August 1, 2021 Lunch - Vichyssoises and grilled artichokes Dinner - Shell Club; Ribs and German Potato Salad and Cole Slaw

 August 1, 2021 Lunch - Vichyssoises and grilled artichokes  Dinner - Shell Club; Ribs and German Potato Salad and Cole Slaw

I watched the Olympics and the news in the morning and boiled the four artichokes I had bought at Trader Joe’s last week. 

Near noon I went to the garden and picked a handful of basil and chives and brought in the Vichyssoises from the garage refrigerator.  I sliced the chives into thin rounds and Suzette processed the basil with lemon juice and Mayo in the food processor into basil mayonnaise.

Suzette then squeezed out most of the water and sliced two artichokes in half and brushed each half with olive oil and grilled them on the grill.

When Willy arrived we served each of us a bowl of Vichyssoises with a grilled artichoke and I filled a bowl with some basil mayonnaise as a dipping sauce for the artichokes and Suzette sliced several ripe tomatoes she had brought from her garden at the Center for Ageless Living and garnished the tomato slices with basil mayonnaise.  We all love basil mayonnaise, but Willy is particularly fond of it.

I opened a bottle of 2014 Benton Lane Willamette Valley Pinot Blanc that had seemed have lost some of its fruitiness. 

It was a fabulous lunch.  

German Potato Salad

After lunch Willy left to play soccer and Suzette and I made potato salad and Chicken Corn soup.  I finely diced 2 1/2 cups each of celery and onion, and 4 cups of Yukon Gold potatoes and put them in a pot of water to cook on the stove.  Suzette steamed about 10 stalks of asparagus and I diced those also.

Suzette combined about 1 1/2 cups each of celery and onion with the cooked diced potatoes and asparagus and made a dressing of apple cider, white vinegar, and olive oil in a large bowl.  I covered the potato salad and refrigerated it.  I also chilled a bottle of Gruet Pinot Noir Rose.

Chicken Corn Soup

Suzette then heated the chicken broth from the chicken she boiled several days ago and added 1/2 of the chicken meat we pulled off the boiled chicken plus a cup each of the diced celery and onion and she added slices of fresh carrots she brought from the garden at the Center for Ageless Living.  She then cooked the five ears of corn we bought at the Santa Fe Farmers’ Market and then cut off the kernels from the ears and added them. The cooking the corn was an improvement to the prior recipe of adding uncooked corn.  

Suzette then made Ribbles, a pasta noodle, and cooked those in the soup.

We then put the soup in the fridge to chill and took out the potato salad.

At 4:30 we took the potato salad and bottle of Gruet Rose and two New Zealand oyster shells we were served at Audrey’s at the Hammer in L.A. and the fossil shells I bought in Mexico.

Bruce was at Tom and Donnie’s when we arrived and we discussed she’ll stuff for a while and then dug into the two large piles of ribs and cole slaw they had fixed and our potato salad.

They served a red wine that Suzette and I drank when we discovered that the rose had oxidized and was barely drinkable.  Donnie drank rose but we did not.

After dinner Suzette and Donnie went back to the kitchen and peeled and sliced peaches and served us three guys peaches on vanilla ice cream for dessert

We then retired to the kitchen table and examined the fossil shells.  I learned that the fossils were over 6,000,000 years old and the shell had been replaced with rock or solidified mud in the way that petrified wood is mineralized rock instead of wood.

At 9:00 we said goodnight and left with a package of ribs and the last of the potato salad.

Bon Appetit