October 27, 2020 Lunch – Caprese Salad with toasted French baguette. Dinner – Mapo Dofu with PPI Rice

 October 27, 2020 Lunch – Caprese Salad with toasted French baguette. Dinner – Mapo Dofu with PPI Rice

I attended my first pandemic on-line seminar today. I replicated the food service at a seminar.  I ate a Lax, red onion, and cream cheese open faced sandwich at 8:45 before the seminar started with a cup of green tea instead of the muffins and coffee usually served before a seminar starts.

Then at the mid morning break at 10:30 I heated the PPI bowl of Noodle Soup from yesterday’s lunch.

Then at 12:15 I made a light lunch and the best dish of the day, a Caprese Salad made by filling leaves of bibb lettuce with diced tomatoes, basil, red onion slices, and fresh mozzarella.  I lay the last of the anchovies on the salad and drizzled Cesar dressing on the salad.

This was an amazingly beautiful and delicious salad and was the best dish of the day

I also toasted two slices of French baguette and buttered them to eat with the salad.  The ingredients nestled in the pockets formed by the curved lettuce leaves was a charming composition. Here is a photo.

The Dow was down 222 points, but the Nasdeq was up slightly, so I was surprised to see that my portfolio has risen .75% today.  The big tech names were beginning to move up again, even though the broader market was not.  A commenter recommended Gilead that makes Rendesivir, the therapeutic, as a way to play the covid pandemic without buying one of the many vaccine company stocks, so I bought another 500 shares. 

After the seminar ended at 4:00 Suzette arrived and I bundled up and walked ½ mile.  Line after line of cranes flew high overhead their migration the Bosque de Apache about 100 miles south on the RG.

I must have seen 300 cranes fly overhead in the fifteen minutes I was outside.

Suzette had cooked a beef stew at The Center today, so when I returned home I heard no objection when I offered to cook dinner. It was easy to decide on the menu, because it was decided several days ago that we would make a Mapo Dofu using several eggplants from our garden and I thawed a 2/3 lb. pork boneless sirloin. I chopped and combined in my wok two small eggplants diced with the 2/3 lb. pork boneless sirloin steak diced, 1/3 lb. of Jimmie Dean Sausage, fresh White and portobello mushrooms, about 1 ½ T. of fresh ginger and 1 T. of chopped fresh garlic, 2/3 cup of onion and a green bell pepper, to which I added 3 T. of peanut oil and 1 tsp. of sesame oil started cooking on the stove at a pretty high heat. Periodically I would lift and fold sections of the ingredients so all the ingredients cooked evenly.  

I then rehydrated 3 dried shiitake mushrooms and a small handful of dried black wood ear strips in 2 cups of hot water and after about fifteen minutes of soaking when they became soft I added the wood ear and the water to the cooking ingredients in the wok. I then added a 14 oz. Container of firm tofu cut into ½ inch cubes and 1 tsp. of chili oil and peppers.  

After the ingredients simmered for an additional 20 to 30 minutes, I made a seasoning sauce of 2 T. of Chinese Cooking wine, 1 T. of soy sauce, 1 T. of cornstarch, 1 tsp. Of sesame oil, and 2 T. of water and added it to the wok.  After another couple of minutes the liquid n the wok began to thicken into a dark brown sauce and we were ready to eat. 

I was tired at this point and wanted to sit down, so I fetched the container of PPI cooked rice and gave it to Suzette and asked her to take over.

 Suzette heated the rice in the microwave and went to the garage to fetch cold beers and then ladled a pile of rice into a pasta bowl and covered it with spoonfuls of Mapo Dofu. 

I dispensed with adding crushed Szechuan pepper corns and chopped green onion.  That will need to wait for another day, which will occur, because we have enough Left for another meal that I put into the fridge.

We ate around 6:30.

During Rachel Maddow at 7:00 Suzette made us a dessert of ½ of a whoppie pie in a small bowl with a scoop of vanilla ice cream drizzled with a swizzle of Hershey’s chocolate syrup.

I drank a cup of chai after dessert and we went to bed by 8:30.

I awakened at 2:30 to finish this blog and drink a glass of water.

We discussed dinner and decided we needed to eat the baby zucchini grown in Suzette’s garden at the Center tomorrow. Suzette suggested we grill a steak or filets, so I will thaw them tomorrow and perhaps bake some potatoes.

Bon Appetit