All Activity

Please post about this!!

I thought the Kraken Burger was hilarious... first of all, how much food it is (and how much fat is probably in it!) but also, why is there no seafood in it? I'd expect some calamari or something in a Kraken burger...

That's interesting information about the sugar:flour ratio affecting yeast. Without having read anything about it before, I'd have assumed that the yeasts would love having extra sugar! I suppose the issue is that there has to be enough flour to provide the gluten, else the carbon dioxide produced by the yeasts simply escapes to the atmosphere. Does that sound right? Also, I'd never heard about cinnamon being a yeast inhibitor. That's good to know. Finally: you say this tasted good though the recipe itself was a failure. Was the flavor good enough that you might try tweaking the recipe? It could be an interesting experiment.

Soo … zwischen uns: I have three major restocking modes: 1) a very good Japanese friend brings me sake & assorted snacks when she has a business trip to Germany (minimum one per year). As we live pretty close to Frankfurt, she enjoys a weekend at our place, and I get some treats. 2) We still go to Japan for holidays. Last one was summer 2024, next one is this summer 🥳 3) As my sister lives in Bonn we typically visit close-by Düsseldorf regularly, which is home to the largest Japanese expat enclave in Germany. Great for fresh items (pastry, meat) as well. So, I am usually pretty well stocked - great for family & special entertaining events. Current display, sorted by “eat first” (top shelf), potato crisps & associated nibbles (middle shelf) and rice cracker & (semi-)dried seafood (lower shelf). And in one of the drawers: doubles & sweet snacks.

This is my bread baking for the last couple weeks. Last week I made sourdough bread and rolls. The Stars aligned for me and it was some of the best that I've made. Didn't do anything different so I just got lucky. Few days later I made Italian breadsticks (grissini). They were okay but not a recipe that I will repeat. They were more chewy than crispy. Carlos love them so they weren't a total failure. Then I made yeasted gingerbread loaf. That was a fiasco. I started it at 7:00 in the morning and it wasn't ready to go in the oven until 4:00 in the afternoon. It just wouldn't rise. I thought maybe my yeast had gone flat but I decided to do some internet research and found out the problem. I've always had problems with very sweet dough rising but I found out that there is a limit to how much sugar you can use for the amount of flour. This recipe had double that sugar. Further research revealed that cinnamon is also a yeast inhibitor. Who knew? The most you should use is one teaspoon for 3 cups of flour. This recipe has two tablespoons. So this time it wasn't me, it was a bad recipe. It tasted good but it wasn't worth it. So yesterday it was back to the basics. Just plain old baguettes. Nothing fancy but they taste good.

Thank you and you're welcome! It's Happy Egg brand - Free Range on 8+ acres. They raise hens with 10x more space to roam than what you'll find on most farms. These are the blue shell eggs. They have brown too. The color of the yolk is determined by the feed. From Google AI - Happy Egg Co. hens are fed a specialized, nutrient-rich diet consisting of grains like wheat and barley, designed to promote hen health and produce high-quality, dark-yolked eggs. The diet is often supplemented with marigold and paprika to enhance the yolk color, along with essential vitamins and minerals for shell strength.

Warmer than at home 😀. It was 83 yesterday. The water is too cold for me to swim in, but I fully admit to being a wimp. I rarely get into the water in the winter, no matter the location. There were many other, hardier people swimming in the ocean yesterday. A “cold” front is moving in for the next day or so which is supposed to bring brisk winds and dangerous boating conditions. We moved over to the house yesterday. The road was actually in fairly good island condition until the very end. The directions we were given were terrible, so we ended up on a scenic tour of the area. There seems to be lots of new construction, as well as many properties for sale. Interesting. The house is in the Chalk Sound area, which is a more remote part of the island. The sound itself is protected National Park. You can swim or kayak in it, but there’s no motorized boating allowed. View from the house. The pool is supposedly heated, so I might try and go swimming later. Results doubtful 😂 There’s a private access to the water below the house, with kayaks to use. We will not be kayaking. I always end up going in circles. The kitchen Welcome basket from our on island host, filled with the junkiest junk food ever. If my niece and nephew were here they would be thrilled! I have found that junk food, especially chips, is actually one of the most expensive things to buy on an island, so it’s a nice gesture. I am saving my junk food ration for conch fritters though. As an aside, we went grocery shopping before coming to the house, and I was pleasantly surprised by the variety and cost of the food. It was more than at home, but not even close to the grocery prices we pay on St. John. They had a wide variety of organic food, lots of fruits and vegetables in good condition, and a large bakery selection. I did not check out the meat or frozen sections, but overall it was a very good experience. By the time we were all settled at the house it was getting dark, so we went to the closest restaurant to the house for dinner, Las Brisas. I did not take pictures of the restaurant because it was dark, but we will probably go back for lunch at some point. It’s an open air waterfront restaurant, with a pool that guests can swim in if they want to. I think there are tables on the beach that are open at lunch, but it was too dark to tell. We had a dining companion The menu is massive. We shared some conch fritters. They were really good, jammed with conch. The fish of the day was snapper or grouper. I saw the snapper going out to other tables and it looked really good, but I wanted shrimp since I cannot eat them at home. Blackened shrimp with peas and rice and vegetables Husband had a grilled lobster with peas and rice and salad No dessert.

I always think you are brave doing this alone anyway, but doing it in winter? I do not think I'd have the courage to do that. Especially with all the bad weather going through the country lately. Do you have an ultimate destination?

A delivery dinner. Spicy crayfsh with Chinese cabbage and potato slivers over rice.

A firemixer would definitely work but is surely out of my price range. @Kerry Bealwho has some available? What are the details?

Keep playing with it, changing or adding one thing each time. Miso glazed broiled salmon, over sesame ramen with memba, avacado, yu toy and garlic crisps

Sorry for the slow progress and the frigid temps. I’d say you’re underway - you’ve departed your home port and are making progress, even if it’s not as much as you’d like. I’m looking forward to following along in this adventure from my sofa which is blessedly safe from mechanical failures!

Grr. If by "underway" you mean "gone from home", yes. If by "underway" you mean "making solid progress" then the answer is different. I left on Thursday, Jan 29, so I could attend a precision trailer driving course the following day in St. Cloud, MN, a couple of hours' drive from home. The course was yesterday. I'm now only about a 30 minute drive from the course, and spending another night here due to *GRRR* mechanical failures. At least I have shore power, and I'm grateful for that. This trailer is really not built for subzero camping, despite its adverts. Propane does not like to vaporize at 20F below, nor even 10F below. It is Not Fun to awaken to frost on the floor and ice on the animals' water bowls, knowing that the propane tanks are probably still half full but have to be changed anyway. So...I've discovered that my darling's preference of fast food from the service stations is defensible after all, because the last thing I want to do is fire up the oven and dirty up dishes when there's no water in the Princessmobile. The trailer was winterized* last fall, and I want to be sparing of what goes down the drains from the water bottles I packed. That means I need to minimize dirty dishes. So far on my travels I've been through a bucket of fried chicken from my favorite grocery chain back home -- an indulgence before leaving! -- and a couple of green salads on paper plates, with salad dressing from Samin Nosrat's Good Things cookbook. I've eaten half a Ranch Chicken wrap (the other half for tomorrow, probably) and a sausage and egg biscuit from the truck stop where I'm parked. A "breakfast sandwich" of dubious lineage yesterday morning, along with some nondescript potato twinkies (not their name) that even the dog wouldn't eat. Can't think what else there's been. It isn't that I don't have choices. My freezer is well packed with frozen ready-to-heat-and-eat dinners, both from Trader Joe's and from my own cookery. The refrigerator compartment is stuffed with remains of my last few weeks' cooking frenzies, as well as an amazing collection of condiments. I have my best local friends to thank for this. They volunteered, more than once, to help me load the trailer and get it ready to go. When I realized that I'd need help getting it pried loose from the ice and snow outside my house, and that time was short on the remaining "normal" packing, I took them up on the offer. While Mr. helped me with snow and ice removal, and anchoring things down in the pickup bed, Mrs. moved everything from the house refrigerator to the Princessmobile's refrigerator. And I do mean everything. I'm pretty sure there are 2 bottles of fish sauce in there, for example. She also cleaned the house refrigerator. These are true friends! (Confession: I returned a 1 L jar of homemade sauerkraut after she left. That stuff is old, and I still haven't tried it, and I decided to worry about it after I get back home.) I haven't bothered taking photos of the fast food I've purchased so far, but there will be other opportunities, perhaps more than I'd like. In the meantime, here's what I'm drinking tonight, celebrating Shore Power and Heat!! *For those who don't know, "winterizing" a trailer means draining all its tanks and water lines, and running a nontoxic RV-safe antifreeze through the system. That way, no ice should develop to damage water lines or fittings. But you can't flush out and replace it until you're above freezing temperatures.

That looks and sounds delicious to me. Was that your main? I would be happy with that as a main - my husband would say "where's the meat?"😉

Thank you. Yes I do love coleslaw and Costa Rica makes a salad that is made with a fresh pickled cabbage that is delicious. It's just that poor abused rotten cabbage that I hate.

@gulfporter, it was Seghesio that turned me on to just how lovely a Zinfandel can be. I've learned since then that there are other excellent Zins, but Seghesio was my first...and most of us know how fondly we remember our firsts. 🙂

That is a beautiful and delicious-looking dish, and thank you for the history (confirmed and speculative)! The egg yolk is such a deep orange I have to ask whether that was a special egg, special photography, or a bit of both? Thank you also for including the photo of the original cookbook's recipe page. What fun!

Got dumplings at Costco last week and made a quickie cold weather soup tonight.

Picnic chicken, baked not fried after the 11 secret herbs and spices 😉 with flat chips and salad. Things in a bowl, chicken on rice, baby pak choy and the last of the bag of bean sprouts. That’s 5 in a row where I’ve managed to use them all before the slime sets in !! I better give up now. Saturday night with the Carolines. Veggies, fruit, dip, cheese, note my dried mango slices from our tree.

It's Pizza Night!

Chicken larb with cucumbers, Boston lettuce, and cilantro-mint rice. Details on Larb laab larp (clicky).

Chicken larb (laab gai): Hacked up boneless skinless chicken thighs with a cleaver before cooking with sliced galangal. Mixed the cooked chicken with roasted rice powder, roasted chile powder, fish sauce, and lime juice, then tossed with sliced red onion, minced lemongrass, sliced scallions, mint leaves, Thai basil, and cilantro. Served over Boston lettuce leaves with sliced cucumbers, with more roasted chile powder. Made pilaf-style green rice (with cilantro, mint, and garlic) to go with.

You might want to try fresh pack pickled cabbage. Surely you like coleslaw?

Elk Medallions with mushroom brandy sauce, grits, parmesan, & roasted carrots. Inspired by The Mill in Hershey (PA).

Black Truffle and Mushroom Pizza, and Sausage & Giardiniera Pizza - little 10" pizzas for lunch.