October 8, 2020 Lunch – Pho Beef and Noodle Soup Dinner – Bobby Flay Chicken with Steamed Broccoli and Roasted Root Vegetables

 October 8, 2020 Lunch – Pho Beef and Noodle Soup   Dinner – Bobby Flay Chicken with Steamed Broccoli and Roasted Root Vegetables

Ah the joy of simple food cooked well. 

Yesterday I ordered a bag of fresh Ming bean sprouts among the items from El Super, so today I wanted to cook dishes utilizing mung bean sprouts.  One of my favorite mung bean sprout dishes is Vietnamese omelet.  I chopped a green onion and cubed a 4 oz. sheet of medium firm tofu sautéed those items with about three oz.of the PPI chicken, onion, and Refried Black Beans from last night’s taco meal and added a handful of mung bean sprouts and then two eggs whisked with a T. of Vietnamese fish sauce from 2000 Vietnam Restaurant.

   

 

 

 

  I let the ingredients sit and congeal for several minutes and then flipped one half of the omelet onto the  

  other half to make that classic semi circular omelet shape.

 The omelet was delicious with a cup of green tea.

Then for lunch I made a Pho Noodle Soup with a Pho seasoning cube, a tsp. of Knorr dehydrated beef stock, 4 oz. of PPI steak, 2 oz. of onion,  two sliced mushrooms, and the remaining Creamed Spinach from dinner several nights ago plus a bundle of rice sticks and a bundle of wheat egg noodles bought at Talin Market. After about fifteen minutes when the noodles began to soften and absorb broth I added more water, plus a heaping T.of red miso and four leaves of Napa cabbage sliced and diced to bite sized and added a T. of chopped wilted parsley.

B  The result was a slightly creamy beef noodle soup.  I went to the garden and picked a dozen basil leaves and fetched the bottle of hoisin sauce, mung bean sprouts, and cilantro from the fridge and sliced a lime in half.

 After thirty minutes of simmering I ladled a bowl of soup into my favorite lotus bowl and added a handful of mung beans and folded the noodles over them to cook them in the soup. Then I added a drizzle of hoisin sauce and the juice of ½ lime and torn leaves of basil and cilantro in the manner I learned from the Vietnam vets sitting with me around the big common eating table at Hong Kong market in Albuquerque thirty years ago where I first became infatuated with Pho. 

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  After two bowls of noodles and soup I was satiated.  I added some more water to the pot of soup that was still more than half full of noodles and ingredients and placed it in the fridge.

After the market closed at 2:00 with my portfolio within $2,000 of its all time high I decided to go vote at  the voting annex at 15th and Lomas. I walked to Central and realized that I did not have a mask so I  returned home to fetch my mask and drove to the annex.  There was a line of about fifteen voters spaced six feet apart along the portal, so I got in line and waited about twenty minutes until I reached the front of the line.  When I was near the open entry doors an older woman in a brown camisole walked out of the doors and exclaimed in a loud voice, “I love my community!”  That was the high point of my day.  

Soon i was admitted to the short inside line.  There were four people handling the registration and in another couple of minutes I went to the next available registrar.  She asked for my ID and voter registration card and typed the information into the computer.  My name and address and a signature blank immediately appeared on the small screen on the tables do I signed the blank to verify that I was me. 

She then said, “I see that you have requested an absentee ballot.  Do you wish to waive your right to vote absentee and vote today .”  I said, “Yes.”  

She then printed a waiver on a pink sheet of paper that I signed.  Then she printed my ballot, which was a double sided small print approximately 15 inch long sheet of paper listing all the elective offices,

Constitutional Amendments, and bond issuances being voted on.  I quickly voted for Biden for President and then Ben Ray Lujan for Senator and spent the next fifteen minutes marking the thirty other items, mostly judges.

 When I finished voting I took my pink waiver and allot to the voting machine attendant, who took my waiver and placed it in a large pile of other pink waivers.  I realized that I was not the only person who had a two track voting strategy to request an absentee ballot in the event I was unable to vote.  

The attendant then showed me where to insert my ballot in the large electronic tabulating machine and told me to wait until the number changed.  When the number changed from 603 to 604 the attendant handed me a sticker with an American flag and the words “I voted” printed on it.  

I was equally elated that I had voted and felt how mundane the act had been after all the hyperbole on TV news shows and from the President about voting irregularities.  The wait at the city’s only voting site had been twenty minutes and the voting process had been twenty minutes.

I was back home within an hour.  

When I returned I lay down and read until 5:00 when I meditated on Zoom with my zen sitting group. 

After meditating, at about 5:45, I pre-heated the oven to 350 degrees and began peeling and dicing three 

parsnips, two small russet potatoes, two turnips, a sweet potato, an onion, and a small head of garlic. Suzette arrived as I filled a Pyrex baking dish. She had a cocktail while I drizzled the vegetables with Spanish olive oil and Mexican sea salt and and covered the dish with aluminum foil and popped them into the oven.

I had told Suzette I would fix dinners this week while she was remodeling her facility with new flooring and counter tops.

I then removed the flowerets from a stalk of broccoli an put them in the steamer basket of rinsed them and then filled the steamer to the bottom of the basket with water, covered the steamer, and placed the steamer on the stove.

Bobby Flay Chicken 

As I have said many times the recipe for Bobby Flay Chicken is rather generic with many opportunities to vary seasonings within the three essential recipe steps.  The recipe was given to us by our neighbor Susan Palmer, who introduced us to the recipe. The three steps are tossing chicken thighs in a spice rub, sautéing the chicken in a cast iron skillet Weighted down with a smaller skillet filled with water for about eight to ten minutes on each side and then baking the sautéed chicken in the oven for another twenty minutes.  The result is a tender delicious piece of chicken cooked quickly.

 We use a gallon freezer bag to toss the chicken pieces in the rub. Smoked paprika, salt, and white pepper and constants in the rub bag and tonight I added about a T. of the grounded toasted pumpkin seeds Suzette had made by cleaning the seeds from the pumpkin she brought home from her Center for Ageless Living’s garden on Monday and then roasting in the oven and then grinding in a coffee grinder. The Spanish word is pipian.

After I removed ant excess fat and rinsed and dried and coated the four thighs with rub, I sautéed them in a large cast iron skillet with enough olive oil to thinly coat the bottom.  

Suzette took over at this point, having regained her energy after a few minutes of TV news and a scotch.  She finished sautéing both sides of  the thighs and placed the large skillet into the oven.

She also uncovered the vegetables. When the cooking time was down to ten  minutes we turned on the burner under the steamer.

 I had chilled a bottle of 2019 Famille Bougrier Chenin Blanc from Vouvray.  The label also indicated Douce, which means it was slightly sweet. The back label indicated the wine was produced in Saint 

Georges-sur-Cher, which is a small town on the south bank of the Cher River that is a tributary of the Loire River near Vouvray  in the Loire Valley in the Loire- Cher Department in the middle of France.

I bought the wine on special of 2 bottles for $20.00. I think the normal price was $14.99.   Any way we loved the wine. It was the fullest expression of French Chenin Blanc we have had in years.  Chenin Blanc is Suzette’s favorite white wine andi love it also.  One of the unique characteristics of Chenin Blanc is that its sweetness varies from year to year depending upon growing conditions.  This 2019 bottle was the best we have tasted in years. It was a powerful wine full of the energy that abundant sunlight, rain, and a long growing season can impart to the grapes.  It had that amazing balance of citrus, acidity and sweetness that is a unique characteristic of good Chenin Blanc from Vouvray.  A winner.

During and after dinner we watched a rather confusing episode of Midsomer Mystery and went to bed at 9:30 after a chocolate and cognac for me.

The lesson of today was that voting is far easier than the news is making it seem. Perhaps because we live in state controlled by Democrats, who want to make voting as easy and secure as possible.

Bon Appetit