August 10, 2017. Lunch – Vinaigrette. Dinner – Greenhouse Bistro Roasted Chicken with garden salad and Sautéed squash

August 10, 2017. Lunch – Vinaigrette. Dinner – Greenhouse Bistro Roasted Chicken with garden salad and Sautéed squash

I ate my usual breakfast and at 7:00 we rode to Rio Bravo and back.

Then at 11:30 Willy called looking for his UBC transcript, which I found and then I picked him up to deliver it to him and take him to lunch at Vinaigrette.  I ordered my usual Frisee Salad, which is a plate of Frisée tossed with crisp pancetta lardons and topped with a poached egg and dressed with a light vinaigrette dressing.  Willy ordered ½ of an Omega salad with a sandwich and a non-alcoholic carrot, club soda, and ginger drink.   The waitress also brought a basket of fresh focaccia bread and a bottle of olive oil.

After we enjoyed our lunch I drove Willy back to work and then drove to Bill Turner’s office to sign a document and talk to Bill.

At 2:30 I  headed home, found out the bad news about the stock market, and worked until 4:00 when I listened to Jim Cramer’s comments about the day’s activity.

The Comcast cable failed at 5:00 so I went to the garden and picked lettuce and two small tomatoes for ½ hour and read for the other ½ hour until 6:00. I went to the kitchen at 6:00 and prepped the squash dish by peeling and dicing two pieces of green squash from our garden and dicing the large yellow with a thin skin from Suzette’s organic garden in Los Lunas.  I the added ½ diced medium
onion, and as Suzette arrived with a roasted chicken from her Greenhouse Bistro and bakery in Los Lunas, I minced four small cloves of garlic from our garden.

I then went to the garden and picked nine leaves of sage, topped about ten heads of basil, and picked about ten stalks of oregano growing into the garden path.

When I returned to the house a Suzette had begun to sauté the squash, onion, and garlic with a tsp. of salt and a grind of fresh black pepper in  butter and olive oil.  I sliced the sage and basil leaves and removed the oregano leaves from their stalks and roughly chopped them into about ¼ cup of oregano leaves and added the fresh herbs to the skillet of squash ingredients.1

Suzette sliced the three small tomatoes from our garden and made a dressing with olive oil, balsamic vinegar and blue cheese (the American brand at Costco) and dressed the salad.

At 4:00 I had put a bottle of La Granja white blend of Viura and Verdejo grapes (Trader Joe’s $4.99?) in the freezer to chill and when the dinner was ready at about 6:30 she tore of the leg quarters from the chicken and plated them with the sautéed squash dish.  I poured glasses of chilled white Spanish wine and we carried the plates, salad, and glasses of wine to the gazebo in the garden for an al fresco dinner in the cool glow of this late summer sunset.

After dinner we returned to the house.  The cable had been repaired so we ate ramekins of clafoutis garnished with whipped cream, with shots of cognac for a Suzette and Calvados for me with a cup of Earl Grey tea as we watched Rachel Maddow’s take on the day’s news. Our preferred cognac is
Chatelier VS for $19.95 at Trader Joe's.  My preferred Calvados is Berneroy XO at Trader Joe's for $29.95.

I went to bed at 8:30 but woke up at 12:30.  So much for trying to get ten hours of sleep.

Bon Appetit