Friday, December 8, 2017

December 7, 2017 Lunch – Salad and melted cheese bread. Dinner – Thon a la Provençale with steamed whole zucchini squash

December 7, 2017 Lunch – Salad and melted cheese bread.
Dinner – Thon a la Provençale with steamed whole zucchini squash

Because of the cold weather and a slight sore throat I have drunk cups of hot water with the juice of a sweet lime and a tsp. of local honey when I wake up in the morning and in the middle of the night and today was no exception.  Then at 9:30 I ate a bowl with granola, diced banana, blueberries, milk, and yogurt.

This was one of the coldest days of the year.  The temperature never exceeded 32 degrees, so I was happy to stay in, except I went to the bank at noon to transfer my IRA required distribution from my brokerage account to my checking account, which will trigger a taxable income but avoid a 50% penalty on the amount of the required distribution.

When I returned at 12:45  I had a hankering for a salad, since I had eaten Vietnamese Noodle Miso Soup for lunch the last two days.  I chopped a heart of romaine lettuce and then looked in the fridge and found the bag of PPI salad ingredients from the composed salad we made a week ago for dinner with Willy and Robin and added those ingredients, plus 1/4 peeled and diced cucumber, the last 1/3 of a grilled pork chop, a Roma tomato diced, two radishes sliced, and two green onions sliced thinly.   I Reconstituted the Cesar dressing with juice of ½ lemon and some Sprouts Spanish olive oil.  I melted slices of Monterrey Jack cheese on a piece of rye bread and ate a hardy lunch.



After lunch I thawed 1 ½ lb. of ahi tuna I had bought at Sprouts on Tuesday on sale for $5.99/lb.  When we made the recipe for Scallops Provençal on page 218 of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking on Tuesday night I noticed a recipe on Page 219 for Tuna Provençal that I had never made that looked interesting and realized we had all the ingredients, now that I had bought tuna steaks.

I had invited Willy to join us for dinner to try the recipe and he had told me he would come at 7:00, so when Suzette came home around 5:30 after I stopped working, we discussed dinner and decided to cook the recipe for Tuna Provençal and to steam the lovely small zucchini’s she bought at El Super yesterday on special at 3 lb. for $.99 to go with the tuna dish.

Here is the recipe.


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We cooked it without an alteration other than we halved the recipe and substituted the green tops of green onions for the parsley in the final sauce and added a few capers.

Because Suzette likes to cook and I like to prep, we have a natural division of labor.

I chopped the yellow onion and the 1 ½ lb. of Roma tomatoes, while Suzette minced several small cloves of garlic.  She the followed the recipe exactly.  I ran to the garden and picked three sprigs of fresh thyme for the herbs in the sauce and made the beurre marie and sliced the green tops of four scallion and added those to the beurre Marie for the final sauce, while Suzette sautéed the sauce ingredients and the tuna and filled a 9 x 9 inch pyrex baking dish with those ingredients and baked them in the oven for 30 minutes and then removed the tuna to the oven to keep it warm while she added the tomato paste and beurre Marie I handed her to finish the sauce.  She steamed 8 small zucchini and I sliced a peeled Yukon Gold potato I found in the fridge and put it in a sandwich bag with a ½ T. slice of butter and a squirt of concentrated beef broth and cooked the potato slices in the microwave for 4:44 minutes at a power setting of 7.  When the potato slices were cooked Suzette sautéed them in butter on the stove to a golden brown.












Julia’s wine suggestions included a dry white wine, so when the sauce for the tuna was ready I poured glasses of 2016 Dry Creek Sauvignon Blanc that I had bought at Costco for $10.99.  The wine was exquisitely dry and complemented the rich tomato sauce. We loved this recipe also, although it was totally different from its Scallops Provençal neighbor.  That is one of the joys of cooking one’s way
through Mastering the Art of French Cooking; the base recipes are the best of the best and are all different.  She provided a true exploration of most of the regional variations of French cuisine, as these two Provençal seafood recipes demonstrated.

Cooking these two recipes allowed me to re-experience the excitement and near magical impact that the publication of Mastering the Art of French Cooking has created in American kitchens since its original publication in 1961.  I learned to cook from this book and I am eternally grateful to Julia
Child for introducing me and other American cooks to real traditional and regional French cuisine.

One small aside.  I helped my mother prep her cooking classes for her cooking school that she established in our home kitchen in Fort Worth, so was introduced to classic French Cuisine while living at home. When I went to college and was living and dining at a fraternity house I was shocked by the low level of food.  Dinner was occasionally Salisbury steak in a crude brown sauce with mashed potatoes and it went down from there.  Hamburgers was more the common denominator.  When I expressed my shock to Mother on my first visit home during my freshman year in college in1964 she bought me a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking with the admonition, “Robbie, if you want to continue to eat this type of food, you will need to learn to cook.”  And learn I did, I joined a group of Francophile students who met on many Saturday evenings to cook French dinners, which meant cooking recipes from Mastering the Art of French Cooking.  Two years later when my
brother Billy came to UT in Austin, we would meet on Saturdays. To go shopping, usually at a Kash-Karry at Guadalupe around 32nd because we could buy heavy aged prime beef steaks for $2.00 per lb. and some potatoes and a green vegetable.  Then we would drive to the Bottle Shoppe, as I recall was near 15th and Lavaca that had the best selection of French wine and spirits near the University, and buy a French chateau produced red wine for $2.00 and go to my apartment and make what we thought was a real French meal of steak of grilled steak, a crude sauce Forestiere, baked potatoes, and a vegetable with good red wine; a welcome reprieve from the mundane food offerings at our respective fraternity houses.

After dinner Willy and I toasted pieces of Fano baguette and ate them buttered with slices of Brie cheese with glasses of red wine for a cheese course.

For dessert later Suzette and I ate small bowls of Poached Quince and raisins garnished with whipped cream.

 Willy said goodnight at about 9:00 and we went to bed after watching a documentary on the history of Bitcoin.

Bon Appetit


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