September 26, 2024 Breakfast - Chili Relleno Burrito at La Cocina. Lunch - 2 fried eggs with Mexican green onion. Dinner - Sautéed salmon filet with roasted Cauliflower with Taleggio cheese sauce
Today I woke up at 7:00 with the compulsion to shop for groceries because our refrigerator was empty. I drove to El Super and started buying small quantities of over 25 items, including eggs, milk, orange juice, apples, bananas, an orange, limes, avocados, cilantro, parsley, green beans, broccoli, lemons, a head of cauliflower, four yellow onions, a red onion, Mexican green onions, ginger, Roma tomatoes, a zucchini, sweet potatoes, a 10 lb. bag of russet potatoes, mushrooms, a cucumber, a head of romaine lettuce, radishes, yogurt, and homemade corn chips.
Around 8:00 I ran out of energy and saw that the in-store restaurant named La Cocina was opening, so I bought a chili Relleno plate with a fresh warm chili Relleno that still had a lot of melted cheese inside, two sides of refried beans instead of beans and rice, and two toasted flour tortillas and. I also bought a Mexican coke, and 1/2 gallon of fresh squeezed orange juice. La Cocina has been remodeled and is much brighter and cleaner, probably because to old layout with the Mexican cart with open stainless steel containers of salsas, chopped onions, and cilantro was deemed unsanitary. For example, now those items are kept in individual small plastic containers in a refrigerator. The old open cart is gone and with it that small connection to Mexican culture, thank God.
The newly remodeled La Cocina
The formed burrito with the other half of Relleno and refried beans
I cut the chili Relleno in half longways and lay 1/2 of the beans along side of the half on one of the warm flour tortillas and rolled the tortilla around the Relleno and beans to make a chili Relleno burrito. I asked the cashier for small cups of chopped onion and cilantro and dusted some inside the burrito. I enjoyed the burrito and then wrapped the remaining beans and Relleno inside the other flour tortilla to make another burrito to take home. I drank the rest of the coke as I finished shopping.
I guess not eating dinner depleted me more than I thought because I ran out of energy in the check out line again and had a tough time self-checking the items and getting them to the car.
When I arrived home Luke arrived and carried the groceries into the house.
Soon Suzette was filling the milk attachment to our coffee machine and making a Latte machiatta, so I made one also and drank it with a pain au chocolate, after which I started feeling stronger.
Then at 2:00 after the market closed and Luke left, I fried two eggs with the sliced bulb of one of the Mexican green onions and drank some orange juice and ate a Granny Smith apple and finally began feeling much stronger. My portfolio had a modest gain for the day, which may have given me an additional boost psychologically, but the real key factor was that I had bought fresh dill at El Super, which does not offer fresh fish, so I had to go to Smith’s that usually has fresh salmon. It was my intention to make a fresh batch of Gravad lax, for which I needed fresh salmon.
At 3:20 I drove to Smith’s at the corner of Carlisle and Constitution and bought tallegio cheese, two fresh salmon filets aggregating 4.5 lb., a piece of Aji tuna, a large avocado and six large sea scallops, plus cream cheese, a La Brea baguette, and four shallots.
I was still feeling okay when I got home at 5:00, even though I had walked a total of 3000 steps.
Suzette wanted to eat early and was roasting flowerets from the head of cauliflower doused with olive oil in the oven when I arrived. We cut the two filets into pieces of salmon to fit into a 6 x 9 inch Pyrex dish, then four filets for dinners and bagged the tails for sushi.
Suzette sautéed two of the filets in olive oil and butter for our dinner and we froze the other two filets and I fetched a bottle of Emma Reichart Dry Riesling ($5.00 at Trader Joe’s).
We decided to make a cream sauce for the cauliflower with some of the tallegio cheese. So Suzette made a small amount of roux (flour and butter) and I cut four slices of tallegio cheese and we added milk to the roux and then the cheese and slowly raised the temperature of the sauce while stirring until the cheese melted into the sauce and thickened.
Tallegio is a soft cheese, perfect for melting into cream sauces or combining with pasta and sauce or olive oil to make lasagna. One of the best lasagnas I ever ate was at Intra, Italy, on Lake Maggiore made with tallegio, pasta, and olive oil. The lasagna was literally floating in the olive oil, delicious beyond words with a Piedmont red wine.
When the cheese melted and the sauce became smooth, Suzette prepped our plates with a sautéed salmon filet and roasted cauliflower flowerets drizzled with cream sauce (Sauce Mornay) and poured glasses of chilled Riesling.
This was the first dinner back in our house and it was wonderful. Importantly it satisfied my new dietary regime, which is to eat more fish protein and vegetables, and Suzette’s desire to eat fewer carbs.
After dinner I discovered that Dallas was playing the Giants on Thursday Night Football, so I watched it. Suzette was not feeling well, so she went to bed. When a Dallas won I went to bed happy and blogged a bit and then went to sleep.
Bon Appetit
