May 30, 2024 Lunch - Sonic hot dog at Book Club. Dinner - Roast Duck with Potatoes and Asparagus Au Gratin

May 30, 2024 Lunch - Sonic hot dog at Book Club. Dinner - Roast Duck with Potatoes and Asparagus Au Gratin

I got up at 6:30 and showered and dressed and ate two Pain au Chocolat with a cup of tea. 

Then I moved the barricades and sand bags from my trunk.

Henry came around 8;00 to pick them up and a check.

I then checked the market and it was down big time, thanks to a sell off of over 25% of Salesforce and a smaller drop in price Meta and even Nvidia, so a very tough day.

At 10:30 I ate a snack of toasted slices of baguette spread with butter and thin slices of Humboldt Fog, which is an American version of Morbier consisting of two pours of milk curds with a layer of black ash in between.

Then at 10:50 I drove to Peter’s to pick him and our new book club member, Nicolai, up and drove to the Albuquerque Memorial Park near the corner of Louisiana and Gibson where our book club was scheduled to meet.

We discussed the book, 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur Clarke. One of the facts I learned was thar he wrote the book in the same time as he and Kubrick were writing the screenplay for the 2001 movie in 1967. That seems obvious when I finally read the book, because the plot lines of both are so similar.

Then we critiqued Keith’s newly published book, Corners of the Mind, about counter intuitive scientific thinking.

At 2:30 I drove Nicolai and Peter home on my way home.

When I returned home a discovered that the New York jury unanimously convicted Trump on all 34 felony counts in his falsification of documents case. The inevitable appeal of this conviction with be protracted and costly  and there is no assurance that Trump will not be put under some form of incarceration, like house arrest.  More importantly he may lose the election because of the independents and Haley voters who will not vote for a convicted felon or already think Trump is not Presidential material.

The other thing that on a day without a Trump conviction would be catastrophic was that my portfolio dropped in value by 1.5%.

It may be serendipity but in the morning today I made my first donation to Joe Biden.

When Suzette came home we watched the news and then decided we deserved a good meal. I wanted potatoes au gratin and we still had 1/2  bag of beautiful large asparagus, so Suzette suggested combining a layer of asparagus between two layers of thinly sliced potatoes.

I thinly cut four russet potatoes and sliced the asparaguses lengthwise to less tha 6 inches, so they fit crosswise in a 6 x 9 inch Pyrex baking dish and lay them on top of the bottom layer of potatoes. Suzette then found and made a recipe by Martha Stewart that sauced the dish with a Mornay sauce (a cheese enriched cream sauce). Suzette used Jarlsberg cheese that is similar in texture and taste to Swiss or Gruyere cheese.

The result was superb. Suzette created a fabulous new dish that we will make many times for dinner parties in the future when we have large tender asparagus.

I wanted duck, so Suzette fetched the package of two pre-cooked duck halves that I recently bought at Costco for $20.00 from the garage freezer and put one half in a Pyrex baking dish and when the potato dish was finished put the duck in the oven for fifteen minutes to re-heat and crisp the skin.

While the potatoes were cooking we carried three bottles to the wine cellar in the basement to cellar and after Suzette went back upstairs I rummaged around looking for a bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape but found a bottle of 2009 Chilean Vina Paralillo Arenal Carmenere that looked interesting. I must have collected this bottle at least ten years ago when I was still scouring wine stores for interesting discounted wines. When I opened the bottle we discovered a dark complex heavy wine that tasted of cooked sweet berries to Suzette. I noticed the intense complexity that occurs in a long cellared good wine. To describe the wine in one word, “fabulous”.

We sipped the wine and watched Dallas go on a shooting spree against Minnesota in game five of their Western Conference play off and the continuing coverage of the Trump criminal trial. The conclusion most trial commenters had was either that Trump finally had to face the consequences of his actions in a court of law like every other American citizen or that regardless of what happens now, this was a historic event in American history, a former President being tried and convicted of election related felonies.

When the duck was roasted, I carved the wing, breast, leg and thigh into  slices and plated them equally and Suzette added squares of the potatoes and Asparagus au gratin and I poured glasses of the carmenere.

Almost immediately Suzette and I agreed that this was great meal defined by me as when a great meal is served with a great wine. 

Tonight may have even been better than great. It may have been fabulous, when you are surprised by the quality of the wine and one or more creative elements of the food.

As Suzette stated, “It was a great meal to start our trip to Michigan.”

During the meal, Luke called and we talked to him for a while and discussed visiting him and Rebecca and Mickie in New York for my birthday on July 3. I will be 78 years of age.

Bon Appetit