October 4, 2014 Lunch Hamburger garnished with Blue cheese and served with tomato slices, greens, pickled garlic scapes, and a medley of mushrooms, shallots, garlic and herbs Dinner Roasted Delicata Squash stuffed with steak, red sweet Italian peppers, bread crumbs, onions, and mushrooms garnished with grated Iberico cheese

October 4, 2014 Lunch Hamburger garnished with Blue cheese and served with tomato slices, greens, pickled garlic scapes, and a medley of mushrooms, shallots, garlic and herbs

Dinner  Roasted Delicata Squash stuffed with steak, red sweet Italian peppers, bread crumbs, onions, and mushrooms garnished with grated Iberico cheese  

Yesterday was spent working on the Building in old town and buying and installing two new fans in our TV room and getting power to the new hot tub.  We also went with Jay to Lowe’s to buy the supplies to move the old power fuse box on the building and refilled our propane tank.  Then Jay and Suzette worked to finish the installation of the fans until 9:00.   We were tired and did not wish to cook so we heated up the PPI paella and drank a glass of beer with it.

Today was a different story.  Suzette picked a bucket full of cucumbers from our garden and then we went to the Old Town store and discussed remodeling ideas and then went to Costco where we purchased lamb chops, a bottle of 2007 Brunello, lemons, salami, coffee, goat cheese and a case of Sam Adams Oktoberfest beer.

When we came home at 11:00, we decided to make hamburgers with the hamburger steaks I had thawed out yesterday.   Also, yesterday I had started to make sautéed shallots and mushrooms, but stopped when we went to Old Town, so today I sliced another couple of mushrooms and sautéed them in the shallots with butter and olive oil and lemon thyme and oriental basil from our garden.  I brought the old pickling bottle full of old pickles and garlic scapes in from the garage and we emptied them into a bowl.  Suzette made a new mixture of pickling liquid and cut the pickles and added garlic and carrots from our garden and dehydrated sweet red peppers to the large bottle with the cucumbers and new pickling liquid.

Then Suzette grilled the hamburgers and then garnished them with slices of blue cheese, while I sliced tomato and some pickled garlic scapes and sautéed the mushrooms and shallots for a couple of minutes and then added 2 Tbsp. of Amontillado sherry and covered the saute pan with a wok and sweated the mushrooms to soften them but not lose the sherry sauce.  I then fetched the organic greens from the garage.  By noon we had a wonderful meal in the garden with bottles of chilled Oktoberfest beer.  We have been aging the blue cheese in the fridge for the last month and it is beginning to taste creamier and more pungent, perfect as a topping for the hamburgers.

green chili, pickled scapes, apples and tomato slices

sauteing the brown mushrooms and shallot in butter and olive oil

sweating the mushrooms and shallots

Dinner   For dinner we did not want to eat a large amount of meat so we decided to stuff delicate squashes we bought at the Farmer’s Market last week with 1/2 lb. of PPI steak from last Sunday’s meal at Seasons, brown mushrooms, sweet Italian red peppers, onions and bread crumbs and baked them in a 350˚oven for 45 minutes.  Suzette first split the squashes lengthwise, de-seeded them and baked the delicata squashes for 20 minutes, then 20 filled with the stuffing and finally ten minutes garnished with grated Spanish Iberico cheese (Costco, 1/3 cow milk, 1/3 goat milk and 1/3 sheep milk) on a buttered cookie sheet.

Stuffed Delicata squash with extra stuffing and stir fried yu choy

We drank Spanish Eguia Reserva Tempranillo red wine (Costco $7.99) with the meal and I stir fried a couple of stalks of Yu Choy, with a shallot and four cloves of garlic, ½ tsp. of sugar, 1/8 tsp. of salt, Japanese sweet soy and Japanese Aji Mirin.

After dinner we toasted pieces of sour dough bread and smeared them with 70% brie cheese and ate them with seedless red grapes.

Bon Appétit