January 17, 2018. If it is Wednesday, it is a food shopping day. Lunch – Salad, Dinner – Pork, Apple, and Onion Tapa and Catalan Spinach

January 17, 2018. If it is Wednesday, it is a food shopping day.  Lunch – Salad, Dinner – Pork, Apple, and Onion Tapa and Catalan Spinach

Monday was a holiday, so trash day and food shopping day came perceptively early in the work week today.

It started with the usual, yogurt, granola, milk, and blueberries.

Then a trip to review and copy a file at the Courthouse.  Then a salad of radishes, roast chicken, avocado, a sliced pickled egg, an artichoke heart, and diced Manchego cheese  dressed with PPI artichoke sauce diluted with Spanish olive oil into a dressing.  I also toasted a slice of rye bread and melted slices of Manchego cheese onto it. After lunch I thawed two boneless pork steaks.

The most exciting thing that happened today was a meeting with an old friend and client, Josef, at 2:00, who has a case he needs representation on.  He is a master electrician and after our meeting, he installed the new LED fixture I bought at IKEA in my office that replaces the old broken halogen fixture.  I am thrilled to be able to light most of the art in my office again and like the softer cooler LED lights.

When Josefo left at 4:30 I went to the post office and then to El Super for the Wednesday produce specials.  I bought four ears of white gourmet corn, 2 or 3 lb. of yellow onions, a bunch each of parsley, cilantro, and green onions, a bunch of bananas, a pineapple, 4 Pasilla chilies, 5 or 6 Mexican squash, a container of yogurt, and a lb. of Ocean pollock for $16.00.

I returned home at 5:30 and after unloading went to meditate from 6:00 until 7:00.

When I returned Suzette and I made one of our favorite Spanish tapa dinners, Roast Pork with Apples and Catalan Spinach.

Here are the recipes from Jose Andres’ Tapas Cookbook:

I sliced 1 ½ Gala apples and one large yellow onion, which Suzette sautéed in Spanish olive oil in a copper sauté pan until tender.  I then cut each of the 2 pork steaks into four pieces and went to the garden and picked a handful of fresh oregano (oregano, sage, sometime thyme, and Rosemary are the herbs that survive in our winters).

Suzette then added five or six stalks of oregano to the pan and roasted the pan in the oven for about 20 minutes until the pork was cooked.

Then she removed the pieces of pork and she deglazed the pan with ½ cup of chicken stock and 2 T. of cognac and returned the pork to the pan and turned them to coat them with the light sauce.

While the pork dish was cooking I fetched the new bag of spinach from the garage and de-stemmed and washed and spun 10 oz., while Suzette fetched the black raisins and piñon nuts and diced a Fuji apple.

She then sautéed the apple, raisins, and piñon in a large sauté pan and when the nuts started to turn golden added the spinach and covered the pan to steam and cook the spinach.

Before going to meditate I put a bottle of  2015 La Granja Spanish Rose into the fridge to chill
(Trader Joe’s $4.99, good bottle of rose’ for a great price)

When dinner was ready I poured glasses of rose’ and we each filled our plates from the warm pans on the stove.  Here are pictures of the food in the pans.

The Catalan Spinach

Not to let the day’s food remain entirely healthy, I opened and ate several squares of Trader Joe’s dark chocolate with almonds with a cup of Earl Grey tea and then a Swedish pistachio flavored marzipan and chocolate dessert I bought at IKEA when I bought the light fixture with another cup of tea to celebrate my new Swedish lighting fixture.

Bon Appetit