September 30, 2016 Lunch – Taj Mahal Dinner – Neighborhood Cocktail Party

September 30, 2016 Lunch – Taj Mahal  Dinner – Neighborhood Cocktail Party

I rode ten miles to Montano and back and ate a cinnamon roll Susan Palmer brought back from San Francisco.  It was lovely, sort of a brioche.

Then at 11:45 I met Mike Verhagen at Taj Mahal for lunch.  I ate tandoori chicken, raita, rice, saag, and curry.  Mike ate tandoori chicken with a dab of saag.

Mike seems to be doing well, with a couple of new projects.  He does computer programs for organizing and manipulating data.  

We planned to make pasta pesto dish for the Neighborhood Cocktail party tonight, so at 3:00 I boiled a lb. of gemali pasta.  I actually slightly over cooked it but as we will see in a moment that turned out to not be a problem.

I called Suzette at 5:30 and she said we were replicating the recipe we did last night.

 So, I diced ½ onion, minced five or six cloves of garlic, 2/3 of a Spanish canned pimiento pepper, and went to the garden to pick chard to  fully replicate last night’s recipe.

I went to the garden and picked a goodly handful of chard and a small handful of basil leaves. I then shelled about 2/3 lb. of shrimp and cut them into pieces the size of the .6 lb. of bay scallops I had bought at El Super on Wednesday for $7.99./lb.  I de-stemmed and cut the chard into bite-sized pieces.  I then sliced the basil into strips.

Suzette arrived at 6:00 and started cooking.  She sautéed the onion, garlic, and pimiento.  Then she added the shrimp and scallops and finally the chard and and pesto and cooked the ingredients together for a few minutes and then stirred in the pasta.  She fetched a covered serving dish and filled it with the warm pasta salad we had made.

   The PPI Pasta Pesto Salad

At 7:00 we took a bottle of Albero Spanish Rose’ and the pasta dish to Rich Jordan’s house on 16th St., our host for the cocktail party.  We spent a couple of hours talking and drinking.  I really liked the Albero rose made from the bobal grape (Trader Joe’s $4.99), a medium weight rose’.

Our dish was the best dish at the party according to Rich’s cousin, who stood in as Rich’s hostess, since his wife had passed away.  About ½ of the dishes were homemade. Susie and one other person made deviled eggs.  Janice made nice cheese biscuits and someone made a fresh plum and blueberry tart. The rest of the dishes were store bought.  I enjoyed eating the food and thought our dish was the most flavorful and creative.  The softness of the crumpling pasta seemed to enhance the absorption of the shrimp and scallop juices, which seemed to me to enhance the entire dish’s flavor.  Sort of an Italian Seafood Congee.

It was fun meeting some of our new neighbors and seeing old friends.

At 9:30 we walked home.

Bon Appetit