August 1, 2017 Lunch – Lamb Meatball Salad with tzatziki dressing Dinner – Grilled hamburger, corn on the cob, and chayote

August 1, 2017 Lunch – Lamb Meatball Salad with tzatziki dressing
Dinner – Grilled hamburger, corn on the cob, and chayote

Today I was busy.  I ate a late breakfast of fruit salad and granola, yogurt, and a splash of milk at 10:30.

Then a bit after noon I decided to make a salad using the PPI lamb meatballs that I quartered and heated with the warned grilled onions and placed those warm ingredients in a pasta bowl with romaine lettuce, two diced Roma tomatoes, and I diced five cucumber stalks, four celery stalks, and threw in a small handful of radish slices.  I added about 1 ½ T. of olive oil to the ½ cup of PPI tzatziki and dressed the salad with it.

I drank a glass of Tuella Red wine from the Douro Valley in Portugal with a couple of ice cubes in it to dilute it and chill it.

I decided to make spaghetti sauce with ground beef and mushrooms, which is my favorite. Instead of spaghetti we intend to imitate spaghetti by making strips with squash from the garden.

I thawed out about 3 pounds of ground beef and began cooking at 5:30 after stopping at Lowe’s Grocery on the way home from the bank to pick up a can of Hunt’s spaghetti sauce with meat and a can of crushed tomatoes.

I diced two medium onions and ten cloves of garlic and began sautéing them in a large pot with 2 T. of olive oil.  Suzette came home and we decided that the spaghetti sauce would not be ready until 8:30 or 9:00 so we needed an alternative dinner plan.  Suzette suggested making hamburgers with 1 lb. of the ground beef.  Since I had invited Willy, she made three 1/3 lb. hamburgers.  I fetched three ears of corn from the garage and Suzette suggested that we made a simple grilled dinner and grill chayotes also.  So after I added the remaining 2 lb. of ground hamburger to the pot of spaghetti sauce ingredients and stirred it to break up any big chunks, I peeled, removed the seed, and sliced each chayote into four slices.

I then sliced ½ lb. of white mushrooms and added them to the sauce. Then I went to the garden and
picked a large handful of oregano and removed the leaves from the stalks and chopped the oregano

that amounted to 1 cup of chopped leaves and added them to the sauce.

When the mushrooms had cooked for a few minutes, I added a 24 oz. can of Hunt’s meat spaghetti sauce to the pot plus one can of water and then diced four Roma tomatoes and added the diced tomatoes to the sauce pot.

Suzette soaked the ears of corn in water and started grilling the hamburgers, and then added the corn and slices of chayote to the grill and grilled them until they were charbroiled and slices of French Roquefort cheese melted on the hamburgers while I sliced an avocado and poured the last ½ of the bottle of Tuella we opened last night (Trader Joe’s $6.99).

Suzette then went to the garden and picked four small orange tomatoes and Willy picked a few leaves of basil and he cut cross- hatched slits in the top of each tomato and placed a basil leaf in each slit and drizzled each tomato with Balsamic vinegar and placed the tomatoes on the plates and we were ready to eat our grilled dinner.

I added catsup to my plate to dip the grilled hamburger into.

After dinner Suzette checked the tomato sauce and decided it needed more tomatoes, so she added the 28 oz. can of crushed tomatoes I had bought at Lowe’s and we cooked the sauce for another hour or two.

After dinner Willy took a walk and we watched TV and ate bowls of Clafoutis topped with squirts of canned whipped cream.  The cold Clafoutis with whipped cream was really delicious with a cup of hot Earl grey tea with milk.

I put the spaghetti sauce into the garage fridge at 9:00, said goodnight to Willy, and retired to bed to blog for a few minutes until tiredness caught up with me.

 We enjoyed our spontaneous grilled dinner and we now have the main ingredient for a spaghetti dinner tomorrow evening.

This was an especially wonderful day financially.  I deposited the rent check from Binswanger and the Children’s candy store and a small check for the divorce I started yesterday and Apple had a good quarter that sent the stock up $8.00 in after market trading to a point that should result in my portfolio realizing a 50% gain since September 5, 2013; the day Willy left for graduate school in Dublin, Ireland, plus the documentation for the sale of the property in Fairfield, California arrived, which will distribute enough money to me to become debt free for the first time since I was 22 years old.

I was so thrilled that I had to share our good fortune with Willy.  Then Willy told me he made his first stock investment in Royal Bank of Scotland today, and I was doubly thrilled because he was starting to invest and grow his wealth.

Bon Appetit