Smithy

It does far more than appeal. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

I knew that. But thank you. 🙂 🤎

I'm home! I spent the night before last at a Walmart parking lot. Although I gave the company plenty of money for pet food items and other things I needed then or would need soon, their deli was closed when I started shopping. That was okay; I enjoyed the last of the chicken and rice dish I'd made a week or two before. I also celebrated: finished one fine (by my lights) wine and opened another. I was almost home, and I had the blessed sound of frogs at the pond across the way. The first I've heard in months. Yesterday I arrived home around noon, finally got the Princessmobile parked on our snaky driveway, and began the fun of unpacking and enjoying being home again. The dog and cats felt the same way. It feels as though I've been gone forever, but it was actually only 4 months, as opposed to the 6 months my darling and I were gone each year. It feels longer. One factor is that I'm back a month later than usual. I have the green jungle ("yard") to prove it. The ramps are up. The chives are already about to flower. I've started laundry and emptied the boxes that have been waiting for me. Hallelujah, the capers I ordered back here have arrived! The packaging was superb. I've been on a considerable venture and adventure, and am on my way to establishing my new life. There's a mountain of chores and a sea of choices ahead of me. But I'm glad I went, glad to be back, and glad that I wrote about it here. Thanks for coming along, folks, and for your comments (culinary and otherwise) and encouragement. Maybe it's time to revive the Best Use of Stale Bread topic?

@Maison Rustique - what a fun haul of books! I hope we'll see some explorations of (and maybe cookery from) them as your life settles. It's fun to see so much shellfish content...but I'm especially interested in "Liberace Cooks". Did he really? 🙂 Was he as flamboyant a cook as musician, I wonder?

So...have we established that a panade doesn't include eggs and cream? Or is it simply a bread pudding by another name? I've consulted my copy of McGee's On Food and Cooking (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) and am no more enlightened; he uses panade in the sense of stiffening a souffle, and says a panade is like pastry cream but without eggs and with butter. He's using it as an element of something rather than an end in itself. Like the way one binds (homogenizes) a meatloaf. It may be that I adopted Judy Rodgers' idiom without realizing she'd pulled a Humpty Dumpty on us. Whatever...I call it good. I just finished a bit of the leftovers as a late breakfast, and I'm glad there's more. The photo doesn't do it justice!

Welcome! As you already see, you'll get plenty of answers, and sometimes lively discussion, if you ask questions. 🙂 Come on in, have a look around, and enjoy cooking and eating (and drinking) with the rest of us! What sorts of foods do you like to cook and eat?

I salute you! With that time frame I'd probably go with peanut butter sandwiches. 😅

One of the (presumably) obvious things about traveling solo in the Princessmobile is that preparation and setup take roughly twice the time as when there were two of us. For example: in the Good Old Days, he'd be doing outside prep chores while I was making lunches. We'd share some exterior duties, like hooking up the trailer, stowing the Anaconda (that's the massive 50A power cord that weighs half as much as I do), doublechecking that nothing is left behind and everything is working properly. Now it all falls to me. I learned, among other things, that the serious disadvantage of camping under a tree is all the debris that drops onto the glides and has to be swept off. Sure, the tree protected the Princessmobile from hail, but instead dropped wet leaf litter and seed pods. Ah, well. It would have been a bit quicker if I hadn't bothered to document my road-food sandwiches, but I decided to take pictures. I made 2 sandwiches so I won't have to do it tomorrow. Both are generous: one on the Prairie Los Angeles Heritage bread, and one on sourdough bread I've had stowed in the freezer. Here are the meats and cheeses: and the evolution of the sandwiches themselves: (Incidentally, with these sandwiches I finished off a small jar of pickle relish and a large jar of pickles. I'm making headway in the refrigerator.) I'll tell you what: the storage containers that Wolfe's used for enchiladas are coming in very handy now. As it turns out, a less obvious disadvantage to solo travel is navigation. I had 2, count 'em 2 GPS systems. One kept cutting out. The other hasn't been properly updated. Eventually they both agreed on what to tell me to do, when they were both talking, because I'd known more or less which route I wanted to take and kept going that way until they capitulated. That is, I thought they had capitulated.... Remember I said I really, really wanted to avoid Kansas City? I found myself taking the Turnpike eastbound, right to the edge but slightly north of Kansas City. Road closures. Construction. Breathe, Smithy! And near the end, there I was looking at "Liberty, Missouri". 3 or more exits worth. Right where I'd told @Maison Rustique I didn't want to go. 🙂 I waved a silent, and general, hello to her, not knowing exactly where she was, and eventually got out onto open freeway again. The other thing that doesn't work as smoothly is eating. Sure, I had those great sandwiches. In the Good Old Days the passenger would have opened the cooler, fished out a sandwich and napkin for the driver, and the driver would have had a leisurely meal when driving on non-busy roads. Nope. I had half of one sandwich at a rest area, and pressed on. The rest is all in the refrigerator for tomorrow, or the next day. I made it to my intended destination in southern Iowa: the Lakeside Casino, formerly known as Terrible's. In past years we've been here a month earlier. This year the goslings in the flotilla are larger than in past visits, having grown somewhat larger than puffballs with legs. I was Very Hungry by the time I went through the rigmarole of establishing a reservation (required even though the RV park is mostly empty) and setting up. Of course I could have had leftovers, or another half-sandwich. I wasn't sure I wanted to go to the restaurant, since my darling and I had almost always gone there to dine on our way home and there might be painful memories. I decided to chance it. If you're interested in seeing their entire weeknight menu, take a look here. In most years past, I've opted for their "Awesome chicken sandwich" and it has sometimes been awesome, sometimes more average. This year, I was more inclined to try their fish and chips. Then I noticed that they had a prime rib sandwich (until supplies run out). I asked about it. Turns out the prime rib in the sandwich is shaved, or shredded, or some such. Nope. For just a few dollars more, I could have this: We never splurged to that degree here. My darling always felt that his (our) home-cooked ribeye steaks couldn't be beat, and he wasn't interested in risking money or calories on a lesser product. Besides...in his later years he always claimed to prefer pork. I ordered a draft beer, the first I've had in a very long time. It came, and I sipped and pondered, then ordered. What the heck. I'm almost home. It's almost a special occasion, and also a sad one. (Last visit, we were together. Two or three visits ago, Iowa Dee was still alive. I don't like the trend.) I ordered the 12-oz prime rib, medium rare, and prepared myself to sip and enjoy and remember. Well. Before I could say "Sam Adams" the dinner was delivered! I really hadn't intended to have beer with that dinner, but I wasn't even a quarter of the way through the lager. It wasn't a bad combination, just not the wine-and-beef I'd had in mind. No matter. The rib was good. The horseradish sauce and "au jus" provided were excellent with it, and the sour cream quite good on the potato. The vegetables were, well, "filling" is the best I can say for them. I took a few bits of the prime rib and enjoyed them immensely. I ate about half the potato and all the vegetables, and brought the remainders home to the Princessmobile. So now I really, truly won't have to do any food prep before I get home. I may buy something anyway, but if I do it will be because I simply can't resist. Or obligation in a Walmart.

At his age, I wouldn't have chosen plain either. My fave, only available in restaurants, was chocolate chips in pancakes. Never thought of M&M's! 🙂

I have learned over the years that "panade" has at least 2 senses. One is what you mean: the bread mixture added to, say, meatloaf as a binder. The other sense of panade is the one I mean, that I first learned from Judy Rodger's Zuni Cafe Cookbook (eG-friendly Amazon.com link). Here's what she had to say:

That's a heck of a good question! My flip answer is that bread pudding sounds dreadful and panade sounds exotically good. But that just means I've never knowingly had bread pudding. (I have the same knee-jerk reaction to the idea of rice pudding, and I know some people adore it.) As I understand it, a bread pudding is more likely to be a dessert (sweet) dish and a panade is more likely to be savory. A very quick, unscientific scan of recipes on my part also suggests that bread pudding is more likely to involve eggs and cream (or milk) whereas the panade is more likely to involve broth. Beyond that I won't go, since I'm talking through my hat. Maybe someone else will chime in who knows the difference.

With multiple breeds of chicken, do you get hybridization? Or do you somehow keep them all separate?

I extended my stay here another day due to rain. Eventually I'll have to move, rain or no rain, but I got soaked just going out on my morning walk. Rain hitting me at, oh, 2 mph is quite different than rain hitting the windshield at, oh, 55 mph. So I had a relaxing day here, puttering around in the trailer, doing what I could to pack up, going out on walks and getting wet. Oh, and admiring the flowers and greenery. The desert already seems so long ago! It's nice to see milkweed about to pop. The milkweed vines in the desert never managed to bloom where and when I was this year. Since I had a gift of time, I decided to deal with a lot of stray foods in one cooking project. And boy, there were a lot of strays! The cheese that was too hard to do anything with a couple of days ago got a microwave softening treatment described more fully here. The baguette my sister had brought was only half-eaten and brittly hard. I wetted it and wrapped it in foil, then stuck it in the oven (300ish?) for about 20 minutes, then was able to (very roughly) dice it. Once again, I thank @FrogPrincesse for that trick. An onion, neglected during my sister's visit because she doesn't like 'em, was starting to sprout and turn soft. I had a salami from a lovely bereavement gift package sent me by dear friends last summer after my darling died. It had gone unopened so far. There was a pint of chicken broth in the freezer, left over from the last time I had enough chicken carcasses to make broth. I was tired of its falling out every time I opened the door after moving. There was a partial jar of the Trader Joe's Sun-dried Tomatoes in Olive Oil. The only new or fresh things that went into this dish were some of the baby greens I bought a couple of days ago, some broccoli florets, and a couple of Penzey's spices from my shipment a month or two ago: The Outrage turns out to be as hot as its name implies, and very little of it was used in the sweating stage of this dish. I was pretty generous with the Italian Herb mix. Then the layering began. Eventually I had that little souffle dish filled to the top, with everything compressed, and broth added to about the 2/3 mark. 350F, covered, for about 45 minutes, with periodic checks on doneness and additions of more broth. I love the way panades swell as the stale bread soaks up the liquids! I did top this one with a bit of freshly shredded Gruyere ("best by" date of February 2025). I'm calling it Panade Perdu.

Over here I talked about unwrapping a chunk of cheese I'd bought last year and discovering that it was much too hard to use as it was. It wasn't inexpensive, either! It had been an impulse purchase for a luxury dinner, and then I'd waited too long. This is how hard it was. I couldn't even get a cleaver into it, except to make the slight scratches you see at the lower right below. Okay, then. I wrapped it in wet paper towel and microwaved it. 5 minutes at 20% power made promising softness around the edges. I could cut off the desiccated wrapping that looks like potato peelings here: I repeated the process more aggressively then: another 10 minutes at 20% power. By golly, now I could cut it. If you look carefully at the cross-sections you can see discoloration where the cheese was starting to cook. The microwave really does have to be used judiciously, but it works with that wet wrapping. I doubt it was decently shreddable even then, but the flavor was good. The firm cubes should work well enough for the panade that's cooking as I type. There was quite a bit of oil in the wrapping, and I squeezed that into the assembled dish. I'll add a link to the finished dish when it's done. Edited to add: here's the dish, and the process. This was well worth the effort of revival!

That is a cool video, and at least the opening credits are amusing. Thanks!