November 22, 2024, Breakfast - fresh lax on bagels. Lunch - Sashimi

November 22, 2024, Breakfast - fresh lax on bagels. Lunch - Sashimi

This was a very different day of work and food than yesterday or most in two respects. I ate fewer meals and worked much longer and harder than usual with wonderful results.

I was up for two hours in the middle of last night so I slept until 8:15.

I started the day by cleaning the curing medium from the Gravad lax. I had cured it for 12 hours and then flipped it and cured it on the other side for 12 hours. After washing and drying the two cured fillets I sliced seven thin slices from one of the sides (when the Gravad lax is fresh it is firmer and easier to slice thinly) and sliced a bagel into three slices and toasted and spread cream cheese on each and garnished two with thin red onion slices and all three with Gravad lax and capers. Suzette ate one slice of bagel and I ate 1 3/4 when I needed to call my client for my 10:00 telephone conference. We talked and then called the two attorneys for the OSE and made headway in a settlement for a violation.

My client was pleased and then at 10:45 the door rang and it was my probate client that had come to sign papers to sell an estate asset.  We tried to access a notary on line at notarize.com for several hours. Finally we reached a notary in Texas that explained that my client’s name was different on the deed than on his appointment as personal representative by the court and on his driver’s license used for identification purposes. I checked the title commitment from the title Compny and noticed that his name was wrong on it also. The deed included his entire middle name, while the court’s appointment and driver’s license included only his middle initial. This small error stopped the process.

I called the title Compny and they said they would need to correct the title commitment and deed package documents and re-submit the documents to underwriting for approval.

After three months it appears the closing may be finally on track.

It was after 2:00 when my client left and I was hungry.

Suzette came home about 2:15 and ate the Udon noodles in peanut sauce leftover from yesterday’s lunch at Greenside restaurant.

I had planned to fix sashimi for lunch and asked Suzette if she wanted sashimi for dinner. She said, “No”.

Lunch 

So I started a pot of sushi rice with two cups of water, 3/4/tsp. of dehydrated dashi, about 1/2 T. of dried wakame seaweed, 2  1/2 T. of rice vinegar, and 2 T. of sugar. When the water boiled I added 1 cup of jasmine rice and lowered the heat to it lowest temperature, covered the pot, and set the timer for 30 minutes.

I then prepared the plate of sashimi. I peeled and thinly sliced 1/3 of a cucumber, two belly end pieces of fresh salmon (when I make Gravad lax I square up the fillet but cutting off the from of the fillet that protrudes around the head), a 5 oz. Aji tuna steak, three sea scallops, and a small avocado and placed it on the table.

I poured soy into a dipping bowl and added wasabi and filled a bowl with pickled ginger. I also fetched a bottle in which I had pickled daikon slices and Korean basil leaves. I made a cup of green tea and fetched two small rice bowls.

When the rice timer went off Suzette filled the rice bowls and we started dipping fish and cucumber into the dipping sauce and eating them with bits of pickled ginger and sips of tea and chop sticks filled with sushi rice.

Suzette came from her office and offered to heat a pitcher of sake.

Suzette put the filled pitcher in a Bain Marie (double boiler) to heat it and soon the pitcher of sake was hot and Suzette poured sake into small Chinese tea cups and we sipped sake with the fabulous quantity of seafood.

Suzette stopped while there was still some fish, scallops, and cucumber left on the plate. She filled my rice bowl again and refilled the sake and I soldiered on until I had eaten everything on the plate. I was a little stuffed so I made another cup of green tea and watched Ari on MSNBC until 5:00 and the lay down and read a myself to sleep.

I woke up at 7:00 and went to the tv room where Suzette was watching the  Lottery Homes show, where a very tattooed young man helps mostly poor people who win the lottery and become instantly wealthy buy a home. We both actually like the show for lots of reasons, not the least of which is seeing the joy people who never could afford a house, buy a lovely permanent home.

Neither of us were hungry so Suzette picked a movie titled Aloha on Netflix starring Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone, Alex Baldwin, and Dan Aykroyd set in Hawaii that could have been a docudrama about Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos taking control of space satellite development for the U.S. military.

I made a White Russian with milk, Kahlua, and rum for dinner and sipped it as we watched the movie. Suzette went to bed around 9:00 and I stayed up to check my mail and my portfolio. Nvidia went down over $4.00 today, so my portfolio dropped only .7% thanks to a Dow rally of 426 points.

I went to bed at 10:00 and blogged this entry happy with my legal work and gravad lax and sashimi meals.

Bon Appetit