone to Talin today and bought a fresh 1 ½ lb. Pink Grouper steak.
During the tour I said hello to the honored guest, Nate Gentry, who is the son of Nick Gentry, a lawyer friend. Nate is the House Majority leader and in favor of more rational marijuana laws and is being supported by Ultra Health.
When we returned home, Suzette decided to get rid of the PPI BBQ Shrimp by making it into a sauce for the grouper, so I, as the head prep chef, had the job of shelling the shrimp, which was a messy job because the shrimp were mushy and partially disintegrated into the BBQ sauce. I had to pick out antennae, heads, and tails as I picked out and shelled the cooked shrimp meat. I made an appetizer course of the job by sucking sauce out of the crevasses of the heads as I went. Many of the shrimp were so mushy, they fell apart as I separated meat from shell with a cocktail fork, resulting in many small bits and pieces of shrimp that actually enhanced the sauce’s consistency. I threw the shelled pieces of shrimp back into the BBQ sauce and finally tried to dredge the sauce for any pieces of tail, leg, and antenna left in the sauce, so Suzette had only to stir and pour the sauce over the fish and bake the fish. I then de- stemmed several sugar snap peas and de-flowered the last two stalks of broccoli, which Suzette steamed when the grouper was 8 minutes away from finishing being baked.
Suzette said she wanted a glass of wine and we discussed what kind would go well with the spicy fish dish. I went to the basement and found a St. Clair 2004 Refosco red and opened it and gave it to Suzette, who loudly announced it unfit to drink. I had never heard or drunk Refosco, which was probably a wine given to as a Christmas Party gift years ago by some guest who thought we would like a locally grown wine. I am not a wine snob. We buy and drink New Mexico wines. In fact we are members of Gruet’s Wine Club, which I recommend, because of its many benefits, as well as its excellent wines, but over the years I have found that the wines grown south of Elephant Butte Lake, such as in Deming, have a bitter baked flavor. Not unlike the Moroccan wine I tasted in 1969 on my first trip to Morocco.
So after the Refosco experience Suzette sent me back to the cellar, “To get something good.” I selected a 2011 Peres and Fils Vouvray that turned out to be perfect with the spicy fish dish. It was 100% Chenin Blanc with that wonderful slightly sweet, lemony, and tannic flavor characteristic of Vouvray. We loved it and the sweetness complemented the spicy sauce perfectly, such that both tasted better together.
After dinner when Willy returned from visiting his friend, Will, who had his wisdom teeth removed, he suggested he would like to make chocolate chip cookies and we encouraged him and Suzette even went back into the kitchen to teach Willy how to cream the butter and sugar into a homogenous paste to produce a better, more uniform cookie dough.
By 8:39 we were eating cookies and watching MSNBC coverage of the Presidential election, which has become a never ending saga on TV. I asked Willy how it felt to be back in the U.S. during this Presidential election cycle and he said, “Crazy.”
Actually Lawrence O’Donald had a good comment about Donald’s intention to criminalize women who have an abortion. He said, “Donald made the mistake of stating the logical truth of the Republican position on reproductive choice, which is that any woman who terminates a pregnancy for any reason should be found guilty of murder and go to jail.” Lawrence also interviewed Wendy Davis, who went into great detail on how the Republicans have been on a crusade to create legislation to deny women reproductive and health services, such as the abortion clinic legislation she filibustered against in the Texas Senate for 24 hours that made the national news.
By 10:00 I could take no more of the Donald bashing and went to bed.
Bon Appetit
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