January 11, 2025 Trip to Santa Fe Lunch - Rowley Farmhouse Ales. Dinner - 4 Cheese Baked Cassarecce Pasta with ground beef, onion, and mushrooms.

January 11, 2025 Trip to Santa Fe  Lunch - Rowley Farmhouse Ales. Dinner - 4 Cheese Baked Cassarecce Pasta with ground beef, onion, and mushrooms.

I woke up at 6:30 and showered and dressed and ate a bowl of granola with milk, yogurt and blueberries.

At 8:40 we drove to Santa Fe and arrived at the Wheelright Museum at 9:50. We were the first to enter at 10:00. We came to see the dresses of Valarde, Hardin, and Bagshaw, which were impressive, but the permanent collection and temporary exhibits were amazing. Also the Case Trading Post is wonderful with really impressive Indian crafts for sale.

                                                             Helen Hardin

                Helen Hardin’s  stencil for the heart line deer in my painting below

After the Wheelright we drove to Stephen’s and bought the Allessio  corkscrew in the shape of a woman, which turned out to be extremely heavy duty, so should last for years.

Rowley Farmhouse Ales -

Then we drove around the block to the Rowley Farmhouse Ales restaurant. Farmhouse is a misnomer. The menu of food items and beers is extensive.

There are several small Production Flemish beers some of which are priced at $65.00 per bottle.

Our waitress was excellent, the best we have had in years. She brought Suzette small glasses with tastes of several different beers among the over 20 on tab until Suzette settled on the one she wanted , a Scoth ale. It only took me one taste because there was only one cider on the menu, a blackberry cider that was delicious. 

We were equally Impressed with the menu selections, but we quickly decided to share a crawfish pore boy sandwich and a Southwestern Cobb Salad. There was a choice of sides with the sandwich and we chose the onion rings when our waitress told us in her opinion they were the best in the world.

She may have been correct because when the sandwich came there was a large pile of thinly sliced lightly battered onion strips that were really delicious along side a pore boy roll smothered with a large pile of crawfish Etoufee. We disregarded the large Cobb salad and both dove into the warm Etoufee and onion rings. Then when we had finished the crawfish pore boy and most of the onion rings we threw the remaining onion ropings onto the salad and I ate most of it after mixing the ingredients and putting a portion on the sandwich platter for Suzette. There was more than enough food for both of us to feel really full. Each of the dishes was $18 and the drinks were $6 so the total was under $50 without a tip.

                 The Crawfish Etoufee with the shoestring onion rings

We will return to this restaurant often because the food, beverages, and service are all excellent and for Santa Fe the prices for the quality and quantity of the food are more than fair and most importantly, it is only a couple of blocks from Stephen’s.

We decided to return home after lunch rather than drive downtown to visit the Fine Arts Museum to see the Ken Price Exhibit and I am glad we did because we were tired when we arrived home and took naps.

I got to 2300 steps for the day so it was a pretty good day of steps for me.

I took my nap in front of the TV watching the two NFL wild card games which were a little one sided with the Ravens and the Texans dominating.

Dinner - At 6:00 we organized dinner. We had agreed to make a baked pasta dish using the great melting cheeses we bought at a discount, my favorite melting cheeses, Tallegio and Racalette.

I chopped 1/2 of a sweet onion we bought at Costco and three large white mushrooms and four cloves of garlic that Suzette sautéed with some ground beef and ground oregano from our garden, while she boiled some Cassarecce pasta and made a cream sauce with a flour and butter roux and milk.

Then I diced the soft Racalette and tallegio cheeses and thinly sliced some cheddar and grated a chunk of Pecorino Romano to dust the top with.

Suzette then combined the three cheeses with the cream sauce and when the cheeses melted mixed the sauce with the sautéed ingredients and poured the combined ingredients into a large soufflé dish layered with spinach leaves and dusted the top with the grated Pecorino and put the dish into the oven to bake at 350 degrees for 40 minutes.

I opened a bottle of Kirkland Chianti Classico Riserva that was adequate but had the problem that many Kirkland monopole wines have, they represent the grape but have no character or sense of terroir. But the wine went well with the creamy pasta dish and only expressed its shortcomings after the meal when we sipped the last of our glass. 

This dish went as far above hamburger helper as one can go in my opinion and still be in that category.  I can not tell you how wonderful melted tallegio and Racalette are with pasta and the addition of ground beef and sweet onions and garlic and oregano only enhanced their flavors.

It was a great day of food.  After dinner we watched the Age of Adelaine which had an interesting plot about how a girl ceased to age at the age of 29 years of age for over 100 years.

We went to bed after the movie at 9:30 after a very pleasant day.

Bon Appetit