August 5, 2015 PPI dinner at Cynthia’s house shrimp and avocado salad, Fried Catfish, Remoulade Sauce, Sautéed string beans and salad

August 5, 2015 PPI dinner at Cynthia’s house  shrimp and avocado salad, Fried Catfish, Remoulade Sauce,  Sautéed string beans and salad

Cynthia invited us for a PPI dinner she had cooked last night but did not serve because her dinner guests did not make it.  We drove to Cynthia and Ricardo’s house at 6:00 with fresh rhubarb, strawberries, sugar, and a bottle of Winter Haven Pinot Gris (Total Wine).

We started at  the kitchen table drinking a gin and tonic and eating a lovely appetizer of small shrimps in a mayonnaise sauce served on slices of avocado.  The saltiness of the shrimp reminded me of the small shrimp I ate when I lived in Copenhagen for a summer.  Their saltiness derived from the fact they had been cooked in seawater on the boat on its way to port.  The most delicious shrimp of this kind I recall was at a summer dinner party in Copenhagen when we sat around a table peeling what seemed like thousands of small shrimp, which were then mixed with Mayonnaise and dill and perhaps some chopped steamed white asparagus and served on rounds of Fresh French bread as  Danish open faced sandwiches.  The most dramatic small shrimp experience was in 1968 when I first travelled to Oslo, Norway with Bob Howard and Lotte.  We went to the docks at the head of the Oslo fjord where the fishing boats moored by the Town Hall and bought a small brown paper bag from one of the boats filled with fresh shrimp.  These salty small shrimp were some of the freshest, most delicious I ever tasted  and the fact that we were standing in one of the most beautiful spots in the world enhanced the experience.  In my opinion there is no more beautiful country in the world than Noway in the summer.

Getting back to dinner, I opened and poured glasses of Winter Haven Washington Pinot Gris to drink with our salads and while we were eating our salads Cynthia prepared the rest of the dinner, which meant heating a platter of fried catfish filets, a bowl of fresh steamed green beans served with a butter sauce, fresh salad, a lovely mixture of white and wild rice that tasted as if it had been risottoed, and a small bowl of Remoulade Sauce on the dining room table. We filled our plates and had a lovely dinner with lots of talk.  Cynthia had made sliced plums flavored with lemon and honey, but Suzette took four stalks of fresh rhubarb from her garden at her Center for Ageless Living in Los Luna's and the container of fresh strawberries we had bought at Costco on Sunday to Cynthia’s with a cup of sugar and asked Cynthia if we could cook a strawberry and rhubarb compote.  Cynthia graciously allows us the use of her kitchen and soon Suzette had chopped the stalks of rhubarb into bite sized pieces and I had removed the stems from the strawberries and halved them. Suzette put the rhubarb and strawberries into a large pot with the 1 cup of sugar and brought it to a simmer.  We simmered the mixture while we ate dinner, checking and stirring it occasionally.  When the mixture seemed to have melded into a more or less homogeneous compote, we turned off the heat.

After dinner Cynthia brought a pint container of Haagen Dazs vanilla ice cream to the table and spooned small scoops of ice cream into small ramekins and I then spooned a dollop of the warm compote into each ramekin.  Cynthia placed a bowl of Belgian butter cookies with almonds from Trader Joe’s on the table.  These are among my favorite cookies.  I became endeared to the by the McCrimmon sisters Amy and Cissy, who used to serve them with tea.  I guess a wave of nostalgia came over me and I asked Cynthia if I could have a cup of tea.  We went to the kitchen and she opened the drawer where she kept teas and soon we selected a couple of bags of peach/mint tea and she heated a kettle of water and then brewed a pot of tea.  I really enjoyed the tea and cookies as the conversation between Suzette and Cynthia veered into the realm of difficult clients.  By

9:30 I had drunk them rest of the pot of tea and eaten several more cookies and we all said, “Good night,” ending a very pleasant evening of food and conversation.

I must mention lunch. At 12:30 I was thinking that I would love a bowl of warm soup and recalled that James Turk and I had made arrangements to meet for lunch today at Que Houng, so I called him and he was ready to go to lunch.  We met at Que Houng, which was pretty full today.  James ordered his favorite, chicken in curry sauce on rice and I ordered a bowl of pho with rice noodles, sliced raw beef and beef meatballs. Que Houng puts a little extra effort into almost every dish and today I discovered one of the extras when I squeezed what thought was hoisin sauce into the soup it appeared to be much less viscous than it should have been.  James said, “It is teriyaki sauce,” which did not right to me.  Why would a Vietnamese restaurant have squirt bottles of a traditional Japanese sauce on every table when the usual sauce in Vietnamese restaurant would typically be hoisin sauce.  So I asked the waiter why the sauce was thin and he said, “They mix it with orange juice and other things.”  I learned something new today, that you can alter the flavor and texture of hoisin sauce for the better.

Bon Appetit