August 27, 2016 Lunch – Gold Street Café, Dinner – Beef Pho Miso Noodle Soup

August 27, 2016 Lunch – Gold Street Café, Dinner – Beef Pho Miso Noodle Soup 

Sometimes a small thought motivates a menu.  This morning urgency motivated me to eat my favorite breakfast, a bowl of granola with yogurt and tropical fruit salad.  I had ridden ten miles to Montano and back and had only a few minutes to eat between showering and leaving for a 9:30 appointment.

I had called Willy and told him I would meet him for lunch after my appointment.  After my appointment I drove to Willy’s apartment.  We decided to go to the new Vietnamese Restaurant on Gold but it was closed.  We looked at the menu at Le Troquet, but followed Willy’s suggestion that we eat at Gold Street Café.  It was a lovely afternoon, so we sat at a sidewalk table beside the Café’s door.  Willy ordered the Soutwestern Eggs Benedict, which was bacon and poached eggs served on a green chile biscuit with roasted potatoes for $12.95.  I ordered the Cowboy Breakfast, which was scrambled eggs sort of Cooked like an omelet and folded on top of a couple of slices of warmed ham on a green chile biscuit served with roasted potatoes for $8.95. I guess if they had called my dish Scrambled Benedict they could have charged $12.95 for it instead of $8.95.

The food was pretty pedestrian, not a lot of effort put into presentation, no unlike the Central Grill.  But the aspect of lunch that exemplified the thought I mentioned earlier was that Gold Street was within one half block of Willy’s apartment.  A lunch we decided to go see the new Texas movie, “Hell and High Water” playing at the Century 14 Theater one and ½ blocks from Willy’s apartment.  When we finished lunch around 1:00 we walked to the newly opened Silver St. Market, which on the first floor of Willy’s apartment and bought tea, a scrub brush, some cinnamon sticks, unfiltered apple juice, a small container of milk, and Bracken spiced rum for dark and stormys.

We then took the groceries upstairs and took a nap for an hour.

At 2:45 we walked the 1 ½ blocks to the theater and saw “Hell and High Water”, which I liked very much.  Possibly because it was set in West Texas and featured lots of shots of those endless open vistas and Staked Plains of West Texas and Eastern New Mexico, where I spent a lot of time in my youth along Hwy. 287 that meanders on the Texas side off the Red River from Archer City to Olney and on through Childress and the Texas Panhandle or Post in deep West Texas near Lubbock as we drove back and forth from Fort Worth and New Mexico and especially Santa Fe.  The shortest route from Fort Worth to Santa Fe or Albuquerque was north on 287 to connect to I-40 at Amarillo.  If you stayed on 287 you would go up through the Texas Panhandle and connect to I-25 in Colorado.  It is the most direct route from Dallas/Fort Worth to Colorado Springs and Denver and 287 goes almost all the way to Canada. The movie’s unspoken hero is the nearly empty open space and roads stretching in straight lines for miles across those empty spaces of West Texas.

The movie is a morality play about how financial institutions have played havoc with land poor ranchers’ lives in West Texas by taking their land and Texas style vigilante justice.  Jeff Bridges is good as an old crusty Texas Ranger.

After the movie we walked the one block from the back exit from the theater on Second street to Willy’s apartment and said goodbye.

I drove home and watched the news, mostly about the 6.2 earthquake that destroyed hilltop towns in Italy’s spine east of Rome.

I decided to clean part of the fridge and poured out an old container of milk and some crab broth we made from the last Dungeness crab several weeks ago.  The final part of this strategy was to use the beef stock in a sauce pan Suzette had made last week from the PPI steak we ate last Monday plus a mirepoix of carrots, celery from the garden and some onion. I went to the driveway and picked ½ cup of purslane and from the front bed two stalks of blooming oregano.  I then walked to the back garden and picked six or seven chives, some basil tops and six or seven leaves of chard.  I heated the broth and diced the meat left on the two rib steak bones and added a cube of Pho seasoning, a T. of red Miso, the leaves of one of the stalks of oregano, and some Vietnamese rice and wheat noodles.  Then I added the purslane and de-stemmed and diced chard and in about 20 minutes I had a wonderful pho beef soup to which I added finely diced chives and basil leaves to freshen and further flavor the soup.  The beef broth was exquisite and the soup was hardy with the added chunks of beef enriched with miso and pho seasoning.

I added a bit of hoisin to one of the for bowls of soup I ate, but it really was unnecessary.

I got in bed at 9:00 and read myself to sleep with Hampton Sides’  Blood and Thunder to prolong the New Mexico experiences of the day.

Bon Appetit