November 16, 2020 Lunch – Duck Breast Salad. Dinner – Cream of Mushroom Soup.

 November 16, 2020 Lunch – Duck Breast Salad.  Dinner – Cream of Mushroom Soup. 

I could not think of what to eat for breakfast until I saw Suzette’s remaining milk and coffee in the Pyrex measuring cup she heated it in.  I had a flash back to breakfast at Hotel Au Printemps in Paris in 1960 with hot chocolate and French baguette and butter and jam.  So I toasted two pieces of Bosque Rustic loaf Baguette and buttered them and spread coarse cut English marmalade on them and made a cup of hot chocolate with a bit of coffee. 

For lunch I was equally undecided. I knew I wanted to use the PPI Duck breast but could not decide between soup and salad.  Finally, I decided upon salad.  I filled a pasta bowl with Romaine lettuce and the few PPI steamed green beans.  I then added a diced tomato from our garden, ¼ cucumber seeded and diced, 4 green onions thinly sliced into ringlets, and several dried black Moroccan olives.  I also rejuvenated the salad dressing with the juice of ½ lemon and about ¼ cup of olive oil.

The salad was delicious and the duck breast was wonderful. After lunch I ate a chocolate chip cookie.

Suzette came home at 4:15 and I rode my bike south 4 miles at 4:30.

When I returned I found Suzette seating some avocado crema she had made by mixing the meat of two avocados with sour cream with corn chips.  We had a delivery from El Super today with smoked pork chops, oranges green mangos, corn chips, and a papaya.

I used six of the fifteen avocados Suzette bought a couple of days ago at Smith’s to make guacamole with the addition of 3 oz. of minced onion, juice of two limes, salt to taste, two small cloves of garlic, about ¼ cup of cilantro leaves chopped, and a few dashes of Cholula hot sauce..

While I was eating chips and guacamole, Suzette made Cream of Mushroom Soup.  She cooked about two cups of sliced white and portobello mushrooms and 1 cup of sliced leek in about 1 1/4 quarts of chicken stock that I had made today by simmering four chicken thighs in 1 ½ quarts of water with a mirepoix made of 1 carrot, 1 stalk of celery, and ½ onion plus some salt. When the mushrooms and leeks were cooked Suzette puréed the mixture with an emulsion hand blender and then added heavy cream and salt. 

    The result was a relatively thick cream soup full of small bits of mushroom and leek.  Suzette ate 1 bowl and I ate two small bowls of the soup, which was enough food to satisfy us after all of the chips and avocado crema and guacamole we had eaten.  

 

  We watched the Antiques Roadshow and a bit of the Chicago v. Minnesota NFL Monday Night Football and then went to bed. 

I ate a few chocolate covered almonds after dinner. 

 The big news today was that Moderna announced that the preliminary results of its third phase test of its covid vaccine appeared to be 94.5% effective in preventing covid.  That was huge news and the Moderna stock went up $7.00 and that positive news helped pushed the Dow up 370 points and the NASDAQ up 95 points, which sent my portfolio  up about .8% to a new all time high.

Billy  called to congratulate me, which was very nice.

I saw on the news four lines of cars lines up for over a mile at a Fair Park in Dallas on the TV waiting to get food boxes of Thanksgiving Dinner ingredients that made me think what a huge disparity there is between the rich and the poor in our country right now.

Bon Appetit