April 7, 2019 Lunch – Casarecce Pasta with eggplant and zucchini in a meat and mushroom spaghetti sauce. Dinner – Dungeness Crab Salad and Artichoke

At 9:00 I toasted a plain bagel sliced into three slices. I spread a thick layer of Neufchâtel cream cheese and the lay slices of Gravad Lax on the one for Suzette and a slice of red onion and Lax on mine and dotted mine with capers.

I drank hot lime water with mine.

I worked on taxes in the morning.

Since I wanted to ride today, at 11:15 I reheated a bowl of Casarecce Pasta with eggplant and zucchini in a meat and mushroom spaghetti sauce and drank a glass of Chateauneuf Du Pape with it.

I rode ten miles to Montano for the first time still year in a rather slow 1 hour and fifteen minutes, but I did not experience and muscle fatigue, just normal soreness.

I rested until Suzette came home at 5:00.  Willy called and came by and he and Suzette emptied the 20 bags of top soil from their bags into the gardens.  I watched and helped Suzette reconnect the sprinklers in the beds.

I then picked four sprigs of dill and took it to the kitchen at 6:00.  I chopped the dill finely and added it to the existing artichoke mayonnaise dipping sauce plus the juice of ¼ lemon and a couple more T. of mayo.

 

The Russian Dressing is on the right

Russian Dressing

I then made a dressing for the crab salad.  We were lucky to have saved the sauce ingredients from Friday night’s Noisette sauce: a diced peeled lemon, capers, minced parsley and shallot, white wine, white wine vinegar and butter.

To this base I added the juice of 1/3 lemon, ½ cup mayonnaise, three minced sprigs of tarragon, and 1/3 cup PPI cocktail sauce (catsup, horseradish and Lemon.

When Willy and Suzette returned around 6:20 Willy watched a BBC movie with Vigo Mortensen about the Russian mafia in London. I poured out the last of the Chateauneuf du Pape and handed it to
him.

I then made the blueberry Clafoutis.  I scalded two cups of heavy cream combined with 1 cup of regular milk.  I measured 7 T. of flour and 10 T. of powdered sugar into a mixing bowl to which I added three whisked eggs and the three cups of scalded milk that had cooled a bit and 20oz. of fresh blueberries.  I put the mixture into a buttered and sugared ceramic baking dish and baked the Clafoutis for 50 minutes in a 350 degree convection oven while we ate dinner.  I then turned of the
temperature but left the Clafoutis in the oven while we finished dinner.

Crab Salad

While was making the clafoutis Suzette snapped and steamed a handful of asparagus and chopped the
steamed stalks into 1 inch lengths and diced several Persian cucumbers and two small avocados and
mixed those three ingredients with chopped red leaf lettuce to make a chopped vegetable salad.

I fetched the cooked artichoke and the chilled bottle of Gruet Chenin Blanc from the fridge and poured three glasses of wine.

Willy fetched the PPIs from our meal yesterday at Thai Heritage from the garage fridge and heated himself a plate filled with some of the shrimp Pad Thai, the green curry chicken, and the tempura vegetables.

We took everything out to the patio table near the blooming wisteria that smelled delightful.  Suzette
sat on the east side of the table and kept commenting on the brilliance of the sunset as it progressed toward a golden pink that finally seemed to consume the entire atmosphere around us.  We finished
dinner shortly after the sun set and the temperature began to drop, so we retreated into the house.

After we retreated into the house we watched TV. At 9:00 we turned on the new Masterpiece Theater Mystery series, “The Unforgotten” and watched what I assume was the first episode as it introduced plot and character after plot and character until 10:00.

I served bowls of the still warm clafoutis.  Suzette took a snifter of cognac and I took a snifter of Calvados we brought back from our 2003 trip to France that we bought in a wine shop in St. Emillon.  It only seemed to have improved with age.  There was about ¼ of the bottle left.  I remember the first time I sipped a similarly old aged Calvados.  It was on Suzette and my first trip together to France in 1998, I think.  Candice had booked our itinerary and we had selected several hoteles du silence. The first one we stayed in was in a wood on the north side of the Marne Valley near Rheims.  We enjoyed a fabulous meal in the hotel’s dining room (I recall that my appetizer was a thick slice of foie gras terrine with a whole peach baked into it) and decided to splurge and end our meal  by sharing a glass of Calvados.  Our waiter brought out an ancient double magnum bottle sitting on its own cart in a wooden holder that had been sealed in wax similar to the bottle tonight but much older and full of cobwebs.  When our waiter poured our drink into the snifter from the large bottle there remained less
than a drink’s worth of Calvados in the bottle, so he smiled and said something in French and poured the rest of the bottle into our snifter.  That was the first time I had aged Calvados.  Tonight’s dark nutty, slightly sweet, yet bracing sip of calvados that must be at least thirty years old reminded me of that calvados. And we have ¼ of the bottle left.

The Clafoutis also was a surprise. When I spooned some of it into bowls, its texture was moist, almost wet.  I wonder if letting it cool in the oven helped achieve that delicious moist texture.

Willy left at 10:00 and we went to bed.

It was a great day.

As I write this a bit after 3:00 a.m. I feel no pain in my legs.  I achieved a rhythm as I rode that I recall having before my accident last May.  Things are definitely getting better, but I still must resist the urge to escalate my exercise too rapidly.

Bon Appetit