I reverted to granola, yogurt, milk, and blueberries with vitamin powder for breakfast this morning.
I met Terry Jassman for lunch at Café Da Lat at 1:00, which Terry reintroduced me to several months ago. I like Café Da Lat and now count it among the best and most authentic Vietnamese restaurants in Albuquerque, although for uniquely wonderful food I still put Lan’s at the top of the list of my favorite Vietnamese restaurant in the state.
After lunch I went to Sprouts to get a red bell pepper, celery, and gelatin for Mother’s shrimp mold plus mushrooms, asparagus and green beans. As it turned out I was a week early for the shrimp mold and we had lots of green vegetables because I had bought the snow peas and a package of baby bok choy at Talin two days ago. Perhaps I was just feeling the herding instinct to go shopping on the biggest food shopping day of the year and rub shoulders to get some physical contact with all those Thanksgiving cooks. For example, as I was picking through fresh green beans for haricot verts a lady came up and said, “I need green beans for ten,” as she stuffed a plastic bag full of handfuls of beans.
After Sprouts I drove to Costco to fill the gas tank for tomorrow’s drive to Santa Fe and back.
When I got home around 3:30 I noted that the market had set another new high in the Dow but the other two indices were starting to turn downward in what may be an indicator that the Trump bump is about at its end.
I rode to Montano at 4:00 and got back home in a very respectable 50 minutes, where I found Suzette watching TV. We watched the Business news program, NBR, as we usually do and then started cooking at 5:30.
We had decided yesterday to fix the salmon I filleted, but had not decided on the entire menu. Suzette picked the menu with one suggestion from me. Suzette likes cranberry sauce with salmon, so, since we had a 12 oz. bag of fresh cranberries, she wanted to make fresh cranberry sauce. She also wanted to poach the salmon and make a cream sauce for it using the poaching medium instead of milk, which I also prefer. My request was to flavor the cream sauce with garlic.
Suzette cooked dinner. She snipped the ends off the snow peas but did not strip off the strings on each side of the pea and steamed them. Then she poached the salmon fillets in the fish stock I had made two days ago from the salmon bones and tail. Then she kept the salmon warm in the oven while she made the cream sauce by pouring off the poaching medium and then making a roux in the deep skillet she poached the salmon in with two T. of butter and two T. of flour. After cooking the roux for three minutes to cook the flour, she pressed in the pulp of three cloves of garlic and then whisked in enough stock to make a thin, but smooth sauce. The sauce, even with the garlic, did not have much flavor, so we started adding things to it, including ½ tsp. of white pepper, 1/8 tsp. of nutmeg, ¼ cup of cream, 1/3 tsp. of salt and finally I went to the garden and picked three sprigs each of tarragon and thyme and put 1 tsp of tarragon and ¼ tsp. of thyme in. The sauce still did not have a strong flavor so Suzette added another tsp. of salt, which amplified all the flavors and made the sauce taste fabulous.
Suzette also made cranberry sauce by cooking 12 oz. of cranberries with sugar in a bit of water to which I added the juice of ½ lemon and ½ orange and the zest from three small oranges.
I had brought up a bottle of 2010 Nessa Spanish Albariño and chilled it yesterday, which we opened for dinner. The wine had darkened to a deep yellow and the wine, although not oxidized, had taken on a sherry like flavor. I guess we better drink the rest of the Nessa Albariño soon.
This was a very satisfying meal and lovely to look at, a color combination of pink, red, green and white on the plate with a deep yellow in the wine glass.
I ate some Java Chip ice cream after dinner with a drizzle of Kahlua.
We went to bed at 9:00 after watching an episode of Miss Fisher on PBS.
Bon Appetit
No comments:
Post a Comment