January 30, 2021 Lunch – PPI Moussaka. Dinner – Mapo Dofu with rice

 January 30, 2021 Lunch – PPI Moussaka. Dinner – Mapo Dofu with rice

The best food experience today was Suzette making mandarin orange powder that she sprinkled on the chocolate mousse we made two nights ago.  Both recipes are from the Le Buvette Cookbook Luke gave us for Christmas.

I drank a cup of hot chocolate for breakfast. I watched soccer until noon when I ate the last of the wonderful moussaka.

I showered and rested after lunch.  At 2:00 Suzette got me out of bed and we drove to the Wildlife Refuge at the southern end of 2d St., but it was closed. We did see a roadrunner in the parking lot 

It was closed so we drove back to Kit Carson Park and walked to the ponds and the river.

When we returned home the Coopers Hawk was sitting on our bird bath, so we saw several interesting birds without trying today.

Mapo Dofu

We started cooking dinner at 5:30. I sliced three ichiban eggplants into two inch strips, I diced ½ onion, seven or eight cloves of garlic, about 1 ounce of ginger and cubed the meat of two pork chops and 2 oz. of Jimmy Dean sausage.

I then made 1 cup of rice by heating 2 cups of water with a tsp. Of chicken stock to a boil and adding 1 cup of basmati rice and reducing the covered potato the lowest heat and cooking for 30 minutes, which is how long it took to finish cooking the Mapo Dofu dish. 

I heated 2 T. of peanut oil and stir fried the garlic, ginger, and 1 tsp. of garlic chili sauce. I then added the meat and stir fried it and then added the onion and eggplant. It practically my wok, so I covered the wok so the steam would cook the eggplant faster than my turning the mass of eggplant.

I diced approximately 9 oz. of medium firm tofu and added thecubes to the wok. 

I then soaked four dried shiitake mushrooms and 1 1/2 T. of sliced black wood ear in 2 cups of hot water for about ten minutes. I then removed the hard stem from each mushroom with a sharp knife and sliced each mushroom into ¼ inch wide strips and soaked them another five minutes to soften them and then to the wok.  This brought the level of liquid almost to the top of the ingredients.

I cooked the ingredients for another ten to fifteen minutes while I made the seasoning sauce of 1 ½ T. each of cornstarch, Chinese Cooking wine, and soy sauce with 1 tsp. of sesame oil and ¼ cup of water.

After I added the seasoning sauce I covered the wok to let the sauce thicken until the rice was ready.

I went to the garage and fetched the last two Modelo Especial beers, which we drank with our dinner.  We each added a pinch of salt to give the dish a bit more flavor.

After dinner we watched The Dig, a new British movie with Ralph Fiennes and Carey Mulligan about the discovery and excavation of the 5th century Sutton Hoo burial sight including an entire Anglo-Saxon wooden ship on Netflix.

Dessert 

Suzette became fascinated with the recipe in our new Le Buvette cookbook for mandarin orange powdered this week she bought a bag of mandarin oranges.  Today she removed the pulp by making a horizontal incision around ten oranges and drying in the peels in the oven for 2 hours as the recipe provides.  She then ground the peels into a powder using an electric coffee grinder.  During the film tonight suzette served a dessert of chocolate mousse in a champagne glass dusted with mandarin orange powder and sniffers of cognac.  It was a wonderful dessert.  You can smell the orange before you even taste the chocolate and orange flavor.

We loved it.

Bon Appetit