June 30, 2017 Lunch – sautéed bulgur with Texas BBQ. Dinner – Grilled Lobster tails and Sweet Potato slices with Creamed Spinach

June 30, 2017 Lunch – sautéed bulgur with Texas BBQ. Dinner – Grilled Lobster tails and Sweet Potato slices with Creamed Spinach

This was a wonderful day. I received two more rent checks and experienced my first month of having no house mortgage payment.

I will pay down my line of credit with the extra cash.

I made a great dish for lunch.  I found the bulgur with raisins, piñon nuts and spinach and heated it in a large skillet with two smoked sausages and some brisket Dee brought us from Austin with 2 T. of BBQ sauce. I drank iced tea with the meal.

 Suzette brought home 5 oz. lobster tails for my birthday dinner.

She knew I love lobster for my birthday dinner and bought two fresh ones at Costco’s Seafood Fiesta this afternoon.

At 4:30 we went to the garden to harvest the garlic.  This year we used technology; garlic grows in circular clumps usually, so I used a shovel to lift the clumps away from binding soil and Suzette grabbed the loosened stalks of garlic out of the loosened soil.  This method worked really well and in 1 ½ hours we had harvested all of the garlic.  We stacked it on chairs and tables to let it dry.  When we return from Taos, we will process it by removing the heads and cloves from the stalks and storing it.

We had a bag of spinach that was going bad (perhaps some of it had frozen in the garage fridge), so I suggested making creamed Spinach and grilling slices of sweet white potato, since we had ½ of one left.  Suzette washed and drained the spinach and I picked out as much of the wilted spinach as I could in about 1/3 hour.

I made the cream sauce in a  Le Crueset Casserole.  I melted three T. of butter and added 1 clove of fresh minced garlic from our garden.  I then added 3 T. of flour and let the flour cook three minutes. I then began adding small amounts of milk and then stirring the milk into solution until the sauce became a uniform, smooth cream sauce.  I then added ½ tsp of nutmeg, some salt, ¼ tsp. of smoked paprika and a little white pepper and turned off the heat.

I then sliced the sweet potato into about a dozen 1/3 inch wide slices.

Willy came at 6:45 and we started cooking in earnest.  

Suzette split the tails with a knife and lay slices of butter and lemon in the slit down the middle of each tail.

Then she put the sweet potato slices and the lobster tails on the grill and added the spinach to the casserole and stirred it into solution.  The moisture left on the spinach was sufficient to loosen the cream sauce to allow the spinach to cook into the sauce.

In just a few minutes everything was cooked and we were ready to eat.  I opened a bottle of 2014 Sainte Celine Chablis ($12.99 at Trader Joe’s) and Willy poured it out into three glasses.  We removed the meat from the tails with some difficulty and put a pile of lobster meat on each plate with four slices of grilled sweet potato and we each ladled creamed spinach onto our plates and Suzette grated Swiss Gruyere cheese onto each of our piles of spinach.  We each took a glass of wine and went to the garden table in the gazebo.  Suzette had laid one of the IKEA green Pear decorated table clothes on the table in the gazebo and she immediately recognized that the light grassy green color of the wine matched the color of the tablecloth.  We were excited and became more excited when we sipped the wine and were greeted by that wonderful grassy slightly sweet, minerally/acidity of the Chablis.  As Suzette said, “Chablis is the only Chardonnay I really like.”
Me too.

Here is a description of the wine of Chablis from Wikipedia:

The Chablis (pronounced: [ʃa.bli]) region is the northernmost wine district of the Burgundy region in France. The cool climate of this region produces wines with more acidity and flavors less fruity than Chardonnay wines grown in warmer climates. These wines often have a "flinty" note, sometimes described as "goût de pierre à fusil" ("tasting of gunflint"), and sometimes as "steely". The Chablis Appellation d'origine contrôlée is required to use Chardonnay grapes solely.

Chablis
Wine region
Type Appellation d'origine contrôlée
Year established 1938
Country France
Part of Burgundy
Total area 6834 hectares
Size of planted vineyards 4820 hectares
Varietals produced Chardonnay (Beaunois)
The grapevines around the town of Chablis make a dry white wine renowned for the purity of its aroma and taste. In comparison with the white wines from the rest of Burgundy, Chablis wine has typically much less influence of oak. Most basic Chablis is unoaked, and vinified in stainless steel tanks.

The amount of barrel maturation, if any, is a stylistic choice which varies widely among Chablis producers. Many Grand Cru and Premier Cru wines receive some maturation in oak barrels, but typically the time in barrel and the proportion of new barrels is much smaller than for white wines of Côte de Beaune.[1]
Perhaps the reason why we like Chablis is because it is unoaked.  It is not far from Sancerre which also produces flinty, acidic and grassy Sauvignon Blancs.

To make a long story shorter, the meal was heavenly, fresh grilled lobster eaten with bites of creamy spinach and washed down with sips of Chablis, a very special meal.

Willy told us about his trip to Denver, from which he just returned Thursday evening.  He was sent to a conference on the use of Census data.  Willy told us that the U.S. Census Department collects approximately 250,000 questionnaires per month with detailed transportation information with questions such as, How long is your commute to work? And, “What means of transportation do you use to get to work?  So the data gathered creates a large sampling of trends in transportation.

After dinner we decided to go to Marble brewery to listen to the South American band Suzette had heard at the Bio Park last night.  We had to park a block away and as we walked east on Marble between 2nd and 1st, we saw a new bar that was a dispensary of spirits produced by Santa Fe Distillery named Still Spirits at 120 Marble.  It had an open bar facing Marble that we sat at from which we could see Marble Brewery and the bandstand and hear the music without enduring the crowd at Marble or the loud volume of noise of people and music.  We ordered drinks.  Willy had a turmeric flavored vodka martini and I had a Gin and Tonic.  Still Spirits makes their own tonic, which is tasted both earthy and fruity, which they then mix with Soda water and Santa Fe Spirits’ Wheeler Dry Gin.  Here is some info on Wheeler’ Western Dry Gin from Santa Fe Spirits:


“Over the two years that it took Santa Fe Spirits’ to perfect the recipe for Wheeler’s Western Dry Gin, we found ourselves constantly wandering the Southwest in search of the perfect combination of botanicals to create a classic dry gin with southwestern flair. Much like explorer and cartographer George Wheeler, after whom both this bold gin and New Mexico’s highest mountain are named, we wandered New Mexico’s arid desert basins, lush mountain meadows, and everywhere between with the goal of revealing the subtle secrets of the Southwest to the rest of the world. But where Wheeler used a pen and paper, we used a bottle and a still.

Wheeler’s unparalleled flavor marries bold complexity with sincere terroir. When enjoyed neat, hop flowers and osha root create a vibrant aroma that is a delightful interplay of bright fruit and spice. Upon a solid foundation of Juniper, the short-lived, frail, magenta flowers of a local cactus contribute a one-of-a-kind flavor reminiscent of cucumber, but chock full of sweet nectar and delicate perfume. Then, just as the distinct hues of a desert sunset combine to form a single, spectacular view, the various aromas and flavors of Wheeler’s unite in a pleasant finish with a hint of sage, leaving one to contemplate the unending list of cocktails that would benefit from this adventurous gin and the subtle flavors of the Southwest.”

To say the least, I enjoyed the gin and tonic.  Suzette was able to wrangle a taste of Still Spirits’ own house made gin, which reminded her of the award winning gin produced by Sweetwater Distillery in Maine we visited four years ago.  When she tasted my gin and tonic she went back to Mike, the bar man she had obtained a glass of the tonic and soda water and poured the new house gin into it.  Her comment was, “This now a really proper gin and tonic.”

It appears that Still Spirits is somewhere between a tasting room and cocktail lounge, very much the same balance as at Santa Fe Spirits’ Distillery in Santa Fe, where you can taste or order drinks.

After an hour of drinking and talking Willy drove us home.  I watched a Rachel Maddow, who gave the best analysis of President Trump’s tweets I have ever heard.  Basically she said Trump uses tweets to divert attention from unpleasant subjects such as the failure of Congress to pass healthcare reform.  He does not care how outrageous the lies are in his tweets and the more provocative the better because everyone starts talking about his tweets and that diverts attention from the important issue which is the decimation of the existing healthcare system or the probes into the Trump election team’s collusion with Russian hackers by misogynist statements about Joe Scarborough and co-anchor on Morning Joe.  What Trump appears to have done is expose another avenue of inquiry into his complicity with the National Enquirer to threaten press attacks by the Enquirer as a means of silencing Scarborough’s criticism of Trump.  Things are just getting crazier and crazier.

It reminds me of the Clinton investigations by the Republicans that started looking at real estate transactions of the Clintons and ended up impeaching Clinton based on his lies about Monica Lewinsky.

I celebrated my Birthday with a glass of Calvados and a piece of milk chocolate with almonds while watching Rachel after Suzette went to bed at 10:00.

Bon Appetit