September 29, 2019 Lunch – Dungeness crab with Vegetables and Bob’s Special Crab Sauce. Dinner – Teriyaki Salmon with Stir Fried Baby bok Choy and beech Mushrooms and Brown Rice

September 29, 2019 Lunch – Dungeness crab with Vegetables and Bob’s Special Crab Sauce. Dinner – Teriyaki Salmon with Stir Fried Baby bok Choy and beech Mushrooms and Brown Rice

Today’s meals illustrate that if you mess up one dish in a meal it can ruin the entire meal no matter how wonderful the other dishes are.

I toasted a bagel for breakfast and smeared cream cheese on it and garnished it with thin slices of red onion and bits of white fish and drank green tea with it as I watched the Sunday morning shows.

Suzette and I drove to Home Depot and bought 4 cycle fuel and  2 bags of potting soil.

When we returned home we discovered the tiller required 2 cycle fuel, so Suzette went to Lowe’s for that and I started pulling weeds out of one of our four raised beds.

Then we discovered that the mini-tiller did not start.  So, Suzette transplanted herbs from out garden into the two large pots she had bought for Willy’s new apartment deck.

By 1:30 we were tired and hungry, so we stopped working and I rested a bit while Suzette showered.  I made teriyaki sauce by heating 1/3 cup each of soy sauce, Aji Mirin, and sake plus 1 T. of sugar until the sugar melted.  When the teriyaki sauce cooled, suzette placed it and the salmon filet in a gallon freezer bag to marinate in the fridge.

Bob’s Special Crab Sauce.

This is a combination of a French mignonette sauce and an American tartare and cocktail sauce.

I finely minced 1 1/2 T. of shallot and added to it juice of ½ lemon and 1 tsp. of chopped capers and a bit of the caper liquid and let that sit for about ½ hour to let the lemon juice cook the shallot.

While it sat I sliced ½ cucumber, four radishes, a tomato and Suzette boiled three eggs and steamed about fifteen stalks of asparagus..

We arranged two sliced eggs, the steamed asparagus, the sliced radishes, the sliced tomato, ¼ of a large avocado sliced, and the slices of the ½ cucumber on a large platter.

Then i finished the sauce by adding 2/3 cup of prepared mayonnaise, 2 tsp. of horseradish, and 1 T. of catsup and whisked the sauce until smooth. I refrigerated the sauce until the crab was cleaned and the Gruet Rose Sauvage was fetched from the fridge and iced in an ice bucket.

Suzette had thawed the crab in the fridge overnight in a bowl to catch the melting ice water.  I removed the shell covering the body and the innards and washed away everything except the meat, inner shell structure and claws and put it on a tray.

We took everything to the patio table and ate a lovely slow late lunch as we broke off each claw, removed the meat from each and dipped it into the sauce with pieces of vegetable and sipped Sauvage.

Sauvage is one of my favorite Gruet produces because it has the greatest taste of Pinot Noir and the greatest cleanest of any wines because there is no second dosage of sugar added.  It is just the fermented grapes, as far as I know. Therefore, it does not intrude its flavor very far into the taste of the meal.  For something like crab or oysters that had a very mild flavor that is important for me.



Suzette rested after lunch and I watched TV.

Willy called a said he would join us for dinner and asked me to prepare brown rice.  I was a bit lazy and decided to use the PPI Miso Soup as a base to give the rice some flavor and not need to dirty another pot, so I added 3 cups of water to the soup and heated it and added a cup of rice and cooked it 45 minutes.  Something was wrong, because there was still lots of liquid at the end of 45 minutes.  Suzette wanted to grill the salmon. Willy suggested pouring off part of the liquid, which I did.

The result was a thick rice porridge, like a Chinese or Japanese breakfast, which was delicious but not what we wanted.

Suzette over-cooked the salmon a bit and it was raw in the center.

Stir Fried Baby Bok Choy

I separated the thick white stalks from the green leaves and cut all into bite sized pieces on five large Baby Bok Choy.  I then cut the ends off a package full of white beech Mushrooms and put them in the white heavy ingredients bowl.  Then I diced about 1 ½ T. of fresh ginger root and three cloves of garlic.

I sautéed the heavy white parts, ginger, garlic, and mushrooms and then added the tender leaves with some Chinese cooking wine and covered the wok to steam them.  They became very soft.

So we ended up with a rather disappointing meal of over and undercooked salmon, stir fried Baby Bok choy, and Japanese or Cinese rice porridge.

I putout the Japanese pickled vegetables and we served a bottle of Gruet Chenin blanc thar was lovely, and lifted our spirits somewhat, but could not fix what was beyond fixing, a bad meal.

Bon Appetit