Peas with Lettuce and Baked Potato with Truffle Oil

This pea recipe is from Nigella Lawson...

Ingredients

• 3 small or 2 fat scallions, finely sliced
• 3 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 1 drop garlic-infused oil (or any oil really)
• 1 Little Gem (Butterhead) lettuce, shredded
• 2 cups frozen petits pois
• 1/2 cup hot chicken stock (concentrate or cube and hot water is fine)

Cook the scallions in the butter and oil until soft. Stir in the shredded lettuce, and when it is wilted add the frozen peas and stock.

Cook at a robust simmer, uncovered, until everything is tender and the liquid flavorful and reduced.

Baked Potato with Truffle Oil, Sour Cream and Chives

Ingredients

Potato

Black Truffle Oil

Sea Salt

Pepper

Sour Cream

Chopped Chives

For the baked potato...I know its a bit ridiculous to post a baked potato recipe, so I'll just describe my variation here...:)  First oven at 375, coat the potatoes with a thin layer of Black Truffle Oil, Sea Salt and Pepper.  Cook about an hour.  I made a mix of sour cream and chives to serve on top of an opened baked potato.

33

Mark here...Laurel and I are having a meal of Steak au Poivre, Peas with Lettuce and Baked potatoes with truffle oil, sour cream and chives.  We are also watching the first episode of Season One of Battlestar Galactica, post-miniseries, "33"....



The premise of the episode is that every 33 minutes the Galactica fleet is forced to have a FTL jump (Faster Than Light) because the Cylons keep showing up to find them.  The pace of the episode is nice, building towards the end when one ship is revealed to be a problem and potentially harboring Cylon agents.  There's a nice back and forth between Adama and Roslin, who are clearly the anchors of the show at this point and are forced to destroy the rogue ship and its 1300 people on board.  Separately, we see that Helo, the soldier left behind on Caprica in the miniseries, has survived.  He is rescued from Cylons by a duplicate of Sharon (Boomer), who we the audience know to be another Cylon...

Laurel here...This was a super good episode, fast paced and full of tension.  My only criticism -  the episode is called "33" because the cylons keep showing up every 33 minutes like clockwork, and the whole fleet just keeps jumping every 33 minutes to get away from them (a task for which everyone has to basically be awake all the time except for 10 minute catnaps).  This plan is clearly unsustainable yet they never really show anybody working on a longterm solution.  There should have been a nerd in a lab someplace or at a computer at least doing some math trying to figure something out.  At one point Adama refers to "a plan that hasn't been implemented yet"  but I feel like that's pretty vague.  Anyhoo, tough choice to blow up a civilian ship but it seems to have been the right move, we'll see moving forward.

Starbuck also is slightly less annoying this episode, but she is still doing that thing of portraying a tough woman by acting like a man, which in my mind has no place in any show, especially a show about the future.  President Roslin on the other hand acts like a lady and like a tough cookie, which I totally appreciate.