March 14, 2025 Lunch - Pita pocket sandwiches with grilled lamb Dinner - Julia Child’s Red cabbage with chestnuts and Roast Duck

 March 14, 2025 Lunch - Pita pocket sandwiches with grilled lamb Dinner - Julia Child’s Red cabbage with chestnuts and Roast Duck

Today was topped off with a dish from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, my bible, that I had never cooked before Red Cabbage and Chestnuts. Here is the recipe.

I started the day at 8:30 with a chocolate Croissant and a cup of tea.

An interesting thing occurred in the morning. I received a call from the Bernalillo county Treasurer’s Office telling me that two checks I sent had gotten torn in the mail. At first I thought it was a scam, so I said I would come to the Treasurer’s office to replace the checks in trade for the torn checks.

So at 11:00 I drove to the Treasurer’s Office and sure enough they had my checks with the torn envelope, so I replaced the checks and drove home.

Then at 11:30 I decided to make an early lunch. I decided to go totally Mediterranean. I cut a pita in half and heated each half so they could be opened as a pocket. I stuffed each with creamy feta, tomato slices, onion slices, heated lamb slices, lettuce, and tzatziki and added dill pickles, two radishes, four or five pimiento stuffed green olives, and the two remaining tomato slices to the plate.

After lunch I thawed 1/2 roasted duck and four quail.

Mar it came at 2:30 and showed me how to replace batteries in the battery powered motion detectors.

Then at 3:45 Jessica, a location person for a movie came to take pictures of the house for a possible movie.

Then I worked on two letters and got one out by 4:30 and took the other one to the post office at 5:00.

When I returned home we discussed dinner and settled on Red Cabbage with chestnuts, since Susan gave me a box with four dozen husked and cleaned Chestnuts.

I sliced thinly a sweet onion, two carrots and then quartered 12 chestnuts, and opened a bottle of 2023 Jadot Beaujolais Villages. Then I chopped   1/2 of a head of red cabbage and a Fuji apple and Suzette sautéed those ingredients and added 1 cup each of the red wine and beef broth.

We the cooked the ingredients covered in a casserole for one hour. 

After one hour Suzette re-heated the roasted duck for 30 minutes in a heated 375 degree oven until the skin crisped.

I sliced the duck leg, wing, and breast which yielded five or six slices of duck that I placed on the pile of red cabbage and I poured glasses of Beaujolais Villages. I also toasted and buttered three slices of baguette.

The dinner was fabulous and afterwards I ate slices of slightly over ripe brie on slices of baguette with sips of Beaujolais. I have rarely tasted a better pairing than the brie and Beaujolais.o

Later I poured a sip of cognac that I  sipped as I ate two squares of Belgian milk chocolate as we watched a lovely Movie on Netflix “the  Storied Life of A.J. Fikry.

Later we watched the Buenos Aires episode of Someone is Feeding Phil and recorded the names of the restaurants he visited.

We went to bed at 10:30, Suzette to sleep and I to blog.

Bon Appetit