October 15, 2015 Lunch – Mary and Tito’s, Dinner – Tuna, Tofu, Yu Choy and Noodles.

October 15, 2015 Lunch – Mary and Tito’s,  Dinner – Tuna, Tofu, Yu Choy and Noodles.  

I made gravad lax (3/4 cup of sugar, nearly 1 cup of salt, about 1/2 tsp. of black pepper, and 3 oz. of dill) at around 9:30 and d and placed it in the new fridge to cure.

Rita and Ken came in from San Antonio for an appointment and lunch today.  They wanted authentic New Mexican food, so I suggested Mary and Tito’s for it authentic atmosphere and excellent red chili with meat.  You have to ask for meatless red chili.

Ken ordered a smothered burrito stuffed with carne adovado and Rita ordered blue corn enchiladas with red chili, her usual.  I ordered my usual, a stack of three enchiladas with beef and with red chili with onions and extra garnish.  The chili was just at the limit of what I can handle.  They loved it.  Rita grew up in Albuquerque and Ken is a foodie.

  Ken's smothered burrito 

   My Enchladas 

Suzette drove to Santa Rosa today after going to court for a no license traffic ticket, so she did not get home until almost 8:00.  I had planned to grill the tuna steak I bought at Sprouts on the 14th for $5.99/lb. and stir fry some of the Yu Choy with it.  I started peeping at 6:00 by cutting up six stalks of Yu Choy and separating the stalk white pieces from the green leafy pieces and then rinsed the pieces in our new sink with the new faucet’s sprayer setting, which worked well.  I called Suzette around 7:00 and found out she had just passed Moriarty and would be home in 45 minutes. I abandoned my idea of grilling and decided to make a noodle dish, since I did not want rice and the noodle dish could be cooked in one wok, which would save Suzette having to grill the tuna.

I thinly sliced ½ onion, three portobello mushrooms, two cloves of garlic, about 1 oz. of fresh ginger sliced, three oz. of tofu and the tuna steak and put the onion, tuna, ginger, and garlic with the hard stalks to be cooked first and the mushrooms and tofu with the leaves to be cooked second.

I then made a thickening sauce of chicken stock with Knorr dehydrated chicken stock and hot water from the kitchen faucet and added sesame oil, Chinese rice cooking wine, soy sauce, and corn starch to the sauce so I could simply stir fry the ingredients and the add the thickening sauce to quickly finish the dish. 

The only tricky part was cooking the noodles.  I chose the remaining two round flat wheat noodle bundles plus lots of broken pieces and put them in a pyrex bowl and covered them with water and a dash each of soy, sesame oil, and rice cooking wine. I then cooked them in the microwave for 5:55 minutes at a power of 70%, I think.  It cooked them to just beyond al dente, which is what I wanted because I intended to stir fry them into the dish after I cooked the other ingredients.

When Suzette arrived she was hungry.  She was able to light a burner on the new stove with a match, so I was able to cook on the new stove for the first time.

I put the hard ingredients and tuna in first and cooked them until the tuna turned from red to gray.  I then added the soft ingredients and cooked them for a minute or two until they mixed into the hard ingredients.  I the added the thickening sauce and told Suzette we were one minute away from being ready.  She found out two large soup bowls and I added the drained noodles after another minute or two as the sauce began to thicken.  The liquid in the noodles thinned the sauce a bit so I stir fried the noodles and other ingredients together for another minute or two and then scooped the thickened mixture into the soup bowls with the wok spatula.

We ate our pile of noodle and sauce with chop sticks.  Suzette drink her scotch with dinner and I drank a ginger beer, which enhanced the ginger flavor of the dish.

Suzette loved the dish.  I told her, “This is what I fix for lunch many days in the winter.”  (A soup made with some combination of meat, vegetables, and noodles). 

The sauce had thickened further in the wok, so I poured the liquid left  from cooking the noodles into the wok and made a noodle soup for my breakfast tomorrow.

Suzette packed and I retired to bed with the last of the bottle of XO Calvados and two Ferrero Rochers and read the Book Club selection for this month, “A Slight Shift of the Mind” about an imagined elderly Sherlock Holmes by Chris Mullins.

Bon Appetit