September 8, 2020 Lunch – Costco hot dog Dinner – Steamed Stuffed Red Snapper with sautéed Spaghetti Squash and spinach and Cream Sauce

 September 8, 2020 Lunch – Costco hot dog Dinner – Steamed Stuffed Red Snapper with sautéed Spaghetti Squash and spinach and Cream Sauce

Lunch was a throw away but dinner was memorable.

I walked ½ mile and ate granola, blueberries, banana, milk and yogurt.

I then drove to a meeting until 12:15, when I went to Costco and filled the tank. I then drove to Talin and bought, tofu, hoisin, fish cake meatballs, fresh egg white noodles, coconut milk, a fresh 2 ½ lb. red snapper and ginger root.

Another terrible day in the market.  I napped for a couple of hours in the afternoon.

We had decided to use the baked spaghetti squash for dinner. The spinach was getting old, so I wanted to use it.  When Suzette arrived at home we decided to steam the whole red snapper in the steaming oven and serve it with squash and spinach.  Suzette also added piñon nuts and dried cranberries to the squash sauté.

We decided to use s Swedish recipe for stuffed fish that stuffs the stomach cavity with a mixture of herbs, butter, and green onion.  I went to the garden and picked about eight chives and a few sprigs of tarragon.  I chopped up the herbs and a green onion and added butter and stuffed the mixture into the stomach cavity and lay the fish on a steaming rack.  Suzette found the proper setting for a 2 ½ lb. Steamed fish, which was 43 minutes and checked the water level and steamed the fish. 

When Suzette removed the fish from the steamer there was about ½ cup of liquid in the bottom of the pan holding the fish.  I asked Suzette to make a cream sauce with the steaming liquid.  She melted a T. of butter and stirred in a T. of flour to make a roux.  She then added the steaming liquid and then about ¼ cup of half and half,, 1/2 tsp. of lemon zest, lemon juice, and a T. of the herb stuffing from the fish.  The result was a delicious thick cream sauce.

Suzette the ladle several Spoonfuls of the squash and spinach mixture into a pasta bowl and I added a filet from the steamed fish to the top of the squash. Suzette then added a large dollop of cream sauce to the top of the fish filet.  The result was very attractive.

When we started cooking I chilled a bottle of 2018 Domaine du Touch Cotes du Gascogne White wine (Trader Joe’s $7.99?). It’s flinty flavor  turned out to be perfect for the slightly gamey red snapper and cream sauce.   

This was an amazingly wonderful meal.  The kind of dish one would find in a high end farm to table restaurant, like Blue Hill in NYC. The lightness and freshness of the fish was exquisite, the squash grown in Suzette’s garden in Los Lunas had been roasted and then blanched in the microwave and then sautéed with nuts, spinach, and cranberries was also incredibly fresh.  The aromatic cream sauce was the heaviest part of the meal, made with the fish stock and herbs baked in the fish was Devine, and bound all the ingredients together.

The fact that the flinty wine contrasted with the fresh delicate fish and vegetable flavors made the dinner even more interesting.

After dinner I heated a square of blueberry cobbler and surrounded it with scoops of vanilla ice cream for a delicious dessert with a cup of tea.

We watched Rachel interview Michael Cohen and the Dallas lose to Las Vegas and then to bed.

An owl hooting outside our window last night had kept us up, so we went to bed early.

Bon Appetit

September 6, 2020 Lunch – Salmon Salad Salad. Dinner Roasted Chicken and Potatoes with Garlic and Rosemary with Steamed Broccoli

September 6, 2020  Lunch – Salmon Salad Salad. Dinner Roasted Chicken and Potatoes with Garlic and Rosemary with Steamed Broccoli

This was Labor Day and I took a leisurely approach to it. Suzette went for a mile walk at 7:30 and while she was gone I toasted a slice of bagel and spread it with goat cheese and garnished it with sliced red onion and Gravad Lax.  

I usually wait ½ hour to let the food digest a bit for energy before I exercise.  When Suzette returned I rode 5 miles on my bike.  It was a little more difficult today for some reason and took two sugar pills.

When I returned I rested and watched the replay of yesterday’s stage of the Tour and then worked for an hour for my new transaction.

At 12:30 I made a salad with lettuce, a diced tomato and small cucumber plus the PPI salmon salad and a drizzle of Spanish olive oil.

I then read the Joe Biden article in the New New Yorker and rested.

I awakened at 3:30.  Suzette had mentioned roasting the chicken we had thawed yesterday with rosemary and garlic.  That recipe struck me as being very Greek or Lebanese, so I immediately thought about roasted potatoes with garlic and rosemary and a drizzle of olive oil.

I put a bottle of 2018 Barton & Guestier Les Petites Parcelles Vouvray into the freezer to chill.  I bought this Vouvray at Total Wine for about $13.50.  I have always recognized B &G as a reliable French exporter.  The label says they have been in the wine business since 1725.  The wine was clean tasting with a bit of citrus and sweetness.  Suzette thought the wine’s crispness and sweetness balanced the predominantly oily garlic flavors of dinner.  Here are the winery’s tasting notes: Pale straw with green highlights. Great nose of subtle white flowers mixed with white fruits A lovely and intense wine with floral notes, peach and pear flavours. – Winery

 I cleaned the chicken we had thawed and stuffed rosemary and garlic  under its skin and rubbed it with butter like Julia Child did and roasted on a Spandex roasting frame in a ceramic baking dish filled with1/3 inch of water. I pre-heated the oven to 400 degrees and roasted the chicken for fifteen minutes and then lowered the oven temp to 350 degrees.  I peeled and cubed a large potato and tossed the cubes in olive oil and added two sliced cloves of garlic and a T. of rosemary leaves in a Pyrex baking dish covered with aluminum foil and put the potatoes into the oven to roast with the chicken.

After 45 minutes I removed the foil and tossed the potatoes and baked them another 30 minutes to brown them a bit and the removed them from the oven and recovered them with foil.

Suzette came home around 6:15 and tested the chicken for doneness.  One side was 175 degrees and the other side only 145 so we Roasted it another fifteen minutes.

I deflowered a head of broccoli and we steamed the broccoli for 8 to 10 minutes and were ready to eat.

I cut the wings and leg quarters off the chicken and placed them on the plates Suzette had placed the potatoes and some of the broccoli.

Suzette then poured glasses of Chenin Blanc and we enjoyed a wonderful dinner.

After dinner we drank glasses of lemincello over crushed ice and then bowls of Java chocolate chip ice cream garnished with five or six maraschino cherries and sauce Suzette made last year.

What a wonderful day of food, the goal of which was to have chicken breasts for chicken salad.  We also ended up with a bag of PPI broccoli.

We decided we are good cooks as we ate a great meal of roasted Greek Chicken and potatoes topped off with Suzette’s homemade lemincello and maraschino cherries over ice cream.

Bon Appetit             

September 5, 2020 Lunch – Salmon Salad Salad. Dinner – Hamburger on Creamed Spinach with Ear of Corn

 September 5, 2020 Lunch – Salmon Salad Salad. Dinner – Hamburger on Creamed Spinach with Ear of Corn

Again I watched the Tour and ate a bowl of fruit with granola, milk, and yogurt.  Suzette had gone out to garden, so at 10:00 I joined her.  I pruned the rose bushes and then dug up small trees and then helped her empty a can of garden waste.  The yard and garden are beginning to look really wonderful. 

Suzette went to Home Depot, to buy some things including fertilizer and ant poison.

When she returned we made lunch.  We used the PPI teriyaki salmon instead of tuna to make a salmon salad.  I diced two stalks of celery, about 2 oz. of red onion, and a lemon cucumber and we hard boiled four eggs.  We diced and added two of the eggs to the salad plus mayonnaise. Suzette then fetched and chopped a head of Romaine lettuce and placed a bed of lettuce in pasta bowls.  She then placed a mound of salmon salad in the middle of the lettuce and surrounded it with tomato slices for a lovely and delicious lunch.  Suzette drank the last of the Mohua New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc and I drank the last of the Famille Perrin Reserve White Cotes du Rhone.

We thawed three hamburgers.

At 6:30 I sliced four mushrooms and garlic and onion. I de-stemmed a colander full of Spinach.  Willy was climbing Jacinto peak north of Santa Fe, so had not returned to Albuquerque. Suzette sautéed two of the hamburgers and placed slices of blue cheese on them and removed them to the oven..

Then in the same skillet we sautéed the garlic, onion, and mushrooms.  When they had softened we added the spinach and cooked it covered to sweat it.  Suzette then added some cream to create a cream sauce.

   

 Suzette shucked and boiled three ears of corn.  

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When everything was cooked she covered the bottom of a pasta bowl with Creamed Spinach, mushrooms and onion and lay a hamburger on top.  Suzette served the ears of corn on a separate plates rolling them in butter.

I opened a bottle of Ripasso Superiore  had recently bought at Trader Joe’s for about $10.00.  It was heavy,

 not the smooth light red I expected.  So it is off the list.

6

 

We loved the meal.  This comfort food at its best.  We made bites of mushroom and spinach and then ate a few bites of corn and sipped wine to wash it down.

We watched Las Vegas beat Philadelphia in the Western semi-finals game seven of the Stanley Cup tournament and then watched a movie.  

Willy came by after his hike and Suzette sautéed a hamburger for him and he ate dinner with us and watched the movie with us.

When the movie was over we talked for a while and then Willy left and we went to bed.

Bon Appetit 

August 4, 2020 Lunch – PPI Shrimp and Sausage Noodle Soup and Melted Cheese Sandwiches. Dinner – Pork and White Bean Stew with tortillas and guacamole crema

August 4, 2020 Lunch – PPI Shrimp and Sausage Noodle Soup and Melted Cheese Sandwiches. Dinner – Pork and White Bean Stew with tortillas and guacamole crema

I started watching the bike race at 5:30 and at 6:30 I made breakfast of two toasted slices of bagel spread with goat cheese and layered with slices of Lax, onion, and tomato. 

 Today’s stage was a very fast pace led by the Bora team to try to put their teammate Peter Sagan back in the green jersey.  Their strategy succeeded.  No one got past them until at the sprint finish and Sagan took all the intermediate sprints to regain the green jersey.

I then walked ½ mile and stopped to talk to Barry as he was picking tomatoes to take to Taos.

When I returned I ate the PPI bowl of PPI Shrimp and Sausage Noodle Soup and made two Melted Cheese Sandwiches by toasting slices of French baguette and buttering them and adding slices of Jarlsberg cheese and slices of onion and cooking them in the microwave.

After lunch I worked on a pleading and put several of my stock positions back on.  Let’s hope the Tech meltdown is over.

I filed my pleading a couple of minutes before 5:00 and then drove to the library to return Grant and pick up The Lincoln Lawyer by Connelly.

The book club title for this month also arrived in the mail, DiMaggio, an American Knight by Durso.  So lots to read if I can tear myself away from the Tour.

Suzette came home when I returned around 5:45.  We decided to re-heat the Pork, Bean, Tomatillo sauce and Hoja Santa stew and eat it in the fresh tortillas Suzette bought today.  I made a guacamole crema with three avocados, about 3 oz.of minced onion, about 1/3 cup of Lala Mexican crema, and a couple dashes of Cholula hot sauce.

Suzette steamed and softened seven corn tortillas in a wet paper towel to soften them and we heated the stew on the stove.

Suzette fetched beers from the garage fridge and ladled bowls of stew and we made tacos by wrapping tortillas around Pork and guacamole crema and ate the rest of the stew along with them.

It was a hardy filling dinner.

After dinner we walked to the pond to look at the new crop of baby goldfish skitter around the pond as Suzette added water to it that raised the water level to submerge more vegetation/food. 

Willy came by later and ate some stew while his laundry was being washed.

We watched Las Vegas beat Vancouver in the Stanley Cup playoffs and ended the evening watching the celebration of the burning of Zozobra (gloom).

The news was all about Jeffrey Goldberg’s Atlantic article describing how Trump disparages those in the military.  Let’s hope it sticks and Trump is shown to care only about Trump and not America.

Bon Appetit 

September 3, 2020 Lunch – Reconstituted PPI Shrimp and Pork Noodle Soup Dinner – Maryland Dinner of Crab cakes, corn on the cob, sliced tomatoes and Cucumbers and Blueberry Cobbler with Vanilla ice cream

September 3, 2020 Lunch – Reconstituted PPI Shrimp and Pork Noodle Soup   Dinner – Maryland Dinner of Crab cakes, corn on the cob, sliced tomatoes and Cucumbers and Blueberry Cobbler with Vanilla ice cream

This was a near perfect day.  It started at 5:30 when I awakened and watched the Tour de France stage 6 and the business news and ate breakfast of tropical fruit salad, yogurt, and granola.

I saw a big drop coming but was consoled that I had put my stops in place.  I was a little worried when I saw the pre-open price for Apple slip below my limit sell price, but it was filled the second the market. 

 opened at my limit price.  I lost 2 1/2% today instead of 5% so I guess I should be happy. Perhaps better still is I am out of the market and the futures for tomorrow are down again.

I was inspired by a brilliant ride by the champion of Kazakhstan. Lukeshenko, so after the bike race ended around 10:15 I rode 10 miles to Rio Bravo and back with the aid of two sugar pills.

When I came home I rested and worked a bit and then at 1:00 I made lunch.  There was some Shrimp and Sausage Noodle Soup left.  I added crab broth, a whisked egg, a bundle of fresh egg white noodles, a handful of fresh spinach leaves, a heaping T. of white miso, 4 oz. of soft tofu, and two mushrooms sliced.  The result was delicious and there was a bowl left that I put in the fridge for another meal.

1I dozedhd from 3:00 until 4:00 and worked until 5:00 when I meditated for 30minutes with my group of four persons.

Suzette came home at 4:30 and met with an insurance agent while I meditated. 

At 6:00 we started dinner, I fetched three ears of fresh corn I had bought at Albertsons yesterday and shucked them.  Suzette made crab cakes from a Maryland recipe that combined bread crumbs with the crab meat and a béchamel sauce made with a flour and butter roux to which heated crab broth and the half and half were added and mixed to bind the ingredients . Then the cakes were dusted with flour and sautéed in canola oil and butter.

While Suzette was preparing the crab cakes, I sliced three red and two yellow tomatoes and a lemon Cucumber and a yellow cucumber Suzette had brought home from her garden at the Center for Ageless Living.  

We  boiled the ears of corn to cook them, then we plated the ears of corn and two crab cakes each and served ourselves slices of tomato and cucumber. We garnished the crab cakes with the PPI four in one tartare/Cocktail/Louis/mignonette sauce I made two days ago.

I went to the garage and fetched the bottle of 2019 Mohua New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc (Costco $11.49 for a 90 point wine) and poured each of us a glass.

After dinner I asked Suzette to make a blueberry cobbler.  When it as ready we ate bowls of it with vanilla ice cream.

Suzette said, “This is a perfect Maryland end of summer meal except we are missing the beach.”

I loved it. 

Bon Appetit         

  

 😁September 2, 2020 Lunch – Shrimp and Sausage Noodle Soup. Dinner – Cedar Plank Grilled Teriyaki Salmon with rice and Catalan Spinach

I woke up around 7:30.  I watched the Market open and Stage 5 of the Tour de France while I ate a bowl of Tropical fruit salad with yogurt and granola and a dash of milk.

Then I drove to a doctor’s appointment and afterwards I drove t Albertsons. I bought 2 ½ gallons of ice cream, a container of yogurt, bananas, a gallon of milk, and 6 ears of corn.

I was granted a 10% senior discount because it was the first Wednesday of the month.

I then drove to Sprouts and bought a swordfish steak, a Aji tuna steak, and a red bell pepper.

After I returned home and put up the groceries I re-heated the Shrimp Noodle Soup after adding about 1/3 lb. of Jimmie Dean Sausage plus two leaves of diced Napa cabbage.

I watched the Market close and checked my portfolio.  The Dow was up an astonishing 462 points and the NASDAQ was up.  My portfolio actually lost about $1000 mostly due to a drop of $2.67 in Apple, but is still at its highest level ever.

I watched the finish of the Tour again to try to understand what happened exactly.

At 4:00 Suzette arrived and soaked in the hot tub and I made a batch of chocolate chip cookies.

Then at 6:30 I attended the Neighborhood annual meeting.  Then when Willy arrived, I started preparing dinner.  We had a container of PPI rice and the teriyaki marinated salmon, so all we needed to prepare was the Catalan Spinach. I de-stemmed a colander of spinach leaves, diced an apple, and diced 3 oz. of onion.  Then I heated 2 T. of olive oil and sautéed the onion and apple.  After a couple of minutes I added ¼ cup of piñon nuts and ¼ cup of raisins and sautéed all the vegetables until the piñon nuts began to brown.  I had to wait until the salmon was done and then added the spinach and covered it to sweat it. After a minute, I flipped the spinach to cook it.  

We then served.  Suzette cut the salmon into sections and lay them on the heated rice and I added 1/3 of the Catalan Spinach to each plate.

Willy wanted to drink a red wine so I opened the bottle of 2015 Faustino Rivero Rioja Reserva (Costco $7.99).  We all liked the wine both un-iced and chilled with ice. This is the best Reserva Rioja for the money I have found in a long time.

We ate on the patio.  Willy told us about his hike today up from the trailhead at the end of Copper and his plans to hike Wheeler Peak and Jaramillo Peak in the next few weeks. He has really gotten into hiking New Mexico peaks and will start on Colorado peaks son I suspect.

After dinner Suzette packed a bag of chocolate chip cookies for Willy when he left.  Then Suzette went to bed and I stayed up to blog until 11:00 with a cup of tea and a chocolate chip cookie.  

The Tour starts at 4:00, so I need to get to bed.

Bon Appetit

September 1, 2020 Lunch – East Ocean Fried Tofu with Mixed Vegetables in Netherwood Park. Dinner – Cold Dungeness Crab with Vichyssoise and Tomato, onion, and Cucumber Salad

 September 1, 2020 Lunch – East Ocean Fried Tofu with Mixed Vegetables in Netherwood Park. Dinner – Cold Dungeness Crab with Vichyssoise and Tomato, onion, and Cucumber Salad

I watched the Tour de France again today, a mountain finish with the favorite winning the stage.  The most exciting part of the race was the final lead out for Roglic by a young American rider named Kuss from Durango, Colombo took him 500 meters from the finish and looked liked he had enough power to have taken Roglic all the way to the finish line.

I toasted two slices of bagel, spread them with goat cheese lay a slice of onion and bits of Whitefish on them and ate them with a cup of green tea.

I then got dressed and ordered a Fried Tofu and Mixed Vegetables from East Ocean.  I stopped at the bank and then picked up the order and drove to Netherwood Park to meet Robert for lunch.  He brought chairs with small side tables that were perfect for sitting under a tree 10 feet apart to enjoy lunch.  I love the dish because it contains nine different vegetables and fresh fried tofu with rice.

After lunch I went home and had a meeting with a client at 2:00.

When I finally checked my portfolio at 3:00 it had increased 1 ½%, a phenomenal increase, mostly due to a $5.14 increase in Apple after its 3 for 1 split yesterday and strong increases of all the averages today.

At 4:00 I started making the crab sauce for dinner of cold Dungeness crab. I had bought two almost 2 lb. each crabs.  I made a modified sauce which combined a mignonette, a Louis sauce, a cocktail sauce, and a tartare sauce.  I first minced about 2 oz. of red onion and covered it with lemon juice.  I let that cook for about 20 minutes and then added mayo, horseradish, catsup, and sweet relish, plus a few drops of Tabasco.

Suzette came home with several lovely tomatoes, so we decided to make a tomato, cucumber, and red onion salad dressed with a balsamic and olive oil dressing.  I sliced the rest of the lovely Italian cucumber we bought on our trip.  The combination of the beautiful long yellow and pink tomatoes and the lovely cucumber with its ribbons of dark and light colored skin made a memorable salad.

We poured a bottle of chilled Gruet Blanc de Noir champagne and ate all the claws and half of one body and picked the rest of the crabs, so we have enough crab for crab cakes.

After dinner I ate a few bites of Clafoutis with a sip of brandy mixed a bit of German cherry liquor and a cup of tea.

Bon Appetit