December 19, 2024 Lunch - Le Troquet Dinner - Leftover Stuffed Peppers
A very interesting multicultural food day. I ate granola with milk, yogurt, and blueberries for breakfast.
Then at 11:15 Charlie arrived and we drove to Le Troquet at Third and Gold for our book club luncheon. All but two members made it to lunch.
Le Troquet is a legitimate French Bistro in the middle of downtown Albuquerque owned by Jean Pierre Godard, a French chef who has owned five French restaurants in Albuquerque in over 50 years making him one of the longest dedicated chefs to fine French cuisine. The menu contains many French classics, such as escargots, onion soup, and a wonderful pate de Maison.
One of the off the menu specials today was chicken or seafood crepes. I sat by Keith and Peter and we all ordered a seafood crepe. Our waiter described the wine list and after he described the reds, I asked him to describe the whites. When he said Vouvray, I said, “Stop. May I taste the Vouvray.” When he poured it, it was delicious, fresh, fruity with a good deal of acidity and that hint of lemon one loves in a Vouvray. I said, “I will have a glass.” Karl who sat next to me and is a wine connoisseur and drinks lots of Stag’s Leap Cabernet Sauvignon also took a glass, saying, “I need to try more whites.”
When the crepe came I was pleasantly surprised because sticking out of one end of the thin crepe was a large plump pink shrimp and on the other end was a huge 1 to 2 oz. sea scallop. The crepe was wrapped around several more shrimp and scallops that became a pleasantly filling meal. The rice was a little dry so I mixed a small amount of butter and lemon juice into it to soften it. This lovely, elegantly simple dish reminded me why I love Le Troquet, it serves the best ingredients, impeccably prepared in a uniquely French manner. The crepe was lightly sauced with a mushroom cream sauce and accompanied on the platter by a pile of rice risotto, two blanched and sautéed asparagus, and two blanched carrot strips.
Others ordered other items. Karl ordered salmon,
Charlie ordered French onion soup, Travis ordered a bowl of cream of carrot soup, the soup of the day, and a house salad. We were served two rounds of lovely browned dinner rolls as they came fresh out of the oven.
This level of cuisine is not cheap. My crepe was $31.00 and my glass of wine was $14.00, but I did not regret my choices, I was favorably impressed by the skill in preparation and the superb quality of ingredients.
The scallops and shrimp were plump, and juicily not over cooked and the crepe could not have been better prepared, thin and delicately tender. It was easy and delightful to cut a bit of crepe and a bit of scallop and dip them in the cream sauce for a heavenly bite of seafood.
After lunch we drove to Peter’s house for our discussion of Herman Melville’s novel, The Confidence Man, a series of vignette conversations taking place on Mississippi riverboat written to be serialized in 1857. Peter pointed out that he chose the book because its long flowery sentence style with many uncommon words was at the opposite end of the spectrum of literary styles from the terse sentence style of 20th century novel by authors such as Hemingway.
We had a good discussion from 1:45 until 4:00 and the I drove Charlie home.
When I arrived home I checked the market and found that my two main stocks, Apple and Nvidia were both up, while the NASDAQ was down about 15 points, which is not uncommon when the market recovers from a negative period. As I write this blog at 4:00 a.m. Friday morning the futures are strongly down, which indicates to me that the market has reached the end of its euphoria after the Trump victory and is now more realistically assessing the future under a Trump administration and policies.
At 4:20 I walked around a larger circuit Park to San Carlos and back to 15th and home, a distance of approximately 2100 steps instead of about 1200 in the shorter Silver circuit. I felt tired but not weakened, even though I did not take a sugar tablet.
Suzette came home around 5:30 and rested for a while after a busy day running around looking for items to fill this year’s treasure chest that one of her staff will win with the lucky key at the a center’s annual Christmas party tomorrow.
We considered the available leftovers. We rejected the faves with mussels and clams as too old in favor of the stuffed peppers Nina, Monica’s Romanian friend made for the Thanksgiving dinner that Suzette suggested be eaten or thrown out if not eaten. So she heated the stuffed peppers and poured the rest of the La Granja Viura/Verdejo blend into wine glasses and we enjoyed the very Romanian dish one more time. The peppers were stuffed with a mixture of rice and ground pork and the tomato sauce covering it contained crisp prosciutto and ham. It was a great dish. The peppers had collapsed into soft mounds around the stuffing into the tomato sauce to create a vegetable accompaniment.
After dinner we watched the Chargers v. Broncos game until the 2 minute warning when the chargers were up by 10 points 34 to 24, having erased a 21 to 3 point deficit.
I slept from 9:30 to 3:30 a.m. and will go back to sleep.
I often wake up at 3:30 to 4:00 and stay up for an hour or two.
Some of the best news is on TV early, for example this morning Secretary of State Blinken was interviewed and gave lengthy descriptions of U.S. foreign policy and the transition in motion to hand it over to the new administration.
Bon Appetit
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