I ate a whole wheat bagel with cream cheese, Lax, red onion and capers for breakfast and I swear my previously aching joints felt better afterward; perhaps from the bit of fish oil.
At 10:00 I took my bike to the Bike Coop to be repaired from from the fall on a Sunday that snapped the wire to the derailleur gears.
Then I drove the Prius to San Mateo and Leas Coal to be inspected for emission control devices. Since it was after 11:00 and I was next door to Vietnam 2000, which makes my favorite Vietnam egg rolls, I decided to stop in for lunch. I ordered my favorite summer time lunch, No. 21, which is Bun Cha Gio plus grilled Pork. This a large bowl of fresh chopped lettuce, cucumber, mung bean sprouts, Oriental basil and cilantro on the bottom. Then freshly cooked warm rice vermicelli on top of it and finally on the top two fried egg rolls and a pile of grilled, marinated slices of pork served with a small bowl of Vietnamese fish sauce (fish sauce, sugar and a bit of water with pickled carrot and daikon and chili).
Today for some reason it was particularly difficult to get a grasp of the long vermicelli noodles so after lunch I drove home with a box filled with PPI bun.
I worked for a while until I checked the mail and saw a check that needed to be deposited, so I drove to the bank and on my return at about 4:00 I stopped in at DSG Gallery to invite John and Nancy to dinner. They were sitting with John’s sister, Marilyn O’Leary and a young woman she had met at Bluegrass camp recently drinking Oolong tea. John invited me to sit and have a cup, so I did, which led to a two hour conversation, viewing their art, and Trying some of John’s marijuana products, now that he has a grower’s license. I particularly liked the marijuana salve that I rubbed on my sore collar bone that calmed the pain significantly.
Finally, a bit before 6:00 I went home but Suzette was still not home. I checked the recipe for
Scallops Provençal in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and decided we had all the ingredients. When Suzette arrived a few minutes later she was tired and did not want to cook, so I started prepping the recipe by dicing ½ onion, 1 large shallot, three small cloves of garlic and an about 1 lb. Mexican squash. I also clean the ends off about 3 oz. of white beech mushrooms and went to the garden and picked five or six stalks of thyme and fetched the container of peeled shrimp and scallops from the fridge in the garage.
Here is the recipe:
I put about 1 cup of flour dusted with salt and white pepper in a freezer bag and spooned about 1 lb. of scallops and shrimp into the bag of flour and shuck the bag to dust the shrimp and scallops.
At this point Suzette joined me in the kitchen. She dumped the dusted shrimp and scallops into a food colander and shuck it to remove all the excess flour. Then we sautéed the onion, shallot, squash, and garlic mixture in the sauté pan we had used last night for the Roasted Pork Tapa dish with the addition of 2 T. of butter and 1 T. of olive oil. When the vegetable mixture began to soften, I added the mushrooms and cooked the entire mixture another five minutes. In the removed the vegetables and Suzette took over.
She added a bit more butter and then the dusted scallops and shrimp and then the thyme and 1/2 bay leaf and then 2/3 cup dry rose wine and about 1/2 cup lobster stock to make a cream sauce. The sauce thickened so I added another 1/3 cup of rose wine and we added about 1/3 cup more lobster broth. Finally, the sauce smoothed and stopped clotting, so we returned the vegetable mixture to the sauté pan and mixed and heated the dish for a couple of minutes to mix the ingredients. Suzette served ladles full of the dish into each of two pasta bowls and I poured glasses of 2016 Ferme Julien rose and we took our dinners to the table under the gazebo where we relaxed from our day’s activities and ate and drank in the cool evening air.
The sautéed shrimp and scallops in the finished sauce
Suzette said, “Yes, but I need some red wine.” I did not wish to get up, so I told her she could find an open bottle of red Montebello reserva Rioja in the wine rack. Instead Suzette opened a bottle of Marques de Riscal red Rioja Reserva. So we ate pieces of cheese and sipped red wine for a finish to dinner..
Since we now had two open bottles of red Rioja we decided to make elk burgers tomorrow for dinner. I fetched the 1 lb. box of ground elk meat I bought last week at Sprouts for $9.49 from the garage freezer before retiring for the night.
Bon Appetit
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