Breakfast was wonderful; a slice of toasted Nativo bread smeared with goat cheese and garnished with slices of Vidalia onion, Lax, and green zebra tomato with Earl Grey tea.
I made a salad for lunch with some of the fresh ingredients we recently acquired, romaine lettuce, zebra tomato, radish, anchovies, and Comte cheese dressed with Cesar dressing.
After lunch I went to the bank and then Sprouts where I bought blueberries (6 oz. for $1.67), a bunch of green onions for $.34, milk for $2.19, and red bell peppers for $.33 each.
My idea for dinner was to make ratatouille with the red bell pepper plus some of the tomatoes Suzette brought home from the Center for Ageless Living, and eggplant, squash, and oregano from our garden and combine that with grilled steak and artichokes and drink one of the new red St. Emillon red wines I bought at Trader Joe’s yesterday.
When I returned home, I thawed a boneless ribeye steak and simmered the four artichokes I bought pat Trader Joe’s yesterday, but must have not turned the heat up high enough because the outer artichoke leaves did not fully cook and were tough.
I worked until 5:00 and when Suzette came home at 6:00 I started cooking, which meant that I started chopping vegetables for the ratatouille. I chopped one of the red bell peppers, a medium yellow onion, 1/3 of a squash from our garden and thawed a head of garlic from our garden that we had frozen and diced its six or seven cloves. Then I went to the garden and picked the largest eggplant and diced it and went to the garage fridge adx. D.C. Dxdxdd dnd selected five soft tomatoes from among those Suzette brought from her Center. I started sautéing the all the firm ingredients in a large Le Creuset casserole with 2 T. of olive oil and 1 T. of grapeseed oil. Then added the squash and then the tomatoes. We had boiled two extra ears of corn a couple of days ago and Suzette wanted to add corn, so I cut the kernels from an ear of cooked corn and added them while Suzette went to the garden to picked four or five stalks of fresh oregano, which I de-stemmed, chopped, and added with ½ tsp. of salt and 1/8 tsp. of white pepper.
We were hungry so we turned the heat up and cooked the ingredients at a high simmer, covered, which evaporated a bit too much liquid for my taste and scorched the vegetables on the bottom of the casserole, although it cooked all the ingredients into the desired amalgam required to blend their flavors into ratatouille. When dinner was ready I turned the heat down to the lowest setting and the ratatouille mixture continued to cook and generated the extra desired liquid to make it into the flavorful vegetable stew I had intended.
I also made a sauce for the artichokes and tomatoes by mixing some of the fresh bottle of mayonnaise that Suzette bought yesterday at Sam’s Club with the juice of 1/2 of a lemon I bought today at Sprouts, plus a bit of salt and dried dill weed.
Suzette cut two artichokes in half and grilled them with the steak that she had salted with sea salt and garnished with fresh ground black pepper. Suzette cooked the ribeye perfectly to medium rare.
I added a bit of catsup to flavor my steak, which is an old habit acquired in my childhood.
I opened the bottle of 2012 Chateau Rouvier appellation Montagne-Saint Emilon controllee that I bought at Trader Joe’s yesterday for $12.99. I was stunningly smooth. Suzette looked it up on her Vinvida app and found out that it received 3.6 and favorable reviews. Suzette is the red wine expert and she loved the wine and suggested that we buy more and age it. Voila. A good new wine. I had never drunk a Montaigne-St. Emilon and was impressed with the smoothness of the wine due to the addition of Cabernet Franc. Like all good Chateau bottled wines, it was bottled at the Chateau, which is becoming more of a rarity these days and is a big plus for me and other wine purists.
After dinner we finished the bottle of wine with slices of the Leyden cheese we bought in Camden, Maine.
I actually cheated and ate several squares of the dark chocolate I bought yesterday at Trader Joe’s with the last sip of the wine.
This was a great meal because the steak was perfectly cooked, the newly discovered wine was exceptional, and the freshly cooked ratatouille that combined so many fresh ingredients from our gardens was so delicious. Suzette also liked the sliced zebra tomatoes garnished with a bit of the lemon flavored mayonnaise sauce.
Bon Appetit
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