September 23, 2020 Lunch – PPI Vietnamese Chicken Noodle Soup. Dinner – Grilled Rib Steak with Baked Potato and Caesar Salad

 September 23, 2020 Lunch – PPI Vietnamese Chicken Noodle Soup. Dinner – Grilled Rib Steak with Baked Potato and Caesar Salad

Today I ate a breakfast I learned to love when we stayed in Paris when I travelled there with my parents in 1960.  My brother and I had a separate room from my parents at the Hotel du Printemps with a view from our balcony of Gard St. Lazare. Every morning we would be served a French breakfast of a croissant and baguette with butter and jam and hot chocolate.

That breakfast is what I ate for breakfast today. Two pieces of tasted baguette that I buttered and spread with raspberry jam.  The only thing missing was the balcony, the smell of coffee beans roasting from down the street, and the view of the Gard.

At 9:00 I rode five miles south and then worked until 11:30 when I heated the pot of PPI Vietnamese Chicken Noodle Soup to which 8 added a handful of spinach leaves and garnished with sliced green onions, cilantro, and hoisin sauce. I ate 1 ½ bowls and there was still 1 bowl left.

After lunch I thawed a rib steak for dinner.

The market had a huge sell off today.  My portfolio was down a whopping 3%.  Looks like I may need to wait until after the election for a come back, unless Congress reaches a meaningful agreement on another stimulus package or Apple issues it’s new 5G phone.  

At 2:45 Ii drove to an appointment with a new client and the back home.  I is good to have a paying client.

When I returned home a few minutes after 4:15 I baked the three sweet potatoes, two acorn squashes, and three baking potatoes at 375degrees for 45 minutes.

Suzette arrived at 5:15 and monitored the baking of the vegetables while I read Lincoln Lawyer in bed.

At 6:00 Suzette she was ready to proceed with dinner, which meant she was ready to put the steak on the grill.  I returned to the kitchen and made a Caesar Salad with Anchovies, Romaine lettuce, shaved strips of Pecorino Romano cheese, croutons, and Cesar salad dressing .

Suzette went to the garden and cut about ten chives

When the steak was grilled to medium rare Suzette brought it in and I sliced it, while Suzette prepared the potatoes by cutting them open and inserting pads of butter in them.  We each added our own steak strips and salad to our plates and I poured a 2011 De Ponte Dundee Hills Pinot Noir.  This wine had the longest smooth finish of any wine I have tasted lately.  I waited to feel a harshness and never did, just elegant aged fruit flavor.

We carried our plates and glasses of wine to the table in the garden gazebo and ate a hearty and delicious dinner.  Suzette had grilled the steak perfectly to our liking of medium rare and heavily charred.  The potatoes were the huge restaurant grade potatoes we bought at Costco so there was lots of fluffy white potato, and the Cesar salad was full of anchovy flavor because I had opened a small can of out of date anchovies that had disintegrated into a mush that went into solution in the Cesar salad dressing easily.

After dinner we drank glasses of limoncello and watched Tampa Bay beat Dallas in game three of the Stanley Cup and then went to bed.

Bon Appetit