November 9, 2018 Lunch – Vietnamese Miso Noodle Soup with Salmon and mixed Vegetables. Dinner – Fish Baked in Foil with Spaghetti

November 9, 2018 Lunch – Vietnamese Miso Noodle Soup with Salmon and mixed Vegetables. Dinner – Fish Baked in Foil with Spaghetti

Today’s dishes illustrate another interesting aspect of our menu selection process.  As we accumulate ingredients, we often combine PPI ingredients with fresh ingredients to create new dishes.

Lunch and dinner dishes are both examples of this sort of combination.

I also realize I have been cooking this way for much of my adult life. When I lived alone in Fort Worth I cooked a pot of rice and stir fried meat and vegetables daily and added new meats and vegetables or egg to make a rice and egg gongee/egg foo young or revised stir fry dish successively almost every day.

Today was a continuation of that tradition.  For lunch I started by heating ¾ of a Two quart pot of water to which I added a pho seasoning cube, a teaspoon of dehydrated dashi, and three types of dried noodles (mung bean thread, wheat, and rice sticks.  I then diced and added to the pot 3 oz. of red onion, 3 sliced baby portobello mushrooms, a heaping T. of red miso, 1 T. of Chinese cooking wine, and 1 tsp. of sesame oil.

I then added about 2 cups of PPI stir fried salmon and mixed vegetables, mainly sliced water chestnuts and bok Choy.  I then sliced the remaining fresh stalk of bok Choy, separating the heavier white stalk sections from the green leaf sections and added the white sections.  After about 20 minutes of simmering I added the green bok Choy leaf sections.  I did not find any green onions, so could not add any sliced green onion, as usual, but the absence of green onion slices did not diminish the flavor of the broth.  The secret is to add enough flavoring components to hide any flavor of water.

The new boiler expert came at 3:00 to check the boiler and I left him to attend a mandatory one hour seminar on trust fund accounting at the Bar Center until 4:30.

After the seminar I drove to Sprouts at San Mateo at Academy and bought avocados (2 for $.99), Brussels Sprouts for $.99/lb., two ½ lb. fresh Rockfish filets for $7.99/lb., a gallon of milk, and a ½ lb. chunk of Boarshead liverwurst.

Suzette was home when I arrived.  When I suggested making fish wrapped in foil, she suggested, I will make an Italian version using the PPI spaghetti meat and mushroom sauce and we can serve it over PPI spaghetti. And that is what she did.  She cut each filet in half and stacked both halves and added the PPI spaghetti sauce and some Chianti wine and sealed each mound of food within two pieces of aluminum foil crimped at the edges to form a package and grilled the two packages on the grill.  I diced about six or seven cooked stalks of asparagus and threw them into the freezer bag with the stored spaghetti.

We watched the news and in about twenty minutes after Brooks and Shields’ discourse on the events of the week, she fetched the packets from the grill,  heated the PPI spaghetti and divided it into two pasta bowls.  She then opened each packet and placed it on the spaghetti and grated fresh Romano-Pecorino cheese on top.

 

It turned out that the two filets with the addition of the spaghetti sauce and spaghetti created larger portions than we could eat, so we now have a bowl of PPI baked fish in spaghetti sauce and spaghetti.  So it goes.

I brought in the three loaves of bread I had bought at Pastian’s Bakery earlier in the week for $.54
each, a whole wheat baguette, a loaf of of dark whole wheat and a light Jewish rye.


After dinner a sliced and toasted slices of the baguette and lay slices of old Brie cheese on them and ate a cheese course with the last sips of chianti.  We drank one of the three bottles of Gaetano d’ Aquino Chianti Riserva I bought for $5.99 each at Trader Joe’s this week for dinner.  It is a lovely bottle of wine for the price that went well with this fishy spaghetti dinner and even better with the Brie.






After dinner I indulged myself and drank the last sip of grappa of Brunello, with a cup of chai, and several pieces of Halloween candy.  By 9:00 I was tired of watching the news and crawled into bed and went to sleep beside Suzette, who was watching a movie called “New Year’s Eve”.

It appears that as I increase my level of exercise, my appetite increases.

I must be on the mend.

Bon Salud and Appetit