March 2, 2022 Lunch - Central Grille, Dinner - Swordfish Poke Kebabs with Green Rice
I ate 1/2 orange for breakfast.
Then at noon Suzette suggested we go out for lunch. I wanted to try a neighborhood restaurant and had not been to Central Grille at 2056 Central in years, so we drove there.
Suzette ordered the roast beef sandwich with au jus sauce and I ordered the Croque Madame sandwich with two eggs over easy.
We sat in the covered patio, which was not what Suzette wanted. She wanted to be sitting in an open patio in sunlight.
Then after about twenty minutes, the two sandwiches were served.
Neither of us liked our sandwiches, to put it mildly. Suzette’s roast beef was tough and almost uncuttable and she could not dip it in the au jus sauce because the sauce was so salty that it was inedible. Her experience was worse than mine.
My sandwich was rather far from a real Croque Madame, it was two slices of Black Forest ham between two untoasted slices of sour dough sandwich bread, such as Orowheat with a small amount of melted Gruyere cheese and a dab of something that may have been a white sauce at one time with two over easy nicely cooked eggs on top. I asked the waitress if she could bring me some more béchamel sauce and she looked at me as if I was talking a foreign language. So I asked for more white sauce or cream sauce and she still did not register any recognition. So, I muddled on and ate the sandwich, raw doughy bread and all.
The good part of my Croque Madame was that it was served with a small bowl of fresh cantaloupe and honeydew melon cubes with red grape halves that I shared with Suzette.
The owner came by our table to ask us how our meal was and we told him and he instantly pulled $40.00 out of his pocket and threw it on the table and asked if that covered the food cost. I gave him back $20.00 and we discussed the difficulty of obtaining competent help and Suzette told him that she owned a restaurant and she understood but that was no excuse for serving terrible inedible food. The owner then said, “well, we have prize winning pancakes. Would you like a pancake?”
I said, “I would like to try one of the blue corn pancakes featured as a daily special.”
Soon the food delivery person arrived with a plate with one blue pancake on it. I covered it with butter and syrup and tried it. I could not feel ant blue corn meal. It was as if they had added blue food coloring to regular pancake mix. And instead of a doughy smell, it smelled and tasted of vanilla. I did not know what to think, but it was cooked and warm so I ate it.
We left with a clear determination to not return, ever.
We drove to the bank and then home. As we arrived home I had to run to the bathroom with a bout of diarrhea, which often happened after a meal that my gut finds unacceptable. That was the final arbiter of the lunch. My gut rejected it.
Dinner was an entirely different experience. I had bought a fresh swordfish steak at Sprouts yesterday because Suzette had been saying that the best way she enjoyed swordfish was marinated in a poke sauce and cooked on an open fire skewered as shish kebabs.
So at 4:30 Suzette looked up a simple recipe for poke sauce and made a sauce with soy, sesame oil, and oyster sauce and marinated the cubes of swordfish she had cut the steak into for two hours.
The recipe called for a garnish of toasted chopped Macadamia nuts. Suzette chopped cashew nuts and toasted them in a dry skillet.
Perhaps the most interesting event of the day was a visit to our door by Miguel Garcia. Miguel Garcia used to be our representative but he lost when the districts were redrawn several years ago by the Republicans. Since they have now been redrawn by the democrats, he is running for his old seat and out soliciting signatures for his nomination petition.
Suzette spoke to him about the disparity between funding for nursing homes and assisted living facilities and financial assistance to the elderly while I put on socks and shoes and then I joined the conversation. I was impressed that Miguel was knowledgeable about Atrisco and had done many things to help, such as obtain funding to remodel the Los Volcanos Senior Center and at-risk youth housing. When he mentioned getting funding for senior housing in Atrisco, I mentioned that I was attorney for Westland and had worked on building the facility he was referring to, Westwind House, and the handicapped facility at Coors and Central. Suzette mentioned that she had managed Westwind House for several years, but Miguel kept talking about all the great things he had done for Atrisco as if he had a recorded loop in his head. So we signed the petition and wished him good luck in the election after about twenty-five minutes.
At 6:30 I fetched a bottle of the newly acquired Vara Grenache Rose from the fridge in the garage and put it in the fridge to keep chilled.
Suzette heated the grill and skewered the swordfish cubes and glazed them with poke sauce and put them on the outdoor grill to broil. She then put some of the green rice with asparagus tips in a Pyrex loaf pan and covered it with Saran and heated it in the microwave.
I then toasted 1 T. of black sesame seeds and then added the previously toasted cashew nuts in a dry skillet and thinly sliced five green onions.
When the kebabs were fully cooked Suzette plated dishes with a pile of the warmed green rice and lay a row of swordfish removed from the kebab skewer on top of the rice and garnished each dish with some of the toasted sesame seed and cashew nut mixture and some of the green onion ringlets.
It was an appealing and delicious dish, completely different from lunch.
We enjoyed the Vara Grenache Rose with the meal. I had picked the rose because it is the standard wine served with paella and I guess you could say that the poke kebabs on seasoned rice was sort of a Hawaiian style paella. At least it was to us.
We enjoyed dinner tremendously and after dinner watched an episode of Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
I was tired and went to bed at 9:00 and Suzette soon followed.
I woke up at 2:30 to blog this entry.
Bon Appetit
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