June 12, 2021 Lunch - 2000 Vietnam. Dinner - Roast chicken infused with Fresh Herbs of Provence with Roasted Potato Wedges with garlic and Fresh mint, and Sautéed Snow Peas, shallot, and mushrooms
I had trouble sleeping because of a gout attack so I got up and started working at 5:30. When Suzette awakened around 7:30 I called the 24/7 help line for Presbyterian Health and discussed my gout issue with the Physician’s Assistant, who ordered me two drugs to take to treat the gout.
After we agreed to roast a chicken for dinner, Suzette left to do shopping for the Center and I began watching EUFA competition soccer matches. The first one was a doozy between Switzerland and Wales, with Christian Bale on the pitch. Switzerland tied the score 1 to 1 in the last moments of the match.
The most momentous event of EUFA today’s matches occurred in the next match between Denmark and Finland, which was stopped for several hours when Denmark’s star player, Christian Eriksen collapsed on the field and was administered CPR on the field and taken to hospital. After he was stabilized in hospital the match proceeded and Finland won, 1 to 0. I took a short 1/3 mile walk and then got involved in the events surrounding lunch, so missed the continuation
The match I really wanted to see was Belgium v. Russia to be broadcast at 2:00.
Suzette returned from shopping and delivering the provisions to the Center with salad greens, limes, two whole chickens, and a few other items around 1:00 we decided to make a loop by going to 2000 Vietnam for lunch because Suzette had not eaten ( I had eaten granola, yogurt, milk and blueberries for breakfast), then go to Bombay Spice for toothpaste and finally TaLin for wasabi and pickled ginger.
We drove to Walgreens to pick up the Medications. When we arrived there was a big truck in front of us loaded with people and a pet dog at the window in the drive through window where the scene of the day occurred.
When the prescription was slid out the window the driver stepped out of the truck and with the instructions by the drugstore attendant administered a covid test to one of the people in the truck. He wanted to hand the exposed testing swab back through the window, but it took a minute or two for the attendant to instruct him to place the swab in the tube that came in the package and to place tube back in the package before placing the package back through the window. The next thing I saw was a dog stick its head out the truck window and I instantly appreciated family transmission. There must have been five or six people and a dog in the truck. After the truck finally left the window I rolled up and quietly and gratefully waited while the drug store attendant disinfected the window mechanism and counter top inside. I had just witnessed a drive through self-administered Covid test at my local Walgreens.
We then rolled up and picked up the meds with a new appreciation of the private public relationship between drug stores and the government public health system’s tracking Covid. One med was three pills and the other five pills and they cost collectively less than $4.00.
We drove by the store at the corner of Rio Grande and Mountain Rd. on our way to I-40 to drive to 2000 Vietnam to check Frank’s progress in repairing the LP mini-split system and saw him on the roof, so drove on without stopping.
When we arrived at the restaurant it was relatively crowded with four tables filled. Suzette ordered her favorite, flour sheets with grilled pork and egg rolls, and I ordered my favorite summer dish, No. 31, which is a bowl of rice vermicelli on a base of fresh lettuce and mung bean sprouts and cilantro and Oriental basil topped with grilled pork and egg rolls.
After we ordered we received a call from Frank that he had finished the repair, re-laying and insulating the distribution lines from the compressor to the five units, replacing the clean-out valves in each unit, and removing, testing the lines under pressure, and installing new refrigerant to re-charge the system. We agreed to meet him at the store at 2:00, after waiting about ten minutes for our food, we took two or three bites and boxed the two dishes and at 1:45 headed back to the store. When we arrived Frank showed us that the units were pumping out cold air. He even let us pay him with a credit card to garner the extra travel points.
We then headed home and refrigerated our lunches that will now be our Sunday lunches.
When we got home and I reflected on the rapidly changing events of the last two hours I was thrilled. I obtained my meds, eaten some lunch, picked up lunch for tomorrow, gotten the mini-split units fixed, and solidified a new relationship with a competent HVAC professional committed to taking care of the system, and made it home in time to see the Belgium v. Russia match.
I pray we have fixed all the Landlord improvements necessary for Left Turn to open by its projected date of June 28.
Suzette was exhausted from her morning’s work so she lay down. I took the first two pills as directed and then turned on the TV. It was the 51st minute and Belgium was up 2 to 0 on Russia. I loved it and hoped that Vladimir Putin was watching. You might wonder how a small nation like Belgium could defeat a huge country like Russia. The answer is simple, Belgium is a soccer powerhouse and Russia is not. Almost every player on the Belgium team is a premier player in either the English Premier League or the German Bundesleague. Russia’s players are unknowns who mostly play for Russian teams. And, as is often said in soccer, “Quality counts”. For example, Lukaku, one of Belgium’s strikers, scored two of the three Belgium goals in the match. This feat put Lukaku in the rare company of only a few players who have scored two goals in a game in two different years of EUFA competitions.
Dinner
At around 5:30 Suzette got up and we started thinking about dinner.
We wanted to use fresh herbs from our garden to make an Herbs du Provence style mixture to flavor the chicken and Suzette decided we should cut the potatoes into wedges and roast them with garlic and then toss them with mint before serving them.
We also wanted to sauté mushrooms with shallot and fresh snow peas from our garden for our vegetable dish.
Suzette armed with a scissors and I armed with a basket went to the back yard. We cut several stalks of Rosemary, lavender, tarragon, oregano, and mint and picked about a dozen snow peas.
When we returned to the kitchen, Suzette washed and dried the chicken and potatoes while I started de-stemming the leaves from the herbs du Provence and chopping them finely. Suzette then mixed the herbs with butter and then stuffed the mixture under the skin of the chicken and sealed the cavity with one half of an onion while I cut five Idaho russet potatoes into wedges and cut the hard tips off the cloves of garlic, leaving most of the outer peel on each clove. This will be my new technique for roasting garlic when roasting vegetables. It allows the garlic to soak up and mix flavors with the olive oil and other vegetables without drying and hardening that occurs when the peel is fully removed.
Suzette then adde garlic scapes and tossed the potatoes, scapes and garlic with salt, pepper, and olive oil, covered them with aluminum foil and placed the Pyrex baking dish into the oven after she seared the chicken at 425 degrees for 15 minutes and reduced the oven temperature to 375 or 350 degrees.
We then turned our attention to the snow pea, mushroom dish. Suzette stripped the tendons off the edges of the peas while I sliced the last seven or eight white mushrooms and sliced the 1/4 of a shallot left into four or five thin slices.
We wanted a Riesling with dinner, so I went to the basement and pulled two whites, a Salmon Run and a 2019 Herman Weimer Riesling. They were not chilled so I took them to the garage fridge and replaced a bottle of Espiral Vino Verde and a bottle of Herman Weimer Rose, which I took back to the kitchen and chilled the bottles.
We then turned our attention to dessert because we had decided to make a cobbler with our first crop of fruit from our garden, five apricots, and some of the blueberries I bought Wednesday. While Suzette mixed the dry ingredients for the jiffy cobbler recipe, I sliced the apricots. Suzette then added blueberries and sugar to the fruit and let it sit until we cleared the oven of the dinner items. She then melted a stick of butter n a Pyrex baking dish and added milk to the dry ingredients and stirred them into a batter. Then she lay the batter on the melted butter and the fruit on top of the batter and placed the baking dish into the oven to bake.
I opened and poured glasses of the Rose, which was a blend of Cabernet Franc and Riesling, so it had a more tangy brighter flavor than a Pinot Noir Rose. Suzette must have liked the Rose because she asked me, “How many bottles of this did we buy?”
I told her I think we bought three bottles so we should have two bottles left and then Suzette told me something interesting, “You are the cellar guy, so I assume you will make sure we have some bottles of this.”
That is when I realized we were fully committed to regularly drinking Finger Lakes wines, which pleased me immensely.
I cut the leg quarters off the Roasted chicken and placed them on plates and Suzette filled them with minted Roasted potatoes and scapes and divided the sautéed mushrooms, shallot, and snow peas.
As Suzette said, “Four in a row.” This was the fourth meal we had cooked since our return from Mexico and each had been memorable.
This was a classically French as a meal could be, a Roasted Chicken stuffed with fresh herbs du Provence from our garden, roasted potatoes with garlic scapes and fresh mint from our garden and sautéed fresh snow peas from our garden with shallot and mushrooms complemented with a lively northern Rose.
We loved it and felt we had created a really French country style meal.
Later while we watched Stanley Tucci’s Italian food series episodes, Suzette made whipped cream to garnish the warm apricot and blueberry cobbler for a really tasty fresh dessert of cobbler that we ate with sips of cognac for a nice finish to our mostly garden fresh dinner.
Bon Appetit
No comments:
Post a Comment