I ate yogurt, granola, milk, blueberries and ½ banana sliced for breakfast.
I called Robert Mueller and we decided to meet at Japanese Kitchen for lunch. As always he brought his splendidly trained dog Lothar. As always we ordered Chirashi lunches. I ordered the regular Chirashi for $20.00 and Robert ordered the Deluxe Chirashi fon $28.00. You get about 50 more stuff on the deluxe so it is a better deal if you can eat that much. The reason Robert orders it is because it comes with a mound of uni or sea urchin sex glands. Robert loves the stuff and says a prayer every time before it.
I enjoyed my Chirashi, which was the perfect amount of nine pieces of fish and seafood, a giant sea clam, a slice of octopus, a piece of BBQ’d unagi (sea eel), and a slice of salmon, hamachi or yellowtail, Aji tuna, red snapper, a cooked shrimp, and a braised slice of albacore tuna.
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| Robert’s two bowl stack of Deluxe Chirashi |
My single bowl of regular Chirashi
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| Robert’s scoop of green tea ice cream |
The Chirashi was lovely with the creamiest wasabi anywhere and the beast quality green pickled ginger.
Here is a picture of Robert and Lothar, one of the best trained dogs in New Mexico.
After lunch I went to my annual skin cancer checkup. Today was a great success, no major issues requiring surgery. I was thrilled.
After the appointment at around 3:00 I stopped at Albertson’s to look at their beef because it was advertised at 20% off. Unfortunately, the beef was marked double the price it has been on sale for a week ago, so I turned my attention to the butcher block fish section and immediately saw lovely large
fresh rainbow trout for $3.99/lb. I asked the assistant whether the trout were fresh and he looked at
me blankly and then asked the other assistant, who appeared to be his supervisor, “Are the trout fresh? The other attendant answered, “Yes.” I realized I had not garnered the information I sought and simply chose the two largest trout that together weighed 2.37 lb. Good sized trout that were each over twelve inches long from mouth to tail.
This made me remember another similar fish story from the days when I lived in Gothenburg. My Swedish was pretty rudimentary at the time. I went to a fish market located on the way home from work that was almost in view of the big central fish market by the Gota River and was attracted to a pile of one of the local fish called rodspotta or red spot, a small flat fish probably a member of the sole family. I asked, “Are the redspots fresh? The lady assistant looked at me as if I had meant to embarrass her and her fish as one of the fish flipped its tail into the air. My Swedish was so limited I did not know how to apologize or make a joke of my silly question and simply said, “I shall have that one.”
At Albertsons’ I realized the word “fresh” probably meant “not previously frozen” to the assistant, which had nothing to do with my interest in knowing how long the fish had been out of the water. Unfortunately, the trout had been gutted and cleaned, so none flipped their tails. But they had clear eyes, which I took as a sign they were freshly processed and figured that since Albertson’s was a Boise, Idaho based company that it probably had access to the freshest rainbow trout available at any Albuquerque supermarket. As dinner I realized I was correct, the trout were wonderfully fresh.
When I mentioned last night that I had bought a lot of zucchini, Suzette had responded, “If we had some corn we could make calabcitas, which I like.” So I went to the frozen food section and bought a 2 lb. bag of frozen corn kernels. While in the frozen food section I was attracted to the ice cream and soon found a ½ gallon of a Scoops brand of coffee ice cream with swirls of chocolate that looked
interesting and bought it.
I arrived home at 4:00 and turned on Mad Money and unloaded the groceries, so I missed Cramer’s opening soliloquy, but I could tell the Market had stalled today with a lack of movement either up or down.
Suzette came home around 5:00 and when she heard we had fresh rainbow trout, she said, “I love sautéed trout with cottage fries, so I will slice some potatoes.”
A little later after Suzette had sat down and had a cocktail, she sliced some of the Yukon Gold potatoes we recently bought and said, “These potatoes are beautiful.” Willy called at 6:30 and when I told him we planed to sauté fresh trout, he said, “I would love to join you for dinner.” I replied, “Great, Mayor Pete will be on Rachel Maddox and dinner will be ready then, Can you be here by 7:00.”
Willy thought a moment and said, “Sure.”
So we slowed down the prep by a few minutes and Suzette began sautéing the floured and seasoned trout at about 6:45 and began steaming the fresh organic zucchini at 6:50. I made quick tartar sauce by combining the PPI artichoke dipping sauce and the Louis/mignonette sauce I had made for the crab and adding 2 heaping T. of mayo, the juice of ½ lemon, and 1 heaping T. of Heinz sweet pickle relish. The tartare sauce had a rather sweet flavor. I guess I could have added more lemon juice but It was 7:00, Willy had arrived, and the fish was ready, so I put the mixing bowl of tartare sauce on the table and opened a bottle of Hungarian Gruner Vietliner named Floriana I had recently bought at Trader Joe’s for $6.99 as Suzette plated three plates with sautéed trout and cottage fries and the steamed whole small zucchini. I boned the trout and lay a filleted ½ trout on each plate to which
Suzette added a zucchini and cottage fried potatoes and I poured glasses of wine.
The Gruner Vietliner was a high acid wine with a crisp fruity flavor that cut through the grease used to sauté the potatoes and trout.
We loved dinner, especially Willy. And we had ½ of a trout and two zucchini left for a snack or lunch.
After Rachel’s interview Willy said goodbye and I ate a bowl of coffee swirl ice cream doused with rum and Kahlua. I was a little sad that I had not bought the ½ gallon of Blue Bell Pistachio Almond instead for $2.00 more, because this ice cream had small pastilles of coffee candy that I found a little unpleasant. Sometimes more is less. Like the tartare sauce that mixed three sauces created an unpleasant degree of complexity and sweetness. “You sometimes loose control of the intended goal of a dish or sauce when you burden it with too many ingredients” is something Suzette tells me when I keep adding ingredients to dishes or sauces. Tonight I lacked the time to taste the tartare sauce and adjust its sweetness so the complexity and sweetness of the catsup in the Louis sauce overwhelmed it.
This was a small problem in an otherwise brilliantly fresh, delicious meal that I could have corrected by simply not adding tartare sauce to the fresh trout. Next time I will stuff the fresh trout with parsley, dill thyme, and butter and bake it or steam it, a Swedish method of cooking fresh trout.
At least now I know that Albertsons has wonderfully fresh trout for $3.99/lb.
Bon Appetit
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