October 21, 2015 Lunch –East Ocean, Dinner – Fish Soup

October 21, 2015  Lunch –East Ocean, Dinner – Fish Soup 

Today was wet and cool with intermittent rain most of the day.  I was torn between Vietnamese soup at Que Huong and Scallops in Lobster Sauce at East Ocean  I called James Turk, whose favorite restaurant is Que Houng, but he was not available, which made my decision for lunch and dinner easy. 

 I went to East Ocean for Scallops in Lobster Sauce and decided to make   three marlin steaks I had bought a few months ago at Ranch Market into a fish soup, since Suzette would never eat them.  Suzette is cruising the Caribbean with her sister.  Here is a picture of a sunset she sent me.  Quite lovely.

I love food that looks ugly but tastes delicious and scallops in Lobster Sauce may be at the top of my list.  Egg, ground pork and scallops swimming in a gooey thickened chicken stock sauce.  Here is a picture.  One mixes the rice into the sauce or the sauce with the rice to make a gooey mass that can be lifted with chop sticks to one’s mouth.  I usually get it with fried rice and sweet and sour chicken for $6.95.  I know of no better way to eat scallops in Albuquerque at any price.

For dinner I thawed out the marlin steaks and  removed the meat from the skin and bone and put it in a large pot with one medium chopped onion, four or five chopped cloves of garlic, the stalks of three Yu Choy, ¼ red bell pepper, three stalks of celery, and a chopped carrot and sautéed them in a Tbsp. of olive oil.  After a few minutes of cooking the fish and mirepoix I filled the pot with water and added a handful of chard leaves from the garden.  I then chopped and added two small tomatoes I had picked last week in the garden and three baby portobello mushrooms and covered the soup pot with a lid.  I then went to the garden and picked seven or eight stalks of thyme and about 1 tsp. of fresh oregano and added them to the soup.

After a few minutes I tasted the broth and it did not have much flavor, so I looked in the fridge and found two stalks of lemon grass.  I sectioned one stalk and added it plus about 1/3 cup of PPI fish sauce I had made and ½ cup of PPI basmati rice.  In another few minutes I tasted the soup and it tasted much better.

I ate PPI potato/leek soup for a snack at 6:00.  I turned down the heat and went to meditate at 6:45, but it was canceled due to the foul weather.  When I came home around 7:15 I turned the heat up slightly and brought the soup to a slightly rolling simmer.

I read Blood and Thunder about the life and times of Kit Carson for an hour and decided to eat soup, so I added 1 ½ cups of de-stemmed sugar snap peas (Costco $5.49 for 2 lb.) and let those cook for about 20 minutes.

Then I added a bag of La Moderna Mexican small macaroni elbows and six large heads-on shrimp and cooked those for another 15 minutes until the macaroni had cooked completely.

I loved the soup.  It was a wonderful fish caldo like those I have eaten at the great fish markets in Mexican beach towns, such aa in Ensenada, combined with lots of wonderful vegetables, which added a vegetable flavor.  Eating it was fun because of all of the small macaroni elbows among the vegetables and fish.

After two bowls of soup, there still remained a bucket of soup.  I put the soup pot into our new fridge.  There is enough soup to last for days.

Bon Appetit