March 11, 2015 Lunch – Salad, Dinner – Pork Schnitzel with Steamed Asparagus and Warm Chick Pea, Couscous, and ,Preserved Lemon Salad

March 11, 2015 Lunch – Salad,  Dinner – Pork Schnitzel with Steamed Asparagus and Warm Chick Pea, Couscous, and ,Preserved Lemon Salad

I ate my usual breakfast of granola, yogurt, blueberries, and milk.

I was busy all morning editing a Management agreement., so for lunch I went to the garden and picked a basket of greens, added a diced tomato,a sliced green onion, and about ten olives.  I added olive oil and a tsp. of honey to the PPI mustard sauce in the fridge for a quick honey mustard dressing.  I also sliced a piece of baguette, toasted it, and put slices of Manchego cheese on it and melted it in the microwave for. 45 seconds to make an open face cheese sandwich.  The fresh greens from the garden are still wonderful.  I feel like I am receiving a gift from God every time I pick a basket of them.

This was one of those good over 200 point jumps in the Dow as the expectations for the world economy went up with the EBC’s announcement yesterday of negative interest of .4% on money borrowed by banks, which means that the EBC will pay European banks that borrow funds from the EBC 40 basis points.  What bank will not borrow money when they are paid to do so and lend it out at low rates?

In response the European and many stock markets rallied on the news.  It makes the FOMC meeting next week even more interesting to watch to see if the Federal Reserve will continue to tighten interest rates in the face of lowered estimates for growth and aggressive easing of credit in Europe.

At 4:10 I rode to Montano and made it back by 5:05 for a quick round trip

After watching the business news and BBC I started dinner at 6:00 by fetching a bottle of 2007 Trimbach Pinot Gris reserve from the cellar and chilling it.  I then pounded six small medallions of pork with a tenderizing mallet until they were rather thin.  I then went to the garden and thanked God as I picked about twenty stalks of Italian broad leaf parsley.  Suzette asked what she could do to help and I requested her to fill pie plates with flour, whipped egg, and bread crumbs, respectively.  She also filled a large skillet to a depth of 1/8 inch with a mixture of canola oil and olive oil and heated it.  I then coated the pounded pork cutlets in flour, then egg and finally bread crumbs and lay three of them into the heated oil at a time and in two stages we Sautéed the cutlets until the bread crumbs turned golden brown.  Suzette also snapped the ends off about 20 stalks if asparagus and put them in the steamer with water and steamed them and heated the couscous, garbanzo bean, and preserved lemon salad in the microwave.  Suzette made pickled lemons for Christmas and made this chick pea, couscous and preserved lemon salad for our Christmas Eve buffet and people liked it.  So she took some of the preserved lemons to Chef Kelly at the Greenhouse Bistro, who made his adaptation of the salad by adding the additional prep step of sautéing the chick peas, which makes the salad even more delicious.  Suzette brought some of Chef Kelly’s chick pea salad home and heated it for dinner.  

Suzette plucked the leaves of parsley off their stems and fetched a bottle of capers paked in salt we bought in Ballagio fifteen years ago and soaked about 25 capers in water and drained them to eliminate most of the salt.  Then we traded places and she tended to the stove as the schnitzels cooked and I chopped the parsley.  When the schnitzels were all cooked and put in a heated oven to keep warm, we got another skillet and heated two T. of butter and then I made a simple sauce by adding the juice of 1/2 lemon and the ¼ cup of minced parsley.  I opened the bottle of 2007 Trimbach Pinot Gris Reserve and poured glasses of it.  When I tasted it to see if it was still okay a huge buttery lemony flavor exploded in my mouth.  No only was the wine okay, it was superb.  It's lemony slightly sweet flavor complemented the lemon caper sauce on the schnitzels to the point that the flavors almost merged and any distinction of whether the lemon flavor was coming from the lemon in the sauce or the wine became indistinguishable.

Suzette lay a couple of schnitzels on a pile of the warm couscous salad and lay asparagus on the plate.  We had another great meal with an exceptionally wonderful wine.  We could have been in Alsace.

  

    

    Those clever Italians have preserved capers in salt so they can be stored indefinitely

  

After the PBS newshour, we watched a bit of the Real Madrid v. Roma EUFA match played earlier this week and then discovered that “Starman” was playing on the Encore channel and watched it while sipping the last of the bottle of Pinot Gris.  “Starman” is among my favorite contemporary sci-fi movies and I think Jeff Bridges’ best performance as an actor.  

At 9:00 after the movie we went to bed happy with our tummies full of this fabulous dinner and wine.

Bon Appetit