July 25, 2014 Lunch Lan’s Restaurant Dinner Appetizers at the Millicent Rogers Museum

July 25, 2014 Lunch  Lan’s Restaurant    Dinner  Appetizers at the Millicent Rogers Museum

July 25, 2014 Lunch  Lan’s Restaurant, Santa Fe     Dinner  Appetizers at the Millicent Rogers Museum, Taos

We got a late start for Taos today because Suzette had a client leave her facility and there was a search that ended when someone called the APD  as he was having trouble trying to cross Bridge Street, 25 miles away from the Center, but only ten to fifteen blocks from our house near the Sonic at Bridge and 8^th.  Suzette went and picked him up and I went to sign my new line of credit and we left at around 1:30.

Suzette wanted to stop in Santa Fe and go to a couple of stores to check out tables for the laundry room.   

When we arrived in Santa Fe at 2:40 we were hungry, but were too late to eat at the shed, which closes at 2:30. When Suzette suggested that We go to Santa Fe Habitat for Humanity ReStore and Stephens, I suggested that we eat at Lan’s Restaurant , which is located in the same strip center as ReStore.

I let Suzette off at ReStore and drove to the end of the shopping center and was happy to see that Lan’s was still open for lunch until 3:00.   

I had become drowsy on the drive up to Santa Fe, so as soon as I was seated I ordered a drip coffee with condensed milk on ice.  The waitress was very Vietnamese, so it turned out I had to communicate with a lot of sign language and the curt language I have developed for oriental restaurants, like holding up two spread fingers and saying condensed milk to indicate the amount of condensed milk I wanted.  She made my coffee and then Suzette arrived.  Lan came out from the kitchen and took our order.  I first tried to order a dish from the menu and Lan said, “That is winter dish, too hot, available in September.”   I then asked Lan about the lamb wontons (5 for $8.00).

Lan replied, “You have never eaten the Lamb Wontons?”

I replied, “We will have an order of them.”

So we looked at the blackboard list of three items.   I ordered Banh Oug, which turned out to be cooked marinated homemade chicken sausage, cucumber, sweet onion, sweet + sour org. carrots + cabbage, papaya , shallots, and bean sprouts wrapped in a fresh sheet of rice noodle and served with a delicious brown sauce made with lime juice and Lan’s special mixture of Vietnamese spices. 

Suzette ordered one of the other three dishes; Vietnamese BBQ pork spareribs with noodles and a salad. 

Soon the lamb wontons came.  They were a beautiful dish; steamed flat wontons pressed around a small mound of flavored ground lamb on a plate and drizzled with green basil infused lime juice and olive oil.  A very fresh salad-like appetizer with a garnish of pickled carrots and fresh cilantro leaves and lots of other interesting stuff, like toasted black sesame seeds and fried garlic.  Ln put small fried rounds of garlic in most dishes, which was wonderful.  It illustrates her technique of enhancing the flavors in every dish with simple flavorful ingredients to push the flavors just a bit beyond ordinary. 

Suz, sipping iced coffee at Lan's

Lamb Wontons

Lamb  Wontons 

BBQ Sapreribs

Namh Oug

After we finished the wontons, the waitress soon brought us the Namh Oug, a plate with three large rolls of ingredients wrapped with a flat sheet of homemade rice noodle garnished with a light brown sauce. The rolls were large and the sauce looked messy and I had no idea how to eat the thing.   So, I asked the waitress how to eat the dish.  She handed us a sharp steak knife and made a cutting motion above the middle of the rolled stuffed noodles and said, “No fork, eat with spoon.”  She then brought us bowls of sauce and bathed the noodle rolls with more sauce so that when we cut the rolls into pieces they were bathed in sauce and could only be efficiently eaten by scooping them up with a spoon.  We loved the dish. The sauce had a sweet and sour flavor with the flavor of pho sauce.  When I was at Ta Lin the other day I bought a bottle of Pho flavoring paste and saw bottles of other Vietnamese flavorings.  So I need to go back and try some of them.

Suzette’s dish came next.  It was rather conventional, with three three inch long sets of BBQ spare ribs on a plate with a mound of vermicelli sauced rice noodles and a small salad.  Suzette’s dish was delicious also, but we could not finish both of them so we boxed about ½ of the spare ribs with vermicelli noodles and salad and drove on to Taos.   After my coffee hit my brain I was no longer sleepy. 

We arrived at around 4:30 and made our way north to the B&B.  It was located just off Blueberry Hill Rd, which I  thought was the road that went beside the Millicent Roger Museum, but I was wrong.  But I drove to the Millicent Rogers Museum by mistake and when we arrived at a bit after 5:00 the parking lot was full of cars and so we walked in.  We had stumbled into a preview for the Best of Taos, which was an art auction.  Wine was being poured by Black Mesa and the owner of the Trading Post had laid out platters of appetizers.  We immediately blended into the crowd, by grabbing a glass of wine and wandering into the galleries in which the auction items were hung.  We said hello to Robert Parsons who had given a couple of pieces to be auctioned and was deep in discussion with a lady and looked at the art, which appeared to be priced at double its market value. We looked at the art and decided we liked an anonymous set of colchas the best but were not interested in paying the listed price of $5,000 for them.

Colcha Embroidery
A unique style of embroidery evolved in colonial New Mexico. Colcha is done in handspun, hand-dyed wool on a plain-woven wool ground cloth called sabanilla. Sometimes the entire ground is covered with embroidery. The subject matter included ornate and fanciful flowers or birds. Colcha is used for decorative wall pieces and altar cloths as well as household items.

So we went back to the foyer to the table filled with appetizers that had been prepared by the Trading Post Restaurant and had a lovely light meal of appetizers and wine.

There were three appetizers and they were all delicious:  a baked spoon will with a slice of gravad lax and garnished with a dab of seaweed salad, a crab and vegetable filling rolled in phyllo and baked with a dab of flavored mayonnaise sauce, and a wonderful cream puff filled with duck confit and sherry mousse with a slit on the top into which a slice of fresh radish was placed.

Each appetizer was well conceived and executed with unique flavor profiles.  These appetizer were just as creative and appealing as Lan's food had been.  By a series of accidents and mistakes, we had scored a 100% wonderful food day. 

Salmon and Seaweed Spoons

Duck confit mousse filled cream puffs

Salmon and seaweed spoon close up

crab filled phyllo rolls

We sat in comfortable chairs in the inner patio of the Museum and sipped Black Mesa merlot and nibbled appetizers for about a ½ hour before we felt compelled to go to the B&B to meet our hostess at our appointed arrival time of 7:00.. 

When we arrived at the B&B, Marianna, the owner of the house located out on the mesa near the Gorge Road and Blueberry Hill Road, showed us to our room, which originally had been the house's large garage that had been converted into a guest accommodations.  The room was decorated in a Moroccan motif, which meant several posters with a Moroccan motif and a picture of the water lilly pond at Yves St. Laurent’s villa in Marrakesh.  

Our hostess, Marianna, taught art to children and worked at the Harwood Museum.

We were tired and did not want to go out, so I ate the PPI BBQ pork ribs from lunch and Suzette went to bed while I worked on a water law project.

Bon Appétit