October 30, 2017 Lunch – Clam Chowder with sardines in Tomato sauce. Dinner – Grilled steak, chayote, and sweet potatoes with Sautéed Mushrooms

October 30, 2017 Lunch – Clam Chowder with sardines in Tomato sauce.  Dinner – Grilled steak, chayote, and sweet potatoes with Sautéed Mushrooms

I ate yogurt, granola, milk, and tropical fruit salad for breakfast.

I was in the mood for a soup at lunch so I opened a can of Progresso clam chowder and wanted a few more clams.  I looked in the tins of canned fish and found an unmarked can that I thought might be clams, but turned out to be sardines or mackerel filets in tomato sauce.  The combination of oil and tomato was a pleasant addition to the rather bland clamless soup.  I added ½ can of milk to thin out the soup’s viscosity and removed the backbones from the sardine or mackerel filets.  I enjoyed the soup but feared for my life as I read an article on how Allergen uses a botulism toxin to make its famous drug, Botox.

I lived.

At 4:00 I decided to take an early end from work and watched Mad Money.  I was interested to see what Jim Crramer would say about the Fang stocks, since I had just had a historic run in both Apple and Facebook that lead to an approximately $23,000 gain on Friday and a $5,000 gain today.  As it turned out he said the most prescient statement in the morning Squawk on the Street show that short sellers had driven Apple down with stories of lack of demand for components from vendors for the Model X phone last week that turned out to be false.  Apple surged approximately $10.00 per share in the last two days, as factual reality that order demand for the phone exceeded supply capacity became known.   I am heavily invested in the market and today when GE was hammered down to below $20.50 in the selling pressure of a down market, I bought 400 more shares at $20.54.  We shall see if new management can return the company to its historic position of prominence.  He is one of the last members of the original 12 stocks in the DOW and controls ½ of the power generating equipment market in the world, so there is hope if it can execute in that traditional market to regain its growth trajectory.  At the beginning of the year GE was $32.00, so it has been on a long downward slide and is the worst performing stock in the DOW this year.  The question is, When has it become oversold?

I made teriyaki sauce for the remaining salmon filet in the afternoon and added it to the salmon filet in the fridge.  Then at 6:00 when Suzette came home I peeled and sliced two chayote and the sweet potatoes.  We decided to start cooking at 6:30 and while Suzette salted and peppered the two rib steaks we had thawed and heated the grill, I sliced ½ lb. of white mushrooms, a couple of cloves of garlic, a shallot and went to the garden and picked two sprigs of tarragon and five or six sprigs of thyme and removed their leaves from their stems.

Then when Willy arrived I melted butter and sautéed the ingredients until the steak and chayote and sweet potatoes were grilled and added about 2 T. of Amontillado sherry to the mushrooms to make a light sauce.  As it turned out Suzette cooked the steaks to medium in the high wind and darkness, which was fine for Willy and me, but she is more of a rare person. In the case of tonight’s steaks, the overcooking was not harmful to their tenderness because they were heavily marbled with large areas of fat and they retained their tenderness as that fat cooked.

I opened a bottle of Chateau Haut Sorrillon Bordeaux Superiore ($6.99 at Trader Joe’s), which was a clean red wine and more than worth the money.  I am determined to buy more wines at Trader Joe’s and fewer wines at Total Wine, because the wines at Total Wines are often over priced and it pushes up the prices  of its better selling wines like the drug companies do, and I hate that.

For example I bought a bottle of a Spanish 2014 Montebuena Crianza for $9.59 less 20% in February that was marked up to $11.49 less 20% last weekend.  The only reason I continue to shop at Total Wines is  because the less popular wines that typically cost more often stay the same price like the Le Pont Bandol Rose’ that continues to cost $20.00 less 20%, which is our favorite French rose.

We enjoyed dinner and the wine.  I thought the grilled sweet potatoes and chayote were especially delicious tonight and it was fun, in a primordial way, to eat a hardy meal of grilled meat and vegetables as the wind howled outside.

Suzette ate a bowl of the poached Quince and fruits she made last night with yogurt for dessert.  I gnawed the meat off the charred bones with the last of the mushrooms and wine, so I passed on dessert.

We watched the latest Bill Maher show and then the latest John Oliver show on HBO and then we said goodnight to Willy at a little after 9:00.

I forgot to include the artichokes among the grilled vegetables, but that would have been too many grilled things it seems.

Bon Appetit