November 10, 2011 Sushi and Quince and Pear Tart.

November 10, 2011 Sushi and Quince and Pear Tart.

We woke up and decided to turn the remaining pears and quinces at home into a pear and quince tart. So while watching a soccer match we peeled fruit and Suzette made a new pie crust recipe using wine and butter. Then Suzette made simple syrup using 2 cups of sugar with two cups of water and after the sugar went into solution we added the approximately 8 cups of fruit and started simmering it for about three hours. 

At around 11:00 a.m. we went shopping.  First we went to Pro Market where we bought eggs, milk, shrimp, avocados, and cojita cheeses and shredded Asadero cheese for a shrimp enchilada recipe Suzette wants to try.  We then stopped at several thrift stores, including St. John’s Thrift Store on Central at 12^th where we purchased a lovely sushi set with four tea bowls, dipping bowls and chop stick rests for $2.00.

Suzette, then wanted to go to RestoreIt and I wanted to go to Ta Lin to buy ingredients for sushi, so we could try our new sushi set.  At RestoreIt, Suzette bought a four drawer metal file cabinet for $25.00 and at Ta Lin we bought fresh shitaki and Miataki mushrooms, a Japanese eggplant, some shallots, canned pimientos for our favorite Spanish tapa, Swedish pearled sugar crystals for baking, medium firm tofu, packages of filets of salmon, red aji tuna and an octopus tentacle and seaweed salad, a fresh diakon and ginger root. 

When we arrived home at 1:00 p.m. we were hungry and Suzette suggested that we eat sushi.  So I fetched our prepared wasabi horseradish packed in a plastic tube and pickled slices of ginger in a plastic bottle and the bag of pickled cucumber strips I made the other day from the fridge.  I then thinly sliced one half of the fresh daikon and put those slices into the bag of pickled cucumbers, while I sliced the fish and octopus into thin slices and put them on a large plate, which they filled.  I then heated saki and sprinkled sushi flavoring over about 1 ½ cups of PPI rice and heated it made green tea and we put all of that on the table and ate sushi for about an hour while we watched the post-election Maher show and talked to Willy.  Luke is camping at White Sands.

After lunch I thinly sliced the remaining daikon and one cucumber and threw them in a bag with the pickling liquid from the PPI pickled cucumbers while watching Texas A&M play Alabama, which may turn out to be the best college football game of the year.

At around 6:00 p.m. we discussed dinner.  We were not hungry enough to eat Suzette’s proposed shrimp enchiladas, but decided upon Suzette’s suggestion that we bake the quince and pear tarts and eat that for dinner.  So Suzette took the pie crust from the fridge and rolled it into one large and two small circles and pinched the edges, so they would stand up to hold the liquid from the fruit and then filled and baked them in the oven until the crust turned golden brown.  After the Kansas State-TCU game I went to Lowe’s and purchased a carton of Kemp’s vanilla ice cream ($3.50) made with real vanilla bean and put scoops of vanilla ice cream on the warm quince and pear tart and ate a belated but lovely dessert for our large sushi lunch.

Bon Appètit

November 4, 2012 Grilled Teriyaki Salmon, steamed sugar snap peas and rice

We watched the morning new shows and then Suzette made the teriyaki marinade from our Japanese cookbook:

7 Tbsp. dark soy

7 Tbsp. Saki

7 Tbsp. Aji Mirin

1 Tbsp sugar.

Heat the ingredients until the sugar goes into solution.

Then Suzette cut off about 1/3 of the 2 ½ lb. salmon filet I had bought at Costco on Friday evening and we put the rest into a freezer bag with the marinade and put it in the fridge.  The cut off third was also put in a freezer bag in the fridge for fish tacos. 

I worked all day on my brief, but stopped around 4:00 to ride ten miles and then when Suzette came home from work she cut a length of 1X6 inch cedar board long enough to hold the salmon and Luke went to Walgreen’s to fetch a refill bottle of propane so we could grill the salmon.  Then while I showered Suzette fired up the grill and grilled the salmon and stripped the threads from about 1 cup of sugar snap peas and steamed them and put the last of the wild and basmati rice medley into a pyrex baking dish.  When I returned to the kitchen, I covered the pyrex dish and heated the rice.  Suzette removed the salmon to a plate from the cedar board and brought the salmon in from the grill.  It was a darkened to an almost black color from several bastings with the teriyaki sauce.  

Willy and Suzette and I plated up plates with peas, rice and salmon.  The salmon was fabulous, tender moist and with a rich, savory teriyaki flavor with that saucy flavor penetrating deeply into its flesh.  One of the best Teriyaki Salmons I have ever eaten.  The use of the cedar board is the secret to keeping the teriyaki flavor entact and preventing the salmon from the teriyaki sauce burning and the salmon drying out.

The rice was moist but still very sticky and crumbly and the sugar snap peas were soft and tender. We all used chop sticks to mix fish and peas and rice into bite sized clumps and drank Concannon Sauvignon Blanc white wine with the meal. 

For dessert we heated bowls with a slice of lovely apple cake that Luke had baked and then topped it with a mound of fresh whipped cream and garnished the whipped cream with fresh raspberries from Costco and a drizzle of Trimbach Framboise liquour.  A wonderful dinner.   

 Bon Appètit  

November 3, 2012 A PPI dinner with lots of help from Luke

November 3, 2012 A PPI dinner with lots of help from Luke

I worked all day on a brief and then took a ride.  Suzette worked all day at a conference for health professionals at Sandia Resort.  So we were both too tired to cook, but very hungry, so as soon as Suzette got home, she fetched cheese and a beer from the fridge and we started eating cheese and drinking a beer.  I then got some Leyden and Five Grain Kavli from the fridge and spread butter on the Kavli slices and then slices of Leyden and ate some of those.  I then spread the last of the coarse Braunschweiger on buttered slices of Kavli until my hunger had abated.     

Luke and I had gone to the Farmers’ Market in the morning and he had bought turnips and beets and felt like cooking.  So Luke sliced up turnips and beets and sautéed them in skillet with olive oil and some garlic and then added their greens and he heated his PPI Vegetable soup.  When the soup was heated, we scooped Luke’s sautéed beets and turnips into hot bowls of soup and had a pleasant and fresh, hot dish.  Luke ate the rest of the sautéed vegetable on some heated PPI wild and basmati rice.

Bon Appètit  

November 2, 2012 Pizza and Vegetable soup

November 2, 2012 Pizza and Vegetable soup

I shopped at Costco after my seminar ended on Friday evening and bought a salmon filet and a fresh ready to bake large pepperoni pizza on sale for $5.99.  When I returned home, we decided to heat the pizza.  She sliced portabella mushrooms and I sliced some red onion thinly and we laid them on top of the pepperoni and she baked the pizza on a large gel filled baking sheet.

 I fetched a bottle of La Granja red Rioja wine (Trader Joe’s $5.99) from the basement. 
Luke had cooked a vegetable soup with sweet and russet potatoes, onions, carrots, turnips and several other vegetables that he then creamed in the blender after trying unsuccessfully to cream it in the Cuisinart, thanks to Suzette’s suggestion.  

So we each had a bowl of Luke’s rich turmeric colored vegetable soup and Willy and Suzette and I ate several pieces of pizza. Luke ate several bowls of soup.

Bon Appètit  

November 5, 2012 Pasta in Pesto and sautéed beets, red onions, zucchini and pork

November 5, 2012 Pasta in Pesto and sautéed beets, red onions, zucchini and pork

Suzette had a dinner meeting this evening and I road at 4:30 p.m.  When I went to the kitchen at 6:00 p.m. after showering, Luke had begun to cook dinner.  He was boiling a pot of Italian organic Gemilli pasta (Costco) and slicing fresh beets he had bought at the Farmers’ Market last Saturday and had begun to sauté them in a skillet with a diced clove of fresh garlic from o garden and some olive oil.  I asked if I could add some shallot to his beet sauté and he said, “Yes.”, so I took one of the shallots I had bought at the Farmers’ Market on Saturday ($6.00 per lb.) and minced 1/2 of the shallot and put it in Luke’s beet sauté. 
I saw that Luke had laid the three Mexican squashes on the kitchen table and so, like coming in with a jazz solo in the middle of a song, I fetched the PPI Pork steak from last Monday’s meal and a half of a red onion (Pro’s Market $.79/lb.) and sliced one of the Mexican squashes (Pro’s Market $.50/lb.) lengthwise into four 3/8 inch thick slices and sliced rounds of onion about ¼ inch thick and minced the rest of the shallot.  Then I heated some grape seed oil in a large skillet on medium high heat and, when heated, laid the slices of red onion and squash and shallot in the skillet to brown.  I then sliced the pork into ½ inch thick slices.  The pork was still reddish pink in the middle, so needed a little more cooking time to dispel the redness and to warm, so I laid the pork slices on top of the red onion slices and, after I turned the sautéed squash slices, moved the pork slices to the top of the squash so they would not have contact with the hot skillet and overcook and toughen.   After about fifteen minutes and several tests of the pasta for doneness, we decided that the pasta was soft enough to eat and Luke stirred a healthy scoop of Suzette’s homemade pesto and the 1 1/2 cup of Pecorino Romano cheese I had grated into the pasta.  By this time the pork had lost it pinkness and the onions and squash had caramelized and taken on bits of brown color, so I turned off the heat.
Willy was at home so we called him to dinner and Luke put the pasta in a bowl on the table in the T.V. room and we watched “It is always Sunny in Philadelphia” and ate a lovely dinner.  I poured out the last of the Toad Hollow Rosé and enjoyed dinner immensely.   The wine had mellowed in the last three or four days of chilling in the fridge.  I liked it better a little oxidized and less bubbly and zippy, as it was when we opened it .  

I love seeing Luke put together dinner menus that make sense and his generosity of allowing me to improvise a side dish to my liking.  Luke even ate some of the caramelized squash slices and red onion, which made a lovely garnish for his pasta dish.  Could there be an “Eating with Suzette and Luke and Bob” in the future?

Bon Appètit

November 1, 2012 Day of the Dead Dinner – Crabapple/Mint glazed Roasted Duck, Roasted Vegetable Medley, sautéed Greens and turnips and beets and Wild and Basmati Rice Medley

November 1, 2012 Day of the Dead Dinner – Crabapple/Mint glazed Roasted Duck, Roasted Vegetable Medley, sautéed Greens and turnips and beets and Wild and Basmati Rice Medley

We set a date for tonight to meet with Luke and Willy to discuss our estates and each of our estate plans.

Suzette drove to Santa Rosa and did not get back until around 6:00 p.m. and I worked until about 6:00, but I had decided to roast a duck because the package of two duck halves that is sold by Costco is easy to prepare and serves four easily because it comprises four sections that practically fall apart when roasted on a roasting pan: two thigh and leg sections and two wind and breast sections ($13.99).

Luke arrived at around 3:00 p.m. and when we initially discussed dinner plans he asked if we had fresh kale in the garden and I said, “Yes”.  I took a double cryovac package of duck out of the freezer and left it in the sink to thaw at about 4:30 p.m.

At 6:00 p.m. I asked Luke if he wanted to gather some vegetables from the garden and I grabbed a basket and we went to the garden.  Suzette soon followed and we picked five or six each lovely small turnips and beets and a small basket full of kale leaves.

Then Luke and I cleaned and chopped the turnips and beets and kale leaves and I started a pot with 4 cups of water to boil on the stove.  When the water came to a boil I poured 2/3 cup of wild rice into the boiling water and let it cook for thirty minutes, while Suzette completed the thawing of the duck and the placing it on the roasting pan in the oven.  Luke then went to the basement to fetch the PPI roasted vegetable medley from Monday night’s dinner and put the vegetables in a small skillet on the stove with a cover and a bit of water to heat.

After thirty minutes I poured an additional 1 cup of basmati rice into the simmering rice pot and let it cook for about 25 minutes more, when Suzette removed it because it was fully cooked.   

Luke then took a large deep sided skillet and added olive oil and salt and sautéed the sliced turnips and beets and then added their leaves and the kale and covered them with a wok lid to allow them to steam a bit.  We were all shooting for dinner at 7:00 p.m. when Willy said he would return from Soccer practice.

The only thing left to decide was what sauce to use for the duck.  I offered to make orange sauce but no one wanted that.  Suzette suggested using the crabapple/mint sauce she had made to glaze the duck and we all agreed to that.  After the duck was glazed Suzette suggested pulled a plastic container of candied quinces from the fridge and let Luke and Willy, who had returned at around 6:45 taste them.  They both liked them, so we decided to use them instead of a sauce for the duck. 

I wanted the evening’s meal to be special, so I went to the basement and fetched a bottle of 2006 Domaine du Vieux Télégraphe, “La Crau”, Chateauneuf du Pape, one of the great Rhone Valley wines.     We opened it at 7:00 p.m. so it did not have very long to breath.  Suzette tasted it and said it needed an hour to open up, so she topped it with our new five way stopper that has a built in filter and aerator and took the duck from the oven an laid it on a wooden cutting board.  The sections were so tender that they did separate without cutting and we each took a quarter of duck and a scoop of the rice medley and some PPI heated roasted vegetables and some of Luke’s lovely kale and fresh turnip and beet sauté and I poured glasses of wine and we sat down to a feast and family dinner and discussion of each of our estates and a family game plan for the future. 

The only problem with the meal was the wine had a large quantity of finely granulated sediment that clouded and detracted from the clarity of the wine and believe me when I say that the Vieux Telegraphe had great clarity.  Perhaps that is why I was able to buy it for a good price at Costco.

The candied quince was lovely with the duck and the fresh and roasted vegetables were great.  The rice was actually a little dry but very edible, more like eating a thoroughly cooked grain than a sticky mass of porridge.

After dinner we shared a small box of hand made chocolates from Todos Santos ($18.00) that I bought for and gave to Suzette that contained a red devil's head truffle, an orange pumpkin with a green stem fashioned from marzipan and filled with pumpkin flavored chocolate, a molded witch's finger of chocolate with a gold tipped finger nail  and a white drapped ghost molded in white chocolate and decorated with black eyes.

So, all in all, we cooked and enjoyed a very successful fall meal, which made our discussion of death and business, much more pleasant.

Bon Appétit

October 31, 2012 Halloween – A Strange Day of Food

October 31, 2012  Halloween – A Strange Day of Food

I awoke with no plan for food other than to have some yogurt and fruit for breakfast.  Last Sunday I made a fruit salad with ½ papaya, a pineapple and the juice of three limes purchased at Pro’s Ranch Market a week earlier and ½ of a Crenshaw melon grown in our garden.  So I filled a bowl with fruit salad and granola and a large scoop of Lala Mango yogurt (Pro’s $2.99 for 32 oz.) for breakfast.

I became hungry again around 1:00 p.m. and called Mike, but he was going to Taj Mahal and I had gone there for lunch with him recently, so I decided to make what I am in the mood for these days, a bowl of noodle soup.   So I heated a pot of water and threw into it some dehydrated dashi, two chopped up pieces of cooked ham, a handful of sugar snap peas, 2 Tbsp. of diced onion, two kinds of noodles (a round wrapped Chinese wheat flour one and a Vietnamese rice stick one) three fish cake balls, some chopped fresh garlic greens and basil from the garden, three sliced water chestnuts a sliced stalk of celery and a green onion from the garden, two mushrooms sliced thinly, a dash of mushroom soy sauce, a dash of rice cooking wine and a dash of sesame oil and about 2 Tbsp. of brown miso.  When the soup had simmered for about ten minutes and the noodles softened, it was ready.  I ate it with Hoisin Sauce and Shirachi red chili cause and a cup of green tea and read the recent interview of Obama in Rolling Stone magazine.  A pretty good lunch for a throw together.

When Suzette arrived home at around 6:00 p.m. it was time to get the three large bags of candy and music ready for the hundreds of small trick or treaters who visit our neighborhood starting as sunset every year.

Our Huning Castle Neighborhood is a popular, major attraction for two very different groups of people for two very different reasons on two very special nights of the year.  One is Christmas Eve when every house decorates its yard with luminarias when people pilgrimage to Old Town and the County Club area to celebrate the coming of the Christ child by walking or driving the streets of our neighborhood to view the yards filled with luminarias and decorations.  The other wonderful evening is Halloween when children of all ages dress up in their most creative costumes and trick or treat from door to door.

We usually buy three or four large bags of individually wrapped chocolate bars of candy at Costco to give out.  So at around 6:30 p.m. the first of our small visitors arrived.  Every year Suzette and I come up with a question that we ask before giving a treat and this year Suzette came up with the question, “What are the names of the persons running for President?”  We love to ask a question because it breaks the monotony of just handing out candy and often opens up interesting insights into a child or parent who accompanies them’s thinking.  This year we got some great answers, like “Captain America” and “That other guy”.  Most of our visitors are from lower income families that live in the areas near our home and most of them seemed to be for Obama, so asking this year’s question gave us an opportunity to feel good that we were subtly getting out the vote.   I noticed that this year I had resisted eating the Halloween candy until Halloween night and then I ate lots of candy as Suzette gave out bags of it.   As Suzette and I ate candy and gave out candy and queried kids, I realized that Suzette and I were really enjoying sharing with our visitors the joy associated with Halloween, this special celebration of and for

the kid in all of us, as each of us connected with our childhood memories and thrill of celebrating Halloween and trick or treating and gorging ourselves on lots of cheap candy.   

By about 8:00 p.m. all of our 500 pieces of candy were gone, so we closed the door and turned off the porch light.  I asked what Suzette she wanted for dinner and she said, “I do not want to cook.  How about a pizza?”  So we decided to call Old Town Pizza Parlor and order a pizza.  We looked at their menu on line and decided that we would order a plain 16” cheese pizza ($11.99) and add our own toppings.  Suzette suggested some of her homemade pesto and I called Willy and he agreed to pick up the pizza on his way home from the gym.  So I started heated a large skillet with a bit of olive oil and cut up the last two slices of Genoa salami, about 2 oz. of slices and diced red onion, 1 oz. of Spanish Manzanilla olives, 2 oz. of PPI sautéed Italian sausage, some chopped garlic greens from the garden, and three sliced portabella mushrooms.  Then Suzette found and added a couple of Tbsp.s of pesto. These ingredients when sautéed together for a few minutes made a very pleasing medley of flavors.  I then gathered several opened bottles of red wine, including a Valley of the Moon Sangiovese, a Hafner Cabernet Sauvignon, and a 2008 Zichichi Family Vineyard from Healdsburg, CA’s Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon.   

When Willy arrived with the box of pizza, we each plated slices and garnished them with the topping medley.  I heated mine in the microwave until it sizzled and the ingredients sank into the melted cheese.  We were in a great kidlike mood as we ate our hot fresh pizza with glasses of red wine and watched Colbert Report and John Stewart’s hilarious antics.

Bon Appètit