I woke up at 7:15, just in time to see the Market take off toward another all time high buoyed by final talks on a Phase 1 trade deal with China, a weakening dollar, and mini-boom in housing sales.
I felt very lucky to find three checks from clients that provided me enough money to pay the property Taxes on my house before the end of the year. One was especially wonderful. It was sent by a client who I did not send a bill to, a voluntary payment of $2,460 in recognition of my efforts to secure pre-federal water rights for farmers in the Lower Rio Grande. I was amazed.
I worked all morning, mostly paying taxes It was a Willy’s day off so after he returned from the gym at 12:45 he drove us to Vietnam 2000 for lunch. I ordered a bowl of Pho with raw beef and meatballs and Willy ordered his usual No. 21, grilled marinated pork and fried pork stuffed egg rolls on a bed of rice vermicelli noodles on a bed of chopped lettuce, herbs, and mung bean sprouts. When the meal was over and I was ready to pay the proprietress handed Willy a calendar and handed me a bag with a Christmas gift in it. I was startled but thanked her. I did not know my patronage merited any special recognition but I guess after 19 years of eating at her restaurant and blogging about it I have garnered some recognition. When I returned home I opened the bag and discovered an Italian Pannatone (fruit cake) in a box. How special.
I am beginning to think that I have discovered a secret, to help others without thinking of myself first, leads to unexpected benefits.
After an aborted teleconference at 2:30 I checked my portfolio and was buoyed by the fact that I achieved a 1% gain today, a rare and happy experience and an indication that this year we may have a Santa Claus rally instead of a 10% meltdown like we did last Christmas.
At 3:45 I drove to Sprouts and bought two mahi-mahi (dolphin) fillets, two cooked lobster claws, two tuna steaks, a Vidalia onion, milk, broccoli, Italian broad leaf parsley, and green beans. So we now had two meals’ ingredients and our milk replenished through the end of the year.
I returned home around 5:15. Suzette had arrived but Willy was gone. Around 6:15 Willy called and gave us his ETA, so after two hot toddies of rum, nutter, sugar and hot water with a sprinkle of freshly ground nutmeg to take the chill off (it was very cold out when I fetched groceries and forecast to be one of the coldest nights of the year), we started cooking.
We had decided to create a stock by boiling the lobster shells with frozen shrimp and two cloves of crushed garlic and the hard lower stalks of the broccoli to make a seafood stock and then used the seafood broth to create the poaching medium by adding white wine, butter to poach the fish. When the fish was fully cooked she removed the fish fillets from the casserole to a plate in warm oven and then she made a lobster, shallot, and shrimp cream (bechamel) sauce by mixing and heating 2 T. of flour with 3. T. of butter for 3 minutes. Then I helped by adding ladles of poaching medium as Suzette stirred the sauce to prevent creating lumps. After the sauce was smoother added the shrimp and lobster meat I had diced to complete the sauce.
Suzette boiled spaghetti in another pot to make this a pasta dish and steamed the flowerets of broccoli I had prepped.
Willy fetched the bottle of 2018 Kaiora New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc I bought at Total wine for
$7.99 from the garage. Then Willy minced a handful of broad leaf parsley while I shredded about 1/3 cup of Pecorino Romano cheese.
Suzette and I plated each of three pasta bowls with a pile of cooked spaghetti, then a poached Mahi Mahi filet, then the spoonfuls of the lobster and shrimp cream sauce and finally garnished the top with minced parsley and shredded Pecorino-Romano cheese.
Willy toasted slices of French baguette from Trader Joe’s to dip into the sauce and we had a really good meal for our first meal back together.
After dinner I made a cup of Earl Grey tea with fresh milk and ate the brownies we had bought in Mexico with a sniffer of cognac mixed with Grande Marnier.
Suzette and Willy went to bed at 9:00.
But I drank a White Russian made with milk, Kahlua, and rum over ice and watched an amazing documentary using private and public films of the Beatles directed by Ron Howard and produced by Apple Records and White Horse Productions. I was thrilled when I saw the logo of White Horse Productions was one of the 17 large Neolithic figures of horses carved into hillsides and filled with white chalk
Here is the Wikipedia article.
The Uffington White Horse is a prehistoric hill figure, 110 m (360 ft)[1] long, formed from deep trenches filled with crushed white chalk. The figure is situated on the upper slopes of White Horse Hill in the English civil parish of Uffington(in the ceremonial county of Oxfordshire and historic county of Berkshire), some 10 mi (16 km) east of Swindon, 8 km (5 mi) south of the town of
Faringdon and a similar distance west of the town of Wantage; or 2.5 km (1.6 mi) south of Uffington.
The hill forms a part of the scarp of the Berkshire Downs and overlooks the Vale of White Horse to the north. The best views of the figure are obtained from the air, or from directly across the Vale, particularly around the villages of Great Coxwell, Longcotand Fernham. The site is owned and managed by the National Trust and is a Scheduled Ancient Monument.[2] The Guardian stated in 2003 that "for more than 3,000 years, the Uffington White Horse has been jealously guarded as a masterpiece of minimalist art."[3] The Uffington Horse is by far the oldest of the white horse figures in Britain and is of an entirely different design from the others inspired by it.[4][5]
Here is the image.
The clear implication to me was that British creativity has been afoot a very long time
The documentary made the interesting point at the end that the only other person in musical history who wrote as many songs and had such a prodigious output of musical creativity as the Beatles was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
I went to bed singing.
Bon Appetit
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