During my 9:00 appointment at Kaspia, I was describing my
Christmas Eve Open house menu. When I
mentioned the possibility of making posole, Trista said, “I love Posole.” And I replied, “So do I.”
I had not had anything to eat when I left Kaspia a bit after
10:00 and had planned to go to Pro’s Market to re-provision today ,so I
thought, If I get a bowl of pozole in the
restaurant and shop I can kill two birds
with one stone. 
When I arrived at Pro’s Ranch Market I went directly to the restaurant area, where you can often find interesting dishes such as BBQ's pig snouts. Although the sign sitting on the counter offered free sample, I decided to not ample the BBQ'd pig snouts.
I ordered a medium bowl of posole, even though the price had increased
from $3.99 to $4.99. The medium bowl is large
and I am never hungry after eating one.
Today the posole was cooked to perfection, but the meat was not cooked
very much and still retained its firmness.
I had to get a knife and fork to cut it into bite sized pieces. After adding a bit of guacamole salsa, chopped
onion, dried oregano, and a large squeeze of lime from the free condiments
buffet, I cut and ate my way through the entire bowl. I must
admit that the broth was infused with a lot of red chili, which is the Mexican
way. Although it did not prevent me from
eating the posole, later in the evening my body made a very direct effort to eliminate
the quantity of hot spicy food in my stomach, but I am fine now at 230 a.m., as
l drink cups of hot chamomile and ginger tea with liberal squeezes of fresh
lime juice.
After brunch, if that word can be associated with dining at Pro’s
Ranch Market (although on the weekend Pro’s does serve a Mexican food buffet
that includes Pozole and menudo), I began to shop. I purchased 10 avocados (4 for $.99) the sale
item that had attracted me to shop at Pro’s today, 5 lbs of yellow onions (4 lbs./$.99)
a wonderful surprise, limes ($.99/lb.), a pineapple (2 lbs./$.99), 5 2 liter
bottles of Canada Dry Ginger Ale ($.99/bottle), ½ gallon of Kern’s mango/pineapple
juice ($2.99), a gallon of milk, ½ lb. of sliced cooked ham ($.1.99/lb.), ten flour
tortillas for $1,49, and 1 lb. of assorted seafood that included clams,
mussels, shrimp, octopus and a few other things like fake crab that I did not
select ($4.99/lb.). I have a good
relationship with the fish monger in the fish department at Pro’s, if one can
call him that and he hand-picked the specific items I wanted included in my
pound assortment. I finally got all of
my stuff unloaded at the house by around 12:15.
At 1:30 a group of folks from Poulin Remodeling came to
inspect the house for a proposed remodel.
Our plan is to open up the two walls between the kitchen and the den/T.V/casual
dining area to make one of those kitchen casual dining and den areas that are
so popular these days. Our plan is conditioned
on the stock market staying at its recent all-time high and maybe one or two
other potential favorable developments
in my and Suzette’s financial condition during the next three months. Here is a picture of the rendering of the
plan looking at the kitchen from the den.
By 3:30 the Poulin Remodeling crew had finished their extensive
research and we had chatted about the additional issues, such as supporting the
roof trusses when we remove the walls, and I decided to ride my bike because it
was 40˚ and felt warm and sunny, compared to the last few days of freezing snowy
weather. I rode the ten miles to Montano and back.
When I arrived home around 5:00 Suzette pulling into
the driveway. After she carried food baskets
into the house for her T.V. show appearance on Channel 13 Thursday morning, we discussed dinner. Since I had to
go meditate we needed to cook and eat by 6:45.
Suzette suggested Turkey Stroganoff, utilizing the bag of chopped turkey
she had defrosted from the freezer compartment of our fridge last night. We were out of fresh mushrooms, so I fetched
a bag of dehydrated sliced oriental shitake mushrooms and a can of straw mushrooms and
Suzette fetched the last of the bag of dehydrated Grand Bolitas mushrooms she
had bought at the Taos Farmers’ Market in September and she rehydrated the mushrooms in hot
water.
While I sliced and diced 1/3 yellow onion and 1/2 red bell pepper, Suzette shredded several
carrots from our garden. I then
fetched the last of the egg noodles and some casarecchi noodles and filled a
large pot with water and heated it to boiling and Suzette added the egg noodles
and a few of the cassarecchi noodles to the boiling water to cook them. Then she sautéed in a large skillet the carrots,
re-hydrated and straw mushrooms, the turkey and onion and then added some of
the pasta cooking water, sour cream, salt and pepper, and a dash of heavy cream,
to make a light sour cream sauce. Suzette then said, “We need some herbs to flavor the sauce”, so I went to garden to pick a few sprigs of thyme from under its protective canopy and a couple of sprigs of frozen marjoram and three garlic leaves and brought them back and Suzette stripped the leaves and I chopped the garlic leaves and we threw them into the stroganoff. Suzette then said, “What about some of our fresh oregano growing in a pot in our dining room window.” So I went to the pot in the dining room where I found the oregano growing prodigiously and snipped three of the longer stems with my fingers and brought those to the kitchen and stripped the leaves and chopped he leaves finely and tossed the oregano into the g sauce. After a few more minutes of stirring and cooking, we were ready to eat.
At a little after 6:00 I went to the cellar and found a
bottle of 2008 Marques de Riscal Rueda ($9.99 Whole Food in 2010) and we dished
up the noodles and stroganoff. The white
rueda grape’s strong flavor also helped to cover up for some of the lack of
flavor and complemented the heavy sauce in the dish.
I must admit that making a dish with previously frozen turkey
and dried and canned mushrooms creates a different flavor than using fresh
ingredients. I guess I would describe
the taste as dead, without fresh flavor, but I also bet this is the way folks
in Austria’s snowy winter prepared and ate this dish for hundreds of years. They, like we, used what they had available,
such as dried mushrooms and frozen meat.
The creamy sauce disguises some of the lack of freshness of the mushrooms
and meat.
We must have made a decent stroganoff because both Suzette
and I took seconds. Finally, after a simple
but hardy winter meal, at 6:45 I left to
go meditate.
Bon Appétit 
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