Open Face Sandwiches, Dinner - Savoy Cabbage Wrapped Cod filets with a Sugar Snap PeaSalad and Caprese Salad
This was a special food that just got better and better.
We woke at 7:00 and ate a breakfast of fried eggs, cottage fried Potatoes, and a sautéed Smoked Pork Chop.
We then went to the Farmer’s Market, where we bought 6 tomato plants and two zucchini plants and a four pack of pimiento plants. Fresh produce is starting to arrive in abundance and we bought a head of Savoy Cabbage, five or six tomatoes, tender white salad turnips, and a pint of sugar snap peas. We stopped at a grower of beans in Moriarty and ended up buying three bags of beans. What fun to see so much lovely fresh locally grown produce.
Then Suzette went to work and I went back to bed and slept until 11:30. I called Willy and invited him to watch the EUFA Championship between Real Madrid and Liverpool at 12:3 and if he would
join us for BBQ ribs, corn, and beans tomorrow and he said yes, so I went to Sprouts and bought two
slabs of ribs for $1.99/lb. plus ½ lb. of Liverwurst, Vidalia onions at $.69/lb., and asparagus for $1.98/lb.
I got home at 12:50 at minute 20 in the game. Willy was not hungry, so I made Danish style open face sandwiches for lunch; two with buttered bread, liverwurst, cucumber slices and pickled beet cubes and another with sour cream, a red onion slice, and pickled herring of thin slices of Cloud Cliff’s dense whole wheat bread. I drank a Kirtland ale with the sandwiches and told Willy about eating similar lunches every day when I worked at The Hand I Hand Insurance Company at 2 Holmans Kanal in Copenhagen in 1968. I had a view of the Holmans Church and the moat and walls of Christianborg Castle from the window of the office where I worked.
The company provided sandwiches and beers for it employees in a lunch room in the building. Every day you would notify the kitchen how many sandwiches you wanted. There were always a maximum of 8 different sandwiches and they were always the same 8. I recall liverpaste with cucumber, sliced beef with fried onions, shrimp in cream sauce, vegetables in Italian Salad, some other meat with pickled beet slices, and probably several with herring or smoked fish, all made on the flat squares of dense Danish rye bread.
My effort to replicate the liverpaste with cucumber and herring with red onion sandwiches impressed me as being pretty accurate to what was served in Copenhagen.
Suzette came home a bit after 2:30 when the game ended and lay down for a nap.
When Willy left a bit before 3:00 I joined her and napped until a bit after 5:00.
When I awoke Suzette was up and in the kitchen. She had not eaten lunch, so, around 5:30 we decided to cook dinner. Suzette’s idea was to use the fresh peas to test the warm shredded pea/bean salad, to make a caprese salad with the tomatoes, and make a northern style fish entrée by wrapping the cod in a cabbage leaf and cooking it in the steamer oven with the warm sugar I pulled down the Swedish cookbook and the More contemporary Kitchen of Light Cookbook, but before I opened them she had found a recipe on the Internet by searching cabbage wrapped fish. That is the way our modern age works, books are becoming superfluous.
The recipe was easy. Dipping Savoy cabbage leaves in hot water to soften them, removing the central spine to make them tender and more pliable. Placing a square of fresh cod on the leaf topped with a pad of butter. Sprinkling the fish with salt, white pepper, lemon juice, and some fresh thyme. Then wrapping the cabbage leaf around the cod to make a packet and securing the packet with a long chive stalk tied like a ribbon around a package.
I went to the garden for fresh thyme and long chive stalks for that recipe.
Here are pictures of that process.
Shredded pea salad
Suzette wanted to use the pint of sugar snap peas to test the shredded bean salad she has included in the June 23 gourmet dinner at the Center, so while she constructed the fish packets and made the buttermilk dressing for the shredded sugar snap peas, I removed the strings along each side of each pea and shredded each into threads lengthwise with a knife. Here is the result.
Suzette then sautéed the shredded peas in a skillet with a bit of olive oil. Here is a picture of the lightly sautéed pea threads.
Here is the recipe for the dressing
Caprese Salad
Suzette sliced three different types of tomato and picked leaves from the new basil plant she bought. I found the mozzarella cheese in the bottom of the cheese drawer but it was several months old and no
longer edible, so I fetched the last bit of the fig goat cheese log we bought at Costco sliced it into seven slices. I also fetched a red onion and sliced seven or eight thin slices of red onion. We the assembled the Caprese on each plate with alternating overlapping layers of tomato, basil leaf, red onion slice and goat cheese slice. Here is the picture of the finished salad. We decided to drizzle the light buttermilk dressing on the Caprese instead of making a dark vinegary balsamic dressing.
Suzette read the steaming oven manual and found the settings for the fish dish which was 21 minutes on the middle of the three racks and steam/cooked the five packets.
While the fish was cooking, I opened a bottle of French Presidente white wine that was 50%
Grenache and 50% Viognier and poured glasses of it.
When the fish was cooked Suzette plated the plates with two packets of fish and shredded peas and drizzled both salads with butter milk dressing and we carried our plates and glasses to the table under the gazebo in the garden.
The food was fantastic, but we both agreed the wine was lacking, overly acidic with a harsh acidic aftertaste; undrinkable with this supremely light meal. So I fetched glasses and the bottle of 2016 Hungarian Gruner Vetliner I had bought at Trader Joe’s for $5.99 or $6.99 earlier this week. The Gruner Vetliner was light and refreshing without any acidity, perfect for the meal.
So we had done it. We had made a new menu with the freshest ingredients and founda new wine that complemented the meal. This was the closest we had come to a perfect meal in a long time and we complimented ourselves. We could not think of any place we could find such a meal other than some of the very high end restaurants and spas in California. Suzette thought it was a $150 meal. I did not ask if that was, per person, but suspect it was.
Needless to say it was our celebration of Memorial Day weekend, shopping for the freshest best quality ingredients at the Farmers’ Market and combining those with fresh herbs from our garden and discovering a new wine we liked that enhanced the food flavors.
I must note that the cod was among the best I have ever tasted with its lemony, buttery, thyme flavors and its flakes that fell apart at the touch of a fork. We ate forkfuls of succulent cabbage, chive, thyme, and fish as we complimented ourselves. The salads were also superb. This was a truly memorable meal and readily repeatable in season when the ingredients are available.
After dinner we watched recent John Oliver and Bill Maher shows and sipped a small sniffer of rum and a cognac and ate a piece of chocolate to end the meal. We went to bed happy a little before 11:00.
Bon Appetit
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