July 3, 2021 Lunch - Enchiladas. Birthday Dinner Party - CHees Balls, Cucumber soup, Crab Salads, Flan
Today was my birthday l. It was a very pleasant day. I started the day watching Stage 8 of the Tour de France and picking crab with Suzette. Today last year’s winner, Pogajar, rode from 5 minutes back to 30 seconds back to go into 1st place in the general category on wet rainy roads over several mountains in the Haut Savoie. An amazing performance in a race with several amazing performances already.
Suzette drank coffee and I drank a cup of hot chocolate. When the bike stage ended we drove to the Farmers’ Market and Suzette bought eight plants for out garden.
I talked to Billy and Amy and Luke and Willy who called to wish me a Happy Birthday. I watched the Euro match between Denmark and the Czech Republic while Suzette planted the plants and heated PPI enchiladas for lunch.
After lunch I rested and talked to Greg Gould and watched the first half of England v. Ukraine in Euro competition until 1:40 when we drove to the Guild theater to see a premier of a short movie directed by Vic Browder, who is associated with the local Mother Road theater group.
We drove home afterwards but the match had ended. Luckily England won. England will face Denmark and Italy will face Spain in the semi-final matches on Tuesday. Then several of these teams will do it all over again at the summer Olympics later this month.
At 3:00 I made my favorite dressing for crab salad, a mixture of shallots, lemon juice, Mayo, horseradish, and catsup.
I chilled several Roses, a couple of Hermann Weimer rieslings, and a couple bottles of champagne.
Then I chopped the other ingredients for the salad, tomatoes, cucumbers, green onions, and radishes.
Suzette made the croutons for the soup. She chopped fresh dill and cubed French baguette and tossed the cubes of bread and dill with salt, olive oil, and pepper in a plastic bag to coat the croutons and then baked them in a 350 degree convection oven for ten minutes.
We finished prepping by 5:00 and I lay down and read the New Yorker until 6:00.
Wayne and Elaine and Janice and Tom came at 6:30, the time we had designated. Janice brought the appetizers, cheese balls made with figs p, bread crumbs, and Blue cheese and olives and slices of baguette.
Elaine made a baked cream caramel for dessert made with cream cheese and eggs and served with fresh strawberries. They each also brought bottles of wine as birthday gifts, a bottle of rose and a bottle of Rodney Strong Sauvignon Blanc.
Willy arrived soon after with several cheeses and several bottles of wine and a bag of ice. It was already a festive evening and it had just begun.
It was so wonderful to see everyone. We all were in good moods, happy to be liberated from lockdown, but still worried about the lack of vaccinations among the general populace. Elaine is going to be 75 soon and we agreed that 75 was a good age.
Suzette had planned everything and Willy helped her serve. For example, Willy brought a bag of ice and put it in a cooler and we iced a wine in it.
Suzette set up appetizers around the metal tables with pink chairs under the golden rain tree a few feet from the gazebo. After I showed Wayne and Elaine the new art we joined everyone outside. We drank rose and ate cheese balls and olives.
Then after a while we moved to the table under the gazebo that Suzette had set and Suzette and Willy served each person a bowl of cucumber soup. It was a lovely soup made with sour cream, cucumbers, and yogurt.
She then served crab salad with buttered and oven toasted slices of French baguette. We each drizzled our salads with the crab dressing I had made.
Bob’s crab dressing
First mince about 1 T. of shallot and cover with fresh lemon juice and let stand 1/2 hour to soften the shallot. Then add to taste mayonnaise, horseradish, catsup. If you want it spicy add a dash or two of your favorite hot sauce.
The salads were lovely and very filling. I served a bottle of 2019 Hermann Weimer Riesling with dinner. Wayne and Elaine do not drink wine so Willy fetched them glasses of water.
The wind began to blow as it darkened and it started to rain, so we returned to the house.
Wayne and I fetched the dessert, a cream caramel. Wayne loosened it from the cake pan it had been baked in and I flipped it onto their serving plate and Wayne cut it into slices and added fresh strawberries to each plate. No one wanted champagne, so I served several glasses of water and we sat in the living room and talked until 10:00. When everyone said goodnight. Elaine kept saying, “It has been too long.” and we all agreed with her after 1 1/2 years of lockdown and no socializing.
I loved the evening even as we recalled my prior 70th birthday with the whole suckling pig and my 60th birthday potluck with the long table in the garden filled with fifty people.
This birthday I wanted a small group of good friends with exquisitely delicious food. That is exactly what we had.
The meal featured the crab salad which featured the new crab product at Costco. Costco used to sell whole frozen Dungeness crabs which you had to thaw and clean before eating. The new product is superior in two respects; it is fresh and already cleaned. Everyone was impressed by it.
Its taste reminded me of the freshly cooked shrimp I bought at the pier in Oslo in 1968. The fishermen caught the shrimp in the Fjord and cooked them in the fjords’ salt water on their way to shore. They were the freshest shrimp I have ever tasted and they had a slight briny flavor from the salt water they had been boiled in. The crab tonight had that slightly salty taste that reminded me of the shrimp in Oslo. It made me think that these Dungeness crabs may have been cooked at sea and then cleaned and chilled.
The cheese balls were lovely and much lighter than I thought they might be with all their ingredients. Perhaps the bread crumbs lightened the dish.
I loved the dense cream cheese and egg creme caramel with its liquid caramel sauce baked into the dish.
It was a lovely evening of friends and food.
Bon Appetit
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