July 25, 2016 Lunch Seasons. Dinner. Glazed Gingery Spareribs with Stir Fried Chard, onion, and mushrooms and Rice

I ate granola with yogurt, fresh blueberries, and milk for breakfast.

Suzette worked in the garden and I helped her by pulling the garlic.  Some garlic looks good, while some has dried up a bit.  We will have to see how it lasts for cooking.

I worked until 1:30 when I received a call from Aaron, who was having a working lunch on a project at Seasons and invited me to join him and Roland for lunch, which I did.  Roland ordered steak salad, I ordered mussels and linguine flavored with red pepper flakes in a white wine cream sauce, and Aaron ordered crab cakes.  All dishes were attractively served.  I did not think my dish was any better than what we make at home when we make fresh linguine.  The bill was $58.00 before the tip, which was a shock after the great meal we have eaten in Mexico for under $10.00 each and the great brunch we ate at Central Grill yesterday for $31.00. Welcome back to the USA.

For dinner we decided to make the dish Suzette had planned to use the pork spareribs she bought yesterday at Costco for; a Hong Kong recipe for Glazed Gingery Spareribs, page 114 of Madhur Jaffrey’s Far Eastern Cookery. 

The recipe is relatively easy.  We put the sugar, soy sauce, Chinese Cooking wine, diced scallion, and fresh ginger into a large Le Crueset casserole with two pounds of boneless pork spare ribs that I had butchered rather carefully to remove any skin and large areas of tendon and fat and cooked it until the liquid reduced to a thick sauce.

I went to the garden and picked a basket full of chard, which had prospered in our absence and de-stemmed it and cut it into bite sized pieces and washed them.  I then minced a small clove of garlic we picked before we went on vacation and enough giver to make about 1 T. each of garlic and ginger. I then diced 1 small onion and sliced three large white mushrooms while watching the Democratic Convention. I also minced about 1 T. of fresh basil I had picked yesterday in the garden when I topped the basil.

We started the Spareribs about 6:00 and by the time Willy arrived at 7:30 they were well on their way to being cooked,  with the sauce reduced. 

At around 8:15 I started the chard dish by heating 1 ½ T. of peanut oil and stir frying the onion, garlic, and ginger in the wok.  I added a dash of sesame oil and the mushrooms and stir fried that.  When Suzette announced that the spareribs were ready, which was during Michelle Obama’s speech I think, Suzette heated the PPI rice with seaweed and I added the chard to the other ingredients in the wok and tossed them to mix them and cook the chard.  In a minute or two the dish was ready when the chard had wilted but was still green.  Suzette had declared this to be a beer dinner about twenty minutes before and had fetched three red stripes from the garage fridge and chilled them in the freezer.

We enjoyed this new recipe and the fresh chard from our garden and I even thought the seaweed in the rice tasted better because it was softened to a new more edible tenderness.

We enjoyed watching the Democratic Convention.  I can not help thinking the third time is the charm.  It seems to me that I as a liberal Democrat have been here two times before during my lifetime: in 1960 when the hopes for a progressive agenda rose with John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, then in 1968 with the battle for control of the Democratic Party over the Vietnam War and race wars erupted into open hostility after the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, and finally, this year when it seems like there is a chance that finally the control of politics by racism and wealth may be passing as America becomes more racially, culturally, and religiously diverse and the politics of fear and demagoguery seem so painfully obvious.

I hope a majority of people will vote for Hillary and we can finally see if America is ready for a progressive agenda for the first time since the 30’s.  It could be a wonderful period for American democracy.

Suzette said that if we make the dish again she would add more sugar.  I put in a little extra ginger.  I think the dish had enough sugar because it relieved me of any craving for dessert.

After the convention coverage ended at 10:00 we talked to Willy about his new research project and said goodnight to him around 10:30.

Bon Appetit