August 13, 2016 Lunch – Miso Vietnamese Pho Noodle soup. Dinner – Pink Grouper Baked in foil with yellow squash,tomato, pasilla chile, and onion

August 13, 2016  Lunch – Miso Vietnamese Pho Noodle soup. Dinner – Pink Grouper Baked in foil with yellow squash,tomato, pasilla chile, and onion

At 11:30 I went to the bank, then Birdland to check leaks and then Ta Lin.  At Ta Lin I bought German Egg noodles, thin rice noodles, a 1 pound piece of fresh Pink Grouper, 4 Washington State oysters, shiitake mushrooms, and 5 packages of Pho bouillon cubes.  

I then went home and made a Miso Pho Chicken noodle soup combining Diced chicken, seaweed, miso, a diced Mexican green onion, several chopped sweet yam leaves, tofu, and Vietnamese 30 mm wide rice noodles, vegetarian wheat noodles, and bean thread noodles with a dash of sesame oil and Chinese cooking wine.

I love this combination a lot because it combines my favorite Japanese soup with my favorite Vietnamese soup.

I had bought the fresh oysters because Suzette had talked about including oysters in the seafood dinner she is planning for Thursday evening along with scallops.  Finding good oysters at a reasonable price without having to buy a wooden crate of 100 oysters is a challenge, but one I think is met.  Talin’s fishmonger told me they receive fresh oysters daily and they sell for $1.79/lb.  The four oysters coat a total of $2.13, about $.50 each.

In the evening we discussed how to fix the grouper and oysters.  Suzette wanted to test a cilantro mignonette sauce, so I chopped ½ of a shallot and about 1 T. of fresh cilantro and she made a sauce by combining white vinegar and Aji Mirin.  We are out of Japanese rice vinegar.  Then I shucked the oysters so they were on the half shell and Suzette doused them with the cilantro mignonette sauce.  It was a delicious combination with Nessa  Albariño from Spain.

  The cilantro mignonette sauce 

  The oysters garnished with the cilantro mignonette sauce

We then assembled the grouper dish. I filleted the grouper from its bones and cut the long filet into two pieces..  Then I diced garlic, onion, pasilla chile, two white mushrooms and some yellow squash from Suzette’s garden in Los Luna's.  Suzette crisscrosses two sheets of aluminum foil and stacked the ingredients on the fish filets, garnished the mixture with pieces of butter and white wine and crimped the foil sheets to create an air tight package.  Suzette then cooked the packets in our new steaming oven for forty minutes to fully cook the ingredients.  She then heated the PPI couscous and added a couple of scoops of couscous to the fish after she opened the packets.

We ate dinner with a lovely bottle of Famille Perrin Reserve white Cotes du Rhone ($7.99 at Trader Joe’s).  I really recommend this wine as a good white a Cotes du Rhone for the money, just like I like the Famille Perrin Reserve red for the same price. 

Bon Appetit