I spent a lot of this afternoon prepping, which I find
relaxing. The others made half-hearted offers to help,
but I got a sense of kitchen anxiety, plus I prefer
things done my way. The result was bunches of bowls of
stuff, some of which were set to marinate and others
partially or wholly precooked, to be combined according
to the cook's plan, which was, aside from a few words
scribbled on an old boarding pass, locked in his head.

I'd promised dinner at 8, but I got peckish and presented
the appetizer around 7:30 and the main meal around 7:45.

For our starter, I blistered the pimentos de padron with
some garlic in a hot oiled pan and served them with black
salt (Jacquie's idea). Sad thing, though they were delicious,
not a one was hot at all. Also sad, I got only two of them.

The offerings:

Green beans with garlic and black beans - incredibly tiny
beans from one of Ian's favorite stands at the market.
They were very flavorful but on the tough side. Ian
suggested that they could have been blanched a bit before
the stir-fry. Little did he know that I had in fact done
so for three full minutes, enough to tame all but the most
recalcitrant legumes. Whatever; they would in fact have
been deserving of a minute or two more in the hot wok.

Mapo tofu is one of my favorite dishes, and the pantry had
Szechwan pepper, brown rice wine, and sesame oil; so I picked
up a block of firm oldish tofu from, where else, Grand Frais,
which surprisingly for the middle of nowhere France had this,
silken, and fried. Many recipes call for silken, but I find
the dish sissy when made that way, the tofu not holding up to
the strong flavors. Some scallions and home-ground pork added
extra deliciousness. Anyhow, the dish was to my specifications,
the tofu a little sour and crumbly, the spicing high but not
fatal (there were others to think of), and just the way that
I'd had it first several decades ago.

I made beef and broccoli with some bavette from Grand Frais and
tender-stem (sort of between Chinese and American) from the
kitchen garden. I used some of the greens as well, as they are
the most nourishing part of the plant and quite tasty besides.
I'd have put in a splash of oyster sauce but for two of the
customers refusing to eat "anything that has ever lived in the
sea." Oyster sauce is made from oysters, unlike lobster sauce,
baby powder, and so on.

I'd planned to make two-side Shanghai noodles with pork and
peapods, but this ended up being one-side noodles, because I
overloaded the wok. The noodles were the clunky but serviceable
Asian wheat pasta that every supermarket has, tossed with the
other ingredients that ad previously been stir-fried on their own.

I think that was it.

To hot things up a bit I used on my plate of bean curd and
green beans the hotter of two relishes made that day (see "best
thing I ever ate" from some months ago - the semi-hot was made
pretty much that way without seeds and membranes, the hot hot
using the membranes discarded from the other). Ian and I used
the hot; the others the not-so-hot.

Basmati rice, the last rice in the house, was cooked for the
normal length of time but managed to explode into something
vaguely resembling Vietnamese broken rice. It had also lost
most of its fragrance, and I wondered how long it had been
since Ian and Jacquie had cooked rice.

Chateau Templier 15 Bergerac rouge sec for Lilli; this was
pretty bright, a little off dry, okay with the meal.

I had Barmes Buecher 03 Gewurztraminer Herrenweg (Alsace),
which was full of orange blossom and lychee and other stuff
that normally signal a sweet wine, but this was merely a tad
off dry with a touch of bitterness; it too went pretty decently.

There was pretty good jasmine tea for those who wanted it.

Dessert was fresh fruit and leftovers.
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