Again I ate Tropical fruit salad with granola and yogurt for breakfast.
Max came at 11:00 and we worked for a while and then went to lunch at Garcia’s Kitchen on Central. Max ordered a Sopapilla stuffed with sausage with papas fritas covered completely with green chili. I ordered a Thursday weekly special, beef enchiladas with red chili, extra onions and double beans. I did not like that instead of flavored ground beef Garcia’s used taco meat, flaccid and whiteish but with good flavor.
The dish featured a stack of three flat blue corn tortillas, with meat, chili, and cheese between each layer of tortilla with lots of chopped onion and red chili on top, which is my favorite form of enchiladas. The retried beans were creamy and delicious and I loved the extra onions. The weekly specials are $7.99. I may go back tomorrow for the chili Relleno plate.
After lunch we returned to my house and attended a hearing regarding Max’s house telephonically.
Max is lucky. It looks like he has been granted a modification of his note that will reduce his note balance by 30% and reduce his monthly payment and dismiss the foreclosure of his house.
After Max left I lay down for an hour nap and at 3:30 I walked with Suzette to the country club and then to Kit Carson Park and then back home. When we arrived at 3:30 my next client was waiting.
I handled his case, which is a process of trying to settle two lawsuits until 5:30, and yielded a fee.
Luke and Suzette has already started cooking when I Joined them in the kitchen. Suzette has already started making whipped sweet potatoes and had combined and sautéed the PPI rice and cauliflower Couscous with chopped asparagus and green peas.
I located the Scallops Provençal recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking and we decided to try a Tavel, so I placed a bottle in the freezer to chill.
I chopped 1/3 cup of yellow onion, 1 clove of garlic, and 1 green onion.
Suzette had sliced the scallops in half in horizontal slices and tossed them in flour to coat them.. She then sautéed the onion, garlic and green onion in olive oil and butter and added butter and heated it to almost brown and quickly sautéed the scallops. I went to the garden and picked six or seven thyme stalks. When I returned I removed the leaves from the thyme stalks to yield about ½ tsp of fresh thyme. Suzette then added 2/3 cup of white wine and the thyme leaves and cooked the sauce a couple of minutes to integrate flavors and slightly thicken the sauce as the wine and flour blended. I love preparing this dish because the flour, butter, and wine combine instantly into a rudimentary white sauce as the dish is constructed which makes it a very simple dish to cook and a magical result as the ingredients for the white sauce are combined as part of the cooking process. God Bless Julia Child. I don’t know where she found this recipe, but I do know that Simone Beck owned a house and compound in Provence where Julia built a house because mother took a group of women there for cooking classes with Simone Beck, who mother knew in the 70’s.
Willy arrived at 7:00 just as he promised and as Suzette was thickening the scallop sauce and
the dish was ready to serve. We do not complete the last step, which is to bake the scallops in scallop shells.
Instead I lay seven or eight spinach leaves in the bottom of each pasta bowl for a bit of green vegetable and Suzette plated the dishes by laying a scoop of rice next to a scoop of whipped sweet potato, and laying a scoop of scallops next to the sweet potatoes; a very colorful arrangement.
The dish after the scallops were added
I opened the bottle of 2017 Reserves de Chastelles Tavel that I bought at Trader Joe’s. This deeply pink colored wine is blended from the three main grapes in the Southern Rhone Valley. It is 60% Grenache, 25% Cinsault, and 15% Syrah. As I recall Tavel is located on the West Bank of the Rhone
across from Chateauneuf Du Pape. It produces mostly strong well structured very dry roses and is designated Appellation Tavel Controlee. There is none of the floral bouquet of Provençal roses in Tavel. The back label recommends it be drunk with white meats and soft cheeses. Without having
read the label after dinner I toasted and buttered three slices of French baguette and garnished them with slices of French Brie and drank the rest of the Tavel with bites of soft cheese.
With Willy and Luke joined for dinner, there was a lively conversation about current culture and Luke made us watch a TED talk by a spiritually oriented woman who has recently announced her candidacy for president in 2020. She was very dynamic and spoke amazing common sense about how we should orient our perception toward a humanistic sustainable orientation for the good for all, which is the basic American creed rather than a capitalistic orientation which favors the few over the many. I hope she gets some traction. We need more politicians espousing those ideals, especially now, because it counters the basic assumptions driving Trump’s political agenda of cronyism.
Luke in particular, complimented the meal, by saying “We eat really good food in this house.”
Everyone agreed.
Suzette ate a bowl of vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce for dessert, while I had the before mentioned cheese course after dinner.
Luke and Willy went to work out at a Willy’s gym after dinner. Suzette and I watched the news and Seattle beat Green Bay in a close football game.
At 9:30 we went to bed.
I slept until 4:30 when I awakened and finished this blog.
I highly recommend this dish with a dry Tavel.
Bon Appetit
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