October 28, 2025, Breakfast - Granola with Blueberries Lunch - No. 50 at Pho Linh Dinner - Monkfish Poached with Shiitake Mushrooms, shallot, garlic, and broccoli and served over Linguine in a wine Mornay sauce
Almost every day the food is good, but today the food was great and the Market performed exceedingly well also.
I stayed up until the end of the World Series last night at 12:00, so i slept until 7:34 and missed the open but everything started moving up from the open and again the market continued its surge into the close. Nvidia was up $9.54, but AMD and many other stocks closed down. I did not have much time today to watch the market, but when I checked it at 3:00 when I returned home my portfolio had a 1.7% gain. It would have been closer to 2% if I had not sold 1333 shares of Nvidia and bought 1000 shares of AMD yesterday.
But even with that impressive gain, the food out-shown the stock market today.
At 8:30 I ate a bowl of granola with milk, mango yogurt, and blueberries. Then I worked on my pleading until 12:30 when I drove to Pho Linh at 9100 Central SE. it has become my favorite Vietnamese restaurant because of one dish, No. 50 that is a platter with composed piles of the elements of a bowl of Bun, vermicelli rice noodles on which was a pile of marinated grilled pork, a fried pork egg roll cut into thirds, and two grilled shrimp, plus beside the noodles was a pile of pickled vegetables, a pile of mung beans sprouts and chopped lettuce, cucumber spears and chopped basil, and mint.
I mixed the elements as best I could and ate a bit more than half.
After I boxed the remaining Bun, I drove down Zuni to Talin to buy Chinese eggplant for Mapo Dofu and noticed a fresh monkfish in the seafood case, so I bought 1 lb. of monkfish. The attendant cut the fish in half and then we decided where to cut the front of the tail where the loins were located to yield 1 lb. and he cut there and it yielded 1 lb. I was slightly embarrassed that at $12.99/lb. I had left hm with several pounds of what appeared to me to be inedible fish, but that passed when I butchered the fish at home and had to remove the huge spine bone and the scummy gelatinous flanks and skin around the two loins that amounted to about 4 oz.
Monkfish is one of the ugliest fish and not an easy fish to butcher even when much of the work is done for you by the fishmonger but it is Suzette’s favorite fish and the rich lobster like flavor is worth it.
I also bought a bag of baby bok Choy and about a lb. of shiitake mushrooms.
When I arrived home around 1:45 I got a call from Frank and he and Bakhtar came by to discuss a matter and the I spent the rest of the afternoon drafting a complaint for an eviction of a tenant.
At 5:00 Suzette arrived and I lay down for an hour and then we began dinner. We now had to choose which of three meals planned to choose for dinner, Polish Kielbasa and black beans, Mapo Dofu, or Fresh Monkfish. Fresh monkfish won and Suzette suggested we poach it with mushrooms, minced shallot and garlic, and broccoli and serve the poached fish over the PPI linguine in a cream sauce. So that is what we chose for dinner.
I minced a shallot, four cloves of garlic and cut the remaining flowerets from the head of broccoli into bite-sized chunks and sliced three of the fresh shiitake mushrooms and Suzette blanched the broccoli flowerets in a bit of water in a Pyrex bread dish covered with Saran and then sautéed the shallot, garlic, mushrooms and broccoli in butter in a large casserole and added equal parts of water and white wine to create a poaching medium and added the three monkfish loins I had butchered and covered the casserole and poached the fish for about twenty minutes until it was tender.
While the fish was poaching Suzette made a roux with butter and flour and then added some poaching medium and milk to make a cream sauce to which she added about 1/4 lb. of Tallegio cheese to make an elegantly smooth wine Mornay sauce.
Suzette had gone to the garage fridge and fetched a chilled bottle of Archery Summit Vireton Pinot Gris that she used for the poaching medium and we drank with dinner. This wine is one of the best Pinot Gris I have ever tasted and complemented the elegant poached monkfish and linguine in a wine Mornay sauce to create a memorable meal. The bites of fresh shiitake mushrooms and monkfish coated with Mornay sauce and dusted with the amazing seaweed sea salt Diane and Jim brought us from Patagonia were especially delicious.
After dinner we watched an episode of Finding Your Roots that traced the history of Lawrence Fishburne and Henry Gates Jr. back utilizing a combination of DNA and printed records that was fascinating.
Then we watched The Toronto Blue Jays beat the LA Dodgers to tie the World Series at 2 games each. Suzette drank a cordial glass of our home made limoncello and I drank a small glass of Dolin Genepy Le Chamois Liqueur and cognac. I bought the Genepy from Blackwell’s in San Francisco and found out just now that it is more highly rated at 4.9 than Green Chartreuse at 4.8. I guess I will need to buy more of it, as my first bottle is almost empty.
We went to bed by 9:30 as the Jays were up 6 to 2 in the ninth.
It looks like the Jays will win the World Series this year. They have both great hitting and pitching.
So it was a great day in the Market and at the table with one of my favorite lunches and a fabulous dinner. Suzette said, “You are lucky that I can cook and I am lucky you can shop.”
I responded, “We shall never want for wonderful meals.”
Bon Appetit
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