It doesn’t take much to make good guacamole dip. We tasted very nice guacamole dip for corn chips at Zocalo, a small mexican restraunt near our home. We recreated the recipe for ourselves:
It’s harvest time, and it’s time to eat up the ripe vegetables from our garden. First, we made a salad from red leaf lettuce, basil, tomato and green pepper. We topped it off with pearlini mozzerella, oil and balsamic vinegar. The salad was just perfect.
Julie prepared some asparagus for grilling. The asparagus stalks were prepared by cutting off the hard ends and shaving the skin from the final two inches. Next, she put two tablespoons of olive oil, one teapsoon of balsamic vinegar, a minced clove of garlic and salt and pepper in a lasagna dish. The asparagus was loaded onto a pair of bamboo skewers (previously soaked in water), and then left to marinate in the mixture in the lasagna dish.
While we ate the salad, we loaded the grill up with the salmon and asparagus. We used a one pound piece of a fillet of Alaskan Wild King Salmon, that was about an inch thick in the center. First, I placed the meat side down (that is, the skin is facing up). I tried to get the neat criss-cross lines by rotating it 45 degrees after a minute. However I forgot to oil the fish first and the pattern was ruined because a little of it stuck to the grill. After five minutes, I flipped the fish (skin-side down), and let it cook covered for another four minutes.
To season the fish, we took three stems of sage, one stem of rosemary and a good handful of marjoram from our herb graden. We pulled the leaves from the stems and mashed them with a mortar and pestle. Finally, I mixed in some olive oil and applied it to the fish in the last minute of cooking.
We removed the fish from the grill and brought it inside for inspection (it was quite dark here by this time). Julie sent it back, so I put it back on the grill for another four minutes.
We also made some basmati rice to go along with the fish.
In the end, I burned the asparagus. Only cook it three minutes on each side! Use a timer if it is dark out (to avoid my mistake). The basmati rice, which is usually good enough to stand as a dish by itself, didn’t seem to cook properly. The unburned portion of the asparagus was really very tasty, and we will try this again, the next time we grill. We ate the fish with 2003 Chardonay from Lamoreaux Landing (on Seneca Lake in New York).
It was the first rice from a new bag, so hopefully we did something wrong here instead of being stuck with a bad bag of rice. Luckily the fish turned out pretty well, though I think that it could have stood to retain a bit more of its moisture, and the herbs might have suffered a bit from the extra four minutes of cooking. Also, it would probably work better to use butter instead of olive oil. The wine worked well with the fish. I wonder if it would have been even better with something like tunafish. Next time, we will probably substitue some other starch for the rice. I really like polenta with salmon, however I will need to spend some effort to convince Julie of this combination.
These are the days where the acorns drop off of the oak trees with each gust of wind. We bought a 4×6′ seagrass rug at Pier One. It isn’t really meant for outdoor use, but since it was only $20, we decided to try it on our porch. It smells nice and grassy, but it would be rather intense for an indoor rug. And Lo really enjoys stretching her claws on it, so now we have another reason to let Lo out on the porch with us. Too bad they don’t have a larger size.
Lo seems to have conjunctivitis in one eye. This will make the third vet visit in two weeks! Lo is finally getting over her cat cold, and seems to have regained some appetite. This is turning out to be a very expensive kitten.
This weekend, Julie and I are building some shelves in the closet of the office. So far, we have completed demolition of an annyoing cheap-o shelf/clothes holder that the builder installed. We have had considerable trouble attaching brackets for the shelves to the walls. The studs were in the wrong place, so we tried to use some heavy-duty drywall anchors. Then I broke the anchors by installing them too close to a stud in the edge of the wall (where we couldn’t detect it with the stud finder). And then drilling out broken drywall anchors turned out to be nearly impossible. I think we have a good plan now: one side will screw into the studs and the other side of the shelf will have anchors. Hopefully we can finish it up this afternoon.
Here in Boston, we had really wonderful weather this weekend (and it also seemed to be nice weather through my sampling of the Midwest on Friday.) To take advantage of it, we made our warm tomato dinner on Sunday night, and took it outside to eat. We used a mix of plum tomatoes and home-grown grape tomatoes. The grape tomatoes were quite sweet and intensely flavored. We drank our sparkling Northern Spy cider (from Bellweather Hard Cider on Seneca Lake in New York.) I think it might have been better if we browned some almonds in the olive oil, but Julie would have liked less oil. The cider tasted nice and sweet with the salad, but it wasn’t especially flavorful.
After dinner we went downstairs and made a fire in our outdoor fireplace. The Restoration Hardware fireplace was obviously designed for form, not function. Despite a nice breeze, Julie had to continuously blow air into the fire to keep it going.
We call the cat “Lo”. It is nicer than “Slow”, which is what I had called it. Since coming home with Julie, Lo has come down with a nasty little cat cold. She is sleeping all of the time and sneezing a lot. Helen got a cat at the same time from the same animal shelter, and it also got sick. We went right to the vet today after I got home from Chicago, but they couldn’t do much for Lo except inject some saline to reduce dehydration.
Well, Julie prevailed and we brought home a cat. It was something of an ordeal… The cat came from upstate New York. The animal shelter was closed on Monday, when we planned to return, so Julie stayed an extra day to pick up the cat and drive home in a rented car. We all reunited on Tuesday evening. The poor little cat was somewhat worse for the wear after a six hour car-ride, and the first order of business was to clean it up.
We don’t know what to name it yet, so we call it 1070C. Julie says that we should call it “Tensegrity” instead. It likes to stare at us, and it seems to move around rather slowly.
Julie and I took a Saturday to explore Providence. The RISD art museum had a very interesting collection. We walked over to Federal Hill for dinner. It was really good, but I can’t remember the name of the restaraunt. Finally we took a look at Firewater. Being Bostonians, we were hungry for ice cream. We searched high and low, but apparently there is no ice cream at all in Providence.