1. I am very happy that with Christy's help I can watch the small amount of programming I'm interested in on ESPN. At this point in the U. S. Open tennis tournament, ESPN is covering matches live and I was once again mesmerized by the play of Rafael Nadal and the way his play elevates the play of his opponent. Today Nadal faced Nikolos Basilashvili of the Republic of Georgia, a player he had beaten in the French Open a year ago, losing only one set in the entire match. Today, Basilashvili was a stout opponent, ultimately worn down by Nadal's relentless shotmaking, but he played some scintillating tennis, winning the third set. If the commentators were correct, Basilashvili was combating fatigue and heavy legs during the fourth set, but he still stretched Nadal with his power and precision.
Later I watched Serena Williams play Estonia's Kaia Kanepi. After the first set, which Williams won 6-0, it looked like William would cruise to a win, but Kanepi came alive in the second set and won it. In the third set, Williams returned to her more dominant play and closed out the match with a 6-3 win in the third set. I thought, in the end, Williams' serve was the difference in the match. She boomed eighteen aces and when her first serve was in, she won the point 82% of the time.
2. I took a break from watching tennis and went to Yoke's to buy the groceries I needed to cook tonight's Sunday Family Dinner. I cannot repeat often enough how much I enjoy the cooler weather so that I can cook at the stove and not make the kitchen uncomfortably warm.
I've been aching for months to make a hot soup. I looked at my Keto recipes on Pinterest and discovered I had saved a good looking recipe for Beef Stroganoff soup. I put the sirloin steaks I would brown into the freezer for nearly an hour so that they would slice easier and then sliced them as thinly as I could, salt and peppered them, and browned them in butter. I put them aside and fried minced onion and garlic for a few minutes and then added a ton of sliced mushrooms. Meanwhile, I also poured a couple of containers of my homemade chicken stock into the Dutch oven and cooked a head of cauliflower florets until they were beginning to soften. I spooned about half the florets out and used the immersion blender to pulverize the rest of the florets, thus thickening and slightly sweetening the soup's broth. I put the steak strips, mushrooms, onion, and garlic into the broth, added some Dijon mustard, the juice of a lemon, and a light sprinkling of paprika and let the soup simmer, without a lid, for a while, then turned off the heat and put the lid back on. About fifteen minutes or so before dinner, I folded two cups (more than the recipe called for) of sour cream into the soup and served it.
The Deke made us each a cottage cheese salad with a variety of vegetables like grated radishes, picked onions, and others.
Everyone enjoyed the soup and the salad and I was very happy that my little experiment with adding cauliflower to the stroganoff soup worked so well.
The stroganoff soup recipe is here.
3. Dinner talk ranged over many topics including making plans for a sibling outing on Wednesday, what might happen on Thanksgiving Day, Carol and Paul's ideas for earning money now that Carol has retired, the women making plans for a trip to the University of Idaho next week, and much more. While we ate dinner inside to avoid any pesky yellow jackets that might be around, our pre-dinner cocktail time and post-dinner yakkin' all took place in the blissfully increasingly chilly air of the back deck.
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