June 13, 2020 Brunch – Chili Relleno, Sausage, and Pinto Beans, and Fried Eggs on a toasted whole wheat flour tortilla. Dinner – BBQ Country Style Pork Ribs with Garden Salad

June 13, 2020 Brunch – Chili Relleno, Sausage, and Pinto Beans, and Fried Eggs on a toasted whole wheat flour tortilla. Dinner – BBQ Country Style Pork Ribs with Garden Salad

When we awakened this morning by Suzette saying, “It is time to weed the garden!” She encouraged me by making a pot of coffee with the Atlas coffee Willy gave her.  I took a cup with milk and sugar and it was delicious.  Then we went to the garden and pulled weeds for about an hour trying to liberate the food crops like squash and cucumbers from the Johnson grass and baby elm trees.

At about 10:00 after we had weeded several beds, we fixed brunch.  I suggested that we mix the PPI Chili Relleno and Beans from yesterday’s lunch from Padilla’s with sausage and eggs.  Suzette wanted to make a burrito. Suzette chopped up the Chili Relleno and sautéed it with the PPI beans, and onion and sausage and pretty soon had a big gooey mess.  She fried four eggs in a separate skillet and toasted a couple of four tortillas and put one on each plate and then covered it with the greenish gruel and then two fried eggs.

Of course what was obvious when we began eating the large open face Huevos Rancheros/burrito/tostado was that the greenish mush garnished with fried eggs was ineluctable.

Suzette made a Bloody Mary and I made a cup of my favorite Mexican tea, manzanilla/camomile with fresh lime juice and honey.

We carried our drinks and plates of ugly food to the garden table and had a great brunch watching the butterflies and bees hum among the radiant lavender purple blooms and the water lilies and fish in the pond in the bright sunshine.

After lunch we both worked at our desks until about 3:30, when Suzette continued her effort to clean out and rearrange Willy’s bedroom into her new office.  Here is a picture.

While she was doing that I fetched a package of pork country style ribs that Suzette had bought at Smith’s for $.97/lb., the odds and ends of ribs and chops cut into strips.  I placed a steel cake drying rack in the bottom of a 10 x 16 Pyrex baking dish and then lay the ribs on the rack and drizzled and brushed them with Rudy’s BBQ sauce until the surface was completely covered.  I added about 2 cups of water to the area below the rack to keep the grease from sticking and to moisten the ribs and covered the ribs with aluminum foil and put them into a 350 degree oven with the object of cooking them within 2 ½ hours.

I napped until 5:00 when we discovered that another black man who had fallen asleep in a drunken stupor had been shot by police in Atlanta.  Of course the shooting was caught on video and will become another chapter in what has become the continuing saga of black people being killed by excessive police force for minor infractions or none at all, such as falling asleep parked at aWendy’s.

I made an easy BBQ sauce from the New York Times That container  mainly apple cider vinegar, catsup, and brown sugar. Here is the recipe

Suzette and I checked the ribs and we cooked them another hour and then she removed the aluminum foil and flipped the ribs and spread the new BBQ sauce on them and cooked the uncovered for another half hour for a total cooking time of 3 hours.

The ribs were a little tough, which we agreed would have been remedied by cooking them longer at a lower temperature.

We made salad to go with the ribs, using the lovely salad blend grown in the Center for Ageless
Living’s garden and adding diced tomato, and sliced cucumber, fresh croutons Suzette made from some old whole wheat rolls,  and green onion and just before serving the meal Suzette heated the PPI
Roasted Purple Potatoes with mint and garnished the salad with a small mound of warm potatoes.  I drizzled the salads with my latest reconstituted Caesar dressing.

The winds had picked up so we ate inside and watched a Nova special on the interaction between people and polar bears along the west shore of Hudson Bay.  Then we watched our favorite Saturday evening PBS series, Father Brown and Death in Paradise and went to bed.

I awakened at 2:30 and finished this blog entry and drank a glass of water to help digest the ribs.

Bon Appetit