October 30, 2015 Lunch – East Ocean, Dinner – Roasted Chicken and Roasted Vegetables

October 30, 2015 Lunch – East Ocean, Dinner – Roasted Chicken and Roasted Vegetables

Today after I went to the Law Library, I went to East Ocean at noon for my favorite scallop dish, Scallops in Lobster Sauce with fried rice and Sweet and Sour Chicken.  But today’s preparation was interesting in a bad way.  Too much cornstarch had been added to the egg drop soup and it over thickened the sauce which did three bad things: it make the sauce not have its usual lovely texture and sheen, it did not mix well with the other ingredients, and it had a distinctly different flavor, more of cornstarch.  I love this dish because when it is cooked properly, the milk of the cooking scallop chunks blends with the cooking juices of the pork and green onion and the chicken and egg flavors of the egg drop soup to make an elegantly complex sauce that flows to mix perfectly with the fried rice.

For dinner, I asked Suzette to bring home a Roasted Chicken prepared by the Greenhouse Bistro at the Center for Ageless Living.

She arrived at around 3:30 and assisted Jose, our cabinet maker, with some design details in the kitchen remodel.  We agreed to roast some of the  vegetables we had for dinner, including a 2 Shishito peppers, a pimiento and three small eggplants we had picked from our garden, plus ½ of a large sweet potato and one small onion and a red cipolini onion plus three small heads of garlic from our garden.  Suzette went to the garden and picked a small handful of fresh oregano.   

Suzette took over the cooking from here and salted and sprinkled and tossed the vegetables in olive oil.  Then we read our new Bertizonni stove manual and decided to roast the vegetables on the convection bake setting for twenty minutes covered and then twenty minutes uncovered.  

Suzette heated the two leg quarters of chicken in the microwave and we each filled our plates with vegetables.  After we plated we returned the vegetables to the oven because Suzette thought they needed more cooking.  She was right they tasted better when I took seconds ten minutes later, so next time we will roast vegetables for 50 minutes on convection bake.

I opened a bottle of Santiago Station Sauvignon Blanc from the Mendoza Valley in Argentina; a simple wine for a simple dinner. 

We watched Ghostbusters, which is one of Suzette’s favorites, for a pleasant evening.  

Suzette was happy that we were finishing the remodel.  Jose hung the basement door and the door between my office and the TV room and put the black splashboard under the bottom of the cabinets and hung the spice rack and knife rack today, so things are looking much more finished.

We ate ice cream later in the evening.

I went to bed and Suzette stayed up to watch Ghostbusters II. 

Later I woke up and watched The Man Who Fell to Earth and Woodstock from 1:00 to 4:00.  Thank God some hipster is programming the late night movie channels for us aging baby boomers who do not sleep through the night.

Bon Appetit