November 24, 2015 Lunch – East Ocean, Dinner – PPI Squash, Potatoes, and Fish

November 24, 2015  Lunch – East Ocean, Dinner – PPI Squash, Potatoes, and Fish 

Yesterday Suzette stayed in Sant Rosa, so you ate PPS.  For lunch I made chow Mien noodles with ham and the Yu Choy and bean sprouts.

Dinner was even less creative, ham and cheese sandwiches and chocolates.

Today was better.  Peter Eller called and we went to East Ocean for lunch.  I ordered my usual, Scallops in Lobster Sauce.  Peter was adventurous and ordered Shanghai Spare Ribs.  I enjoyed my dish as usual and enjoyed his spare ribs.  Peter’s word for the total experience was, “Authentic “.

On our way back from  East Ocean, Peter was kind enough to stop at Pastian's where I bought a pecan pie and a loaf of sandwich whole wheat bread.

I rode to Rio Bravo.  It was great being back on the bike.

While I waited for Suzette, I ate melted ham and P’tit Basque sandwiches on toasted French baguette.

Suzette arrived a little after 6:00,  I talked to her while she was driving in from Santa Rosa and we decided to heat up PPIs.  So we heated roasted potatoes, spaghetti squash, the stuffed Dover sole, and poached salmon.  Suzette garnished the fish with a dollop of crema and I poured glasses of Pinot Grigio.

We drank the last of the bottle of Pinot Grigio we opened Sunday evening.  It is a new bottle to me.  An inspection of the back label discloses the wine to be a reasonably good Pinot Grigio produced within the indicazione geographica tipica delle Venezie, so it is the real deal, a Pinot Grigio of modest but reliably Italian origins.

  The more informative bac label that tells where the wine was produced.

  We watched PBS’ American Experience’s Plymouth Colony story.

During the program I ate a pie of the pecan pie and discovered why it was sold in the day old section although it had bee baked this morning.  The crust had gotten unhinged from the bottom of the pie pan and floated to the top and pushed many of the pecans in the topping off the pie.  I reacted negatively to the fact that there was no crust on the bottom of the pie and all the filing was loose in the bottom of the pie pan.  Here is one of those rare occasions when form matters in food.

At 9:00 we went to bed and I started reading “mayflower” by Philcheck, who had been one of the historians featured in the TV program and I immediately felt like the program had been lifted in whole cloth from the book, except for the wonderful quotes from William Bradford’s history of the Plymouth Plantation.

The most interesting discovery from the TV program was that the colony was financed by English investors and never produced enough beaver pelts and other goods to turn a profit.  What it did produce was the first real foothold of English colonization in America, which led to the establishment of the U.S. Government.  Let’s not forget that the Spanish settled New Mexico 23 years earlier, but their model of governance did not form the model for the U.S. Government.

Bon Appetit