September 26, 2017 Lunch – Taj Mahal Dinner –Pork, Onion, and Apple Tapa on fresh spinach

September 26, 2017 Lunch – Taj Mahal  Dinner –Pork, Onion, and Apple Tapa on fresh spinach

I splurged and ate ½ bagel with cream cheese and white fish with a bit of sliced onion and a cup of coffee hot chocolate.

Peter Eller came at 11:45 and I drove us first to Donut Mart on Coors at Sequoia to pick up his six bialys plus three bagels and I was given four bagels also.  God bless The Gaubas.

We then drove to East Ocean, which was closed until Friday, so I drove us down Carlisle to Taj Majal where we had a wonderful lunch and I thanked Peter again for selling us the Illa McAfee at a good price.

             Tandoori chicken, saag, curry, onions, and beef meatballs with tamarind sauce and riata

I called Suzette at about 5:45 and she said she was on her way home.  We decided to make the Spanish tapa that roasted pork loins with apples and onions in a chicken stock. Oregano, and cognac sauce.

I sliced a sweet onion and a gala apple and went to the garden and picked six or seven sprigs of oregano.

I also fetched the bag of spinach.  Rather than preparing a separate spinach dish we decided to simply lay a bed of spinach in each pasta plate and to make more sauce to cook it with then heated pork dish and sauce.

This worked well.  The spinach blended into the pork dish as a pleasant vegetable accompaniment.

I opened a bottle of La Granja Rose’ from Spain (Trader Joe’s $4.99).

At 7:00 we watched the Vietnam War about 1969 and 1970, including The Kent State Massacre.
I was blessed I knew that Kent State was the end of the anti-war movement, if the government was willing to fire on peaceful protesters.

I went to Sweden for a year at the end of the summer and worked at Karlgren’s Revisionbyra, a CPA firm in Gothenburg, for the year 1970-1971 almost completely cut off from American culture, so I did not have to face the awfulness of a society out of control.

I gained many insights into Swedish culture, which in those days was still charming with a pleasant colloquialness.  For example, I lived at a student dorm at the eastern edge of Gothenburg.  Once I asked a flat mate, “Are there trolls? When she answered “Yes.” I asked, “Where do they live?, thinking I had sprung a trap on her.  But she took me outside and pointed to the line of low hills about forty mile away visible on the eastern horizon and said, “Over there.”   The low hills she was pointing at were called Trollheten, which in Swedish means Home of the trolls.  It was moments like this that made me realize I was living in a completely different culture that the one I had left in the US and
glad that I had a temporary exit from the culture wars in the U. S. for a year

That does not mean that we were immune from the impact of politics in Sweden.  Many friends in the ex-patriot community were draft resisters and military deserters, so America's war policies were constantly the subject of conversation .

One small footnote.  I represented several of the deserters in proceedings by the State Department to revoke their U.S. passports.  I did not succeed in stopping the revocation of their passports, but several years after the end of the Vietnam War the U.S. granted amnesty to draft resisters and restored  their passports.

Bon Appetit