March 20, 2018 Lunch –Asian Pear. Dinner – Stir Fried shrimp with Vegetables

Tropical fruit salad, yogurt, and granola for breakfast. The fruit salad continues to generate enough liquid to wet the granola without the addition of milk.

I met Willy and friends at Asian Pear for lunch.  I love Asian Pear.  You order your lunch and after we took  it to a table the owner brought us small bowls of pickled cucumbers and Kimchi and another person brought us a plate of slices of vegetable pancakes doused with red chili sauce and bowls of egg drop soup.  I loved the extra food items and personal service.  My plate of BBQ chicken with salad and Korean noodles tossed in soy sauce was wonderful, also.  I don’t know how the noodles are cooked so they are tender and slightly gelatinous.

Asian Pear and Amerasia are my favorite restaurants in downtown Albuquerque.

After lunch I walked through the Border Exhibit at 516 Central.  There were several pieces that caught my eye, including a wicker chair with a frame made in the shape of Mexico.

I then drove to Costco and bought a sockeye salmon filet for $8.49/lb. when I returned home a brochure delivered in the mail while I was at lunch Disclosed that Atlantic farm raised salmon would go on sale for $6.99 at Sprouts starting tomorrow.  Looks like Gravad Lax is going to be made really soon.

 I napped for an hour and at 5:00 rode to Rio Bravo and back.

Suzette was home when I returned.  We discussed dinner and decided that I would make stir fried shrimp and vegetables tonight and she would make seared salmon with pesto tomorrow evening.  She wanted to use sorrel from our garden. She found a great recipe for salmon with sorrel pesto with pistachio nuts.

Salmon with sorrel and pistachio pesto

Four 6-ounce filets of salmon, skin-on
1 bunch sorrel (about 7 ounces)
1/2 cup shelled pistachios
1 small clove garlic, peeled
3/4 cup plus 1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
Kosher salt

Directions

Preheat a large heavy-bottomed skillet over low heat while you prepare the pesto. Remove the salmon from refrigerator to come to room temperature.

Separate the sorrel stems from the leaves, and then discard the stems (especially if it's later in the sorrel season, when the stems are fibrous and tough). You should have about 4 packed cups of sorrelleaves.

Combine the pistachios and garlic in the bowl of a food processor and pulse until the mixture is the consistency of coarse sand. Add the sorrel and pulse until all of the leaves are chopped and incorporated into the nuts. With the machine running, slowly add up to 3/4 cup of olive oil until the mixture is smooth. Season with about 1 1/4 teaspoons salt. Spoon about 2 heaping tablespoons of pesto on the bottom of each plate. Transfer the remaining pesto to a bowl and cover the surface with plastic wrap to prevent it from turning brown. For best use, keep in the refrigerator up to 3 days.

While Suzette made the pesto, I started slicing ½ yellow onion, two medium zucchini, five or six mushrooms, five or six Napa cabbage leaves, and diced six or seven cloves of garlic and four slices of ginger.

I also sliced a carrot and a stalk of celery and opened a 15 oz. can of bamboo shoot strips and a 7 ½ oz. can of sliced water chestnuts.

I heated my wok and added 2 T. of peanut oil and 1 tsp. of sesame oil to the wok.  Then I added the chopped garlic and ginger.  After a minute I added the hard vegetables(the onion, zucchini, and Napa cabbage stalk portion).  I stir fried these ingredients for about ten minutes until they softened.  While the ingredients cooked a made a bowl Oscar seasoning sauce with 3or 4 T. of Chinese rice cooking wine, 1 ½ T. of white soy, and 1 T. of cornstarch to which I added the 11 cooked shrimp that I had cut in halves.

I then added the cans of bamboo shoot strips and the sliced water chestnuts, carrot, and celery and stirred them into the ingredients.  After another couple of minutes I added the sliced Napa cabbage leaves and mushrooms and turned the ingredients in the wok to distribute the heat evenly to all vegetables.  After I thought the vegetables were cooked I added the seasoning sauce to thicken the dish.  The cornstarch thickened the sauce too much, so I added about ¼ cup of water, which  was a little too much liquid because the sauce became runny.  I cooked the dish a bit and the sauce thickened a bit but then the vegetables began yielding liquid, so I served the dish.

I drank green tea and a Suzette drank Chateau de Nages white wine.

After dinner I drank more hot green tea and ate some of the chocolate laced halvah I bought at Café Istanbul.

Bon Appetit