June 10, 2015 Anatolia Restaurant and Grilled steak with fresh garden salad, sauteed mushrooms, and a good 2007 St. Emilion

June 10, 2015 Anatolia Restaurant and Grilled steak with fresh garden salad, sauteed mushrooms, and a good 2007 St. Emilion

Today I went to lunch with Bill Turner at Anatolia.  Anatolia is a Turkish Kebab shop located at I ordered the daily special ($6.99) which today was Kofte kebab, which is ground seasoned beef cooked on a skewer over an open flame.  It is usually served with rice and salad on one plate but today I ordered my lunch with only salad and liked it much better.  The salad dressing was just lemon juice and a touch of olive oil, which Bill, who lived in Cyprus and Jerusalem for a while, says is quite common in the Mediterranean. 

Bill ordered falafels, which were small and hard, not recommended, and a wonderful homemade lamb and rice stuffed dolmas, highly recommended. 

Tuesday the refrigerator in the garage died, so we moved all the frozen steak to the basement fridge.  

I kept one nice steak for grilling tonight.

We are still in our jet lap period, so are not up to cooking elaborate dinners yet.

We gathered lettuce from our garden and I cubed a tomato I had bought at Ranch Market on Monday (2 lb./$.99) and we used the pomegranate dressing from Suzette’s Wendy’s salad from the Salt Lake City airport from Monday because we wanted a sweet and vinegary dressing to soften the bitterness of the quite mature lettuce.

I also sliced mushrooms I had bought at Ranch Market yesterday and sautéed them in butter and olive oil with garlic, a minced onion from our garden and about 2 tbsp. of fresh thyme from the garden.

The high point of the meal was the wine; a 2007 Chateau Haut Saint-Brice Saint-Emilion Grand Cru.   I don’t know where or how I got the bottle because there are no notations on the bottle, but it was delicious.  I particularly like Saint-Emilions with steak.  This one was 70% Merlot and 30% Cabernet Franc.  This label shows how important it is to read the label on the back of the bottle.  It tells you the dosage of grapes, a bit of information about the vineyard and the making of the wine, that it was made at the chateau and some serving suggestions.   This wine is a winner.

I ate the last of the spumoni ice cream for dessert.

Bon Appétit