September 12, 2017. Lunch – PPI salad and zebra tomato sandwich Dinner – Squash noodles with spaghetti sauce

September 12, 2017. Lunch – PPI salad and zebra tomato sandwich
Dinner – Squash noodles with spaghetti sauce

I ate a whitefish sandwich for breakfast with a cup of tea.

I became hungry at 11:15 so ate the PPI salad from last night with an open faced sandwich of sliced zebra tomato on Mayo on a piece of Toasted Nativo whole wheat bread at my desk. Here is a picture.

At 1:00 I attended a wine tasting at the Crown Plaza hotel with Aaron and Roland.  There were several beautiful wines, mostly French and several from the Blaye district of Bordeaux on the right bank.

My favorite wines were the Josselin champagnes from the southern most region of southern champagne.

We left a little after 2:00.  When I returned home at 2:30 I decided to cook, rather than work.

Spaghetti Sauce – I make spaghetti sauce in a manner similar to the way I make Texas chili, in a large pot in volume.  Today I diced two medium yellow onions, ten cloves of garlic, a handful each of oregano and basil leaves, seven large mushrooms sliced, ½ cup of white wine, about three to four lb. of fresh tomatoes and two 6 oz. cans of tomato paste.

I let the sauce simmer while I attended a slow food sponsored tour of the hydroponic growing facility at Washington Middle School’s Greenhouse.

Suzette met me there and we returned home and I made noodles by slicing slices of squash from one of the squashes we grew in our garden by scraping a vegetable peeler along the length of the squash

after slicing it into 1 ½ wide wedges.

Suzette put the squash strips in a Pyrex baking dish, covered them with Saran and microwaved the squash for 5 minutes.

While the squash was cooking Suzette fetched the wedge of Pecorino Romano cheese and cut slices from it with a cheese slicer while I fetched and opened a bottle of 2013 Gaetano di Aquino Chianti Riserva ($5.99 Trader Joe's), which is my usual Chianti for everyday meals, like tonight’s meal.  It is a very clean tasting Chianti that goes well with food.

Suzette then plated the squash noodles and commented, “how lovely the fresh cooked squash is.”  Here is a picture.

                                                      The cooked squash noodles

The meat sauce
 

       
                  
The finished dish garnished with slices of Pecorino Romano cheese

                                      Suzette's dish with all the ingredients mixed together

We then each took a pasta bowl with a pile of squash noodles and served ourselves the spaghetti sauce and garnished the spaghetti with slices of salty Pecorino Romano cheese and I poured glasses of Chianti.

The beauty of this meal is it is super simple to cook and the use of squash noodles provides the vegetable component to the meal.  We could have had a green vegetable if we had wanted, but this was enough food.  The other reason why we love this dish is because it eliminates the usual carbs in pasta.

In fairness, we were still hungry and I ate a few bites of blue cheese as I sipped the last of my glass of wine and I then opened the wheel of Brie cheese from Isigney Ste. Mere in Normandy, which we visited several years ago.  I had bought the Brie at a Costco before our trip in early August and aged it in the fridge for about one month, so it had developed some brown spots on the exterior of its rind and a slightly nutty flavor.

                     Evidence that the Back label is often more informative than the front label

We decided to finish dinner with a dessert of clafoutis with a dab of whipped cream.  I ate mine with a shot of cognac and a cup of tea and Suzette ate hers with a glass of Buller Fine Muscat port from Australia.  Suzette made me taste the port because it had been opened and had breathed for a day and had become much smoother in taste.

Perhaps I will have a glass of it tomorrow to see how it holds up over time.

I had to start cooking the spaghetti sauce at 3:00 because the process takes three to four hours.  You must sauté the onions and garlic until they soften.  Then you add the ground beef and mushrooms and cook them with the onions and garlic until cooked.  Then you dice the tomatoes and add them to the sauce and finally I went to the garden and picked about ten stalks of oregano and a large handful of basil leaves and about ten sage leaves and de-stemmed them and chopped them finely and added them to the sauce.  I then simmered the sauce on low heat for three hours, adding the 12 oz. of tomato paste at the end.  When I have fewer tomatoes, I add canned tomatoes to get the correct proportion of about two or three parts of  tomato to one part meat.  Today the proportion was skewed toward the meat portion so I added an extra can of tomato paste.  You could just as easily add tomato sauce or spaghetti sauce, or canned tomatoes to constitute the tomato component.  In Texas we are not very fussy about the tomatoes in the sauce since they just form the filler for the ground beef.  This is definitely a meat sauce.

Bon Appetit