June 21, 2017 Lunch – East Ocean. Dinner – BBQ brisket and sausage, Pinto beans, and corn in the cob

June 21, 2017 Lunch – East Ocean. Dinner – BBQ brisket and sausage, Pinto beans, and corn in the cob

I had a doctor’s appointment at 1:00 so on the way I stopped at East Ocean for a plate of Moo Goo Gai Pan without rice and sweet and sour chicken.

  

After the doctor’s appointment I went to Sprouts for the double Wednesday specials.  I bought nice tuna steaks for $8.99/lb., fresh corn on the Cobb for 5 for $1.00, a 1 lb. box of baby portabella mushrooms for $3.49,  asparagus for $1.98/lb., and a couple other things.

I only ate only half of the lunch, so had a snack of the rest at 5:00.

Suzette was baking Italian Cloud cakes for the Food to Field dinner, so I stayed out of the kitchen, except to make a teriyaki sauce to marinate the tuna steaks with ½ cup each of soy sauce, Aji  mirin, and sake and 1 T. of sugar heated until the sugar goes into solution.  Then I put the tuna in a freezer bag with the teriyaki sauce to marinate in the fridge over night.

   A cloud cake

We did not cook dinner because Dee Simpson was coming in with fresh BBQ from Austin.  At 8:00 we started getting hungry, so I opened a can of cooked pinto beans and heated it in a skillet with sautéed onion and garlic and shucked three ears of the corn and Suzette boiled the corn. Dee arrived at 8:45 with a load of smoked brisket and sausage.  Dee explained that BBQ has become a gourmet Food in Austin.  Texas Monthly has a list of the best BBQ joints in Texas every year and folks line up two hours early for lunch at the best joints in Austin.  Dee also explained that there are two types of brisket; dry and wet.  The dry is smoked a little longer until some of the juices in the fat run out of the meat, while the wet is fully cooked but at a lower temperature, so it retains more of its fat.  This similar to the French preference for undercooking meats, so they retain more of their original flavor.  I never will forget a lunch of Bourg en Bresse chicken, which is considered a delicacy in France, at a highly rated restaurant in Dijon, France when Billy and I and Suzette went with Mother in 2000 that served roasted chicken that was still red at the bone.  Well, the brisket Dee brought was fully cooked but, super moist.  He wanted us to re-heat it in the oven, but we would not wait, so Suzette heated the portion we wanted to eat in the microwave, which Dee said would dry out the meat.  I did not think  the meat was dried out at all.  It was the most tender, succulently moist, and the biggest and thickest slabs of brisket I have ever tasted.  Smoked meat and fat never tasted better.

Here is a picture of the brisket.

Actually I remove the slab of fat encasing the meat that holds the juices in the meat inside the meat, so I do not eat all the fat, just the internal fat mixed in with the meat.

We had a lovely dinner of beans, fresh corn, and brisket and sausage.  Actually the sausage was a little drier and both crumbled to the touch of a fork.

Bon Appetit