August 14, 2018 Lunch – Amore Dinner – Voodles Lasagna and Baked Asparagus

August 14, 2018 Lunch – Amore  Dinner – Voodles Lasagna and Baked Asparagus

I ate a bagel with Lax, cream cheese, onion slices, and capers with a cup of green tea for breakfast and then rode to Campbell Road.

Peter came at 12:00 to go to lunch.  We drove to Jay Rembe’s new Country Club Center on Central. The new restaurant was still not open, so we walked around to the walkway in the middle of the complex to Amore.  Peter ordered a Fresca pizza with fresh cherry tomatoes and mozzarella cheese for $9.00 and a dash of aged balsamic vinegar for $.50.  I ordered a Rustica Salad with pieces of house made mozzarella, Italian salami, artichoke hearts, and pitted Nicoise olives.  There was a large table that ordered ahead of us so we had to wait about twenty minutes but it was worth the wait. Peter really liked the both dishes and thanked me for suggesting Amore.  Amore makes thin crust Neapolitan pizzas and uses the freshest ingredients, so it is uniquely Italian in that sense and well worth a visit.

I had made a meat and mushroom spaghetti sauce last week that was so heavy it gave Suzette terrible nightmares.  So today I tried to fix the sauce.  I went to Lowe’s and bought two 24 oz. bottles of Spaghetti sauce for $3.00.

When I got home I added the two bottles of sauce to the spaghetti sauce with about 20 oz. of water, which doubled its volume and cooked the sauce on low heat starting at 3:30.

Then I diced four Roma tomatoes, a head of garlic (10 cloves), and sliced four mushrooms and sautéed them in olive oil and added eight basil leaves and five chive stalks finely sliced.  When the vegetables softened I added them to the sauce.

Suzette came home at 5:10, when I was starting to make voodles.

I removed the rough ends from two medium Mexican squash, quartered them and sliced each quarter into strips with a vegetable peeler.  We call the resulting strips of squash voodles and substitute them for pasta noodles.

Suzette then suggested we make a voodle lasagna.  After buttering and rubbing the bottom of a ceramic baking dish lay layers of  ingredients: voodles, spaghetti sauce, grated Jarlsberg, mushrooms, and sliced Vidalia onion,  spinach and purslane, then a layer of crema, then voodles, spaghetti sauce and finally slices of Pecorino- Romano cheese.

Here is the finished lasagna before it went into a 350 degree convection oven.

We had invited Aaron for dinner at 6:30, so we wanted a vegetable also and decided to bake asparagus in the oven.  Suzette snapped the ends off 18 stalks of asparagus and coated them with olive oil, salt, and pepper and placed them in a Pyrex baking dish and placed them in the oven at 6:20.

Suzette and I selected a bottle of 2014 Flor de Vino Chianti Classico Reserva from Tuscany, Italy that I recently bought at Trader Joe’s for $5.99.  This was a very good wine for the money. Wine of great complexity with light fruit and flower overtones, very drinkable.

Aaron arrived a bit after 6:30 and we immediately sat down and planned the trip.  I asked if Aaron wanted bread and when he said yes, I wrapped the ½ loaf of PPI multigrain bread In aluminum foil and placed it in the oven.

Finally, a little after 7:00 I suggested we eat.  When we took the lasagna out of the oven, it was perfectly cooked and the bread was heated, but still moist.  But the asparagus had wilted and given up most of their moisture.  They were not tough, just not tender and plump.

We all agreed that the wine was really good, especially for $5.99.  Also, we liked the vegetable heavy lasagna, because the vegetables are fresh and abundant.  We garnished the dish with pieces of shaved Reggiano-Romano cheese.

We also came up with a trip itinerary that combined tasting our Le Dans and Nori wines as they are being bottled along with visits to famous tourist spots in Romania, like the Danube Delta at the Black Sea and the Transylvanian Mountains in the north.

Aaron left at around 8:30 and we decided to eat the last of the Peach and cherry clafoutis.  Here is a picture of the last piece.

There is a fresh blueberry and peach clafoutis and I will make a two fig Clafoutis for the Neighborhood party on Friday evening.

We went to bed at 10:00.

Bon Appetit