April 30, 2020 Lunch – Roasted Pork Salad and cheese sandwich. Dinner – Ghoulash with Casarecce noodles.

April 30, 2020 Lunch – Roasted Pork Salad and cheese sandwich. Dinner – Ghoulash with Casarecce noodles.

Another simple day.  The most interesting thing was Governor Cuomo’s news conference.  Two things were of interest.  First, the City and MtA are going to shut down the trains, subways, and buses and will clean them.  Mayor De Blasio will increase the support for the homeless that have been sleeping on the subways. During the interview I ate granola, yogurt, and tropical fruit for breakfast.

The other development is the offer by ex-mayor Mike Bloomberg to develop and pay for tracing in NY.

At 11:00 we held the monthly book club meeting by Zoom.  When the meeting ended at 12:30 I made my lunch salad with a head of Romaine, a tomato diced, a slice of roasted pork diced, capers, and two green onions sliced thinly and drizzled it with Caesar salad dressing and toasted two slices of a French dinner roll, buttered them and lay slices of Jarlsberg cheese on them to make two open faced  cheese sandwiches.

I checked the market after the bell and it was sharply down 288 points. My portfolio was down for the day but the market posted its best month since 1987 and I had caught much of that gain so I was happy.  We will see if the 30 million unemployed workers creates a drag on the market.

I napped from 2:30 to 4:00.  As Jim Cramer said at 4:00 all the major issues facing the economy have reached fruition and there is nothing left to push the market up further, which is why it has stalled. It would take something more to push it forward, such as a vaccine.  He showed by the chart of market activity how the market at the end of February had gone into a deep dive into an oversold position as everyone, including me, sold their stock and then how the market had pulled back to within about 12% of it February high rather rapidly beginning in the middle of March.

I watched Mad Money and news shows until 5:00 and then went for a bike ride just as Suzette came home.

I road about five miles.

When I came home Willy arrived to pick up his desk and computer that had been delivered today.
Suzette packed him a lunch box with tandoori chicken and some tumeric rice and gave him the rest of the Riata.  After Willy left we decided to make a sort of goulash.  We had Spanish smoked paprika instead of Hungarian and we had bell peppers instead of Hungarian peppers, so it was like a non-Hungarian Goulash.

I diced ½ each of a yellow and a red bell pepper, ½ lb. of mushrooms, ½ of a red onion, 2 Roma tomatoes, four cloves of garlic and a thawed 1 lb. rib steak.

Suzette then boiled ½ lb. of Casarecce pasta in a pot and in a large skillet sautéed all the ingredients and added about ½ lb. of frozen green peas.  When the ingredients were all cooked, Suzette added the smoked paprika, sour cream and heavy cream to make a sauce.

We opened one of the bottles of Joseph Drouhin Beaujolais Suzette had bought for her now closed restaurant because we wanted a light red wine with the dish.

Suzette then plated the dish by spooning pasta into a pasta bowl and covering it with the goulash.

The dish was very tasty.  It made up for fact that it did not have the spicy zip of its Hungarian relative, by having been improvised out of thin air. We ate bowls of  our ersatz goulash as we watched Midsommer Murders and then went to bed at 9:30.

There was wine left and I opened the new wheel of brie and toasted and buttered three slices of French baguette and we had a lovely cheese course after the meal.  In this period when one must make do with much that is not at its height of freshness because we shop only every other week, having a perfectly aged brie was a pleasant surprise.

I tried to blog but fell asleep at 10:00 and slept until 2:00 when I finished the blog.

On a day like this, self isolation seems pretty wonderful.

Bon Appetit