1. I wanted to cook dinner using ground beef today and I consulted my America's Test Kitchen Mediterranean cookbook and found an Egyptian recipe combining, among other ingredients, ground beef, spinach, and eggs.
I didn't want to serve an egg dish for dinner, so I looked elsewhere for a recipe combining ground beef and spinach and found one and modified it.
The recipe called for a dish that included sour cream and mushrooms, but I went a slightly different direction.
I decided to make a mushroom sauce and add sour cream to it.
So, I cooked diced potatoes, chopped onion, and sweet red pepper in the skillet and simultaneously cooked up some ground beef in a Dutch oven. When the meat was brown, I added spinach and garlic and cooked this until the spinach wilted. I then added the potatoes, onion, and sweet pepper to the Dutch oven.
Before I made this dish, I made a mushroom sauce consisting of butter, sliced mushrooms, dry vermouth, chicken stock, heavy cream, garlic, sour cream, grated Parmigiana Reggiano cheese, and thyme.
Debbie and I served ourselves the spinach and ground beef medley and poured mushroom sauce over it.
It worked!
We enjoyed a delicious and comforting dinner.
2. Earlier in the day, Bill, Bridgit, Colette, and I jumped on ZOOM and talked for a couple of hours about internet scammers, Bill having avoided serious injury after a Saturday evening fall, different dynamics in different families, and what we've been reading lately. We also quickly surveyed television programming we either have enjoyed or are enjoying now -- I especially liked our discussions of A Touch of Frost and Vera. Bridgit has been enjoying an ABC program, Will Trent and I'm thinking one day I might like to catch up to that one.
3. After dinner, Debbie and I settled into a quiet and most entertaining evening. I multi-tasked during a gripping episode of Perry Mason by completing the Monday NYTimes Crossword Puzzle online, while watching Perry Mason get to the bottom of a murder tied into a scammy land deal.
We then watched a 1990 episode of Columbo and, unlike the previous three episodes we watched, this episode did not feature philandering, women in bikinis, or any male characters living with three women.
No, this episode returned to the more familiar, traditional Columbo plot. In it, an attorney, working as a campaign consultant for a Congressman preparing to run with the state's governor for president, tries to wipe out a dark story in his and the Congressman's past by murdering a racketeer and going to great lengths to make it look like a suicide.
Let me just say that in the series Columbo, these staged suicides never succeed.
And, indeed, with persistence, stubbornness, keen observation, and some help from the boys at the lab, Columbo nails the smooth, arrogant, ambitious, condescending attorney.
So, the governor in the Columbo episode was played by Arthur Hill.
I suddenly remember that his series, starting in 1971, Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law, was one of Mom's favorite shows and I had a sudden surge of good nostalgic feelings and I wanted to watch an episode.
To my disappointment, a quick search of my SmartTV came up empty, but then I said to Debbie that maybe I'll have better luck with a search of YouTube.
SUCCESS!
Someone, it looks like to me, recorded episodes of Owen Marshall off of TVLand, and although the quality of the image wasn't great, it more than sufficed.
We watched Owen Marshall defend, in a military court, a soldier, sent to Vietnam, who had deserted the army while recovering from injury in a hospital in Honolulu.
Then I remembered what made Owen Marshall such a compelling show.
This episode confronted the political, mental, and emotional tensions and conflicts of the Vietnam War and I remembered that Owen Marshall always told stories involving difficult and divisive questions we all were facing in the early 1970s.
I didn't carefully check how many episodes of this show are available on YouTube, but I'm sure Debbie and I will be back to watch more.
By the way, another popular program in our home from 1971-73 was Marcus Welby, MD. I would love to find the two episodes of Owen Marshall that crossed over with Marcus Welby. I've read about them, but I don't know if they are readily available.
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