February 4, 2025 Lunch - Pho Linh. Dinner - Chicken Mole with Rice and Steamed Broccoli

 February 4, 2025 Lunch - Pho Linh. Dinner - Chicken Mole with Rice and Steamed Broccoli

I woke up at 8:30 after being up for several hours trying to download the Left Hand of Darkness.

I watched the market start to recover from the last few days of losses. By the end of the day it was up sharply thanks to a nice rebound in the tech names. My portfolio gained 1.8% on the day but is still down 7% from its all time high last November.

At 9:30 I ate a toasted bagel and slice of baguette spread with cream cheese and garnished with onions, Gravad lax, and capers.

The big news of the day was notification from India of receipt of my PAN application. The government agency that processes applications will proceed to verify my identity.

Suzette worked at home today so at 1:00 we drove to Pho Linh, my new favorite Vietnamese restaurant. I ordered stir fried flat noodles with vegetables and mixed seafood. Suzette ordered beef Pad Thai. Both were excellent and huge portions that we carried over half home.

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I then drove Suzette to her doctor’s appointment at Kaseman Hospital and drove to Cafe Istanbul to buy pita and double cream feta, neither of which they had. I bought yogurt milk and Middle Eastern candy, instead.

Then I read in the car until Suzette called to pick her up.

We drove to El Super and shopped, buying: orange juice, mangoes, oranges, a pineapple, a papaya, lemons, limes, red onions, romaine lettuce, broccoli, snow peas, mango yogurt, smoked pork cutlets, chicken quarters, carrots, and Fuji apples.

We arrived at home at 4:00 and I separated the legs from the 6 leg quarters and skinned and boned and cubed the six thighs for Suzette to confit.

Suzette simmered the six drumsticks plus the skin and thigh bones with a mirepoix of celery, onion, and carrot to make a stock and cook the drumsticks.

Dinner - At 6:00 I Boiled two cups of chicken stock and cooked a cup of rice. While the rice was cooking I removed the meat from three of the boiled drumsticks that Suzette combined with a cup of Blanca’s mole sauce and heated on the stove. 

I also removed the flowerets from a head of broccoli and put them in the steamer with water and when the rice was cooked, Suzette steamed the broccoli. I fetched two Negra Modelos and opened them and we each served ourselves plates of rice with chicken mole and steamed broccoli. I chopped and added a handful of pecans to the mole, not understanding that Suzette wanted to garnish the mole with chopped pecans.

It was a great dinner. After dinner we watched Finding your Roots.  Tonight master chefs Jose Andres and Sean Sherman were featured.

We each ate a chocolate chip cookie we bought at Chokola in Taos this last weekend for dessert.

We also combined the leftover chicken mole with the leftover rice and I picked the remaining meat from the boiled chicken and Suzette poured the chicken broth into a container, so we will have ingredients for two more meals and a leftover chicken mole meal.

We watched some news and then Suzette went to bed at 8:30. I stayed up to watch Frontline about the pursuit, capture, imprisonment, and release of Venezuelan President Maduro’s bag man named Alex Saad until 10:00 and then took out the trash and went to bed at 10:30 and blogged and went to bed.

Today the President announced that he wants the US to take ownership or control of the Gaza Strip and develop it into the Mediterranean Riviera. My question is if that occurs, will the children born to Palestinians who remain be US citizens and be able to immigrate to the US?  If the Supreme Court does not overturn birthright citizenship, that is a probability.

Bon Appetit