Smithy

Without having tried it myself, my guess is that if you toast some and store them unground, you'll be able to keep them in pretty good condition for at least a week...maybe 2 weeks? A month? From what I've read, the degradation in flavor begins when the peppercorn is broken apart, i.e. ground. A good way to test your own tolerance for flavor degradation would be to devise a flavor comparison, if you have the equipment to do it. Toast some peppercorns and store them in one grinder for, say, a week; toast another set and grind them the day of the test. See if you can tell the difference. Keep working at that until you reach the level of perfection vs. convenience that works for you.

That looks delicious, and I love tabbouli! You mentioned mint and parsley, but do you not include cilantro? My recipes call for equal amounts of parsley and cilantro, with a bit of mint. Not that it matters: I've been taken to task here for the relative amount of bulgur, so I'm certainly no expert. 🙂 More to the point: what sort of dressing do you put on the tabbouli? Oh, and...did you make those spring rolls, or buy them prepared?

As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, I went into town for a few supplies. I'm sorry: I was overwhelmed by the first place I visited, the nearest Fleet Farm. This place is huge. It has massive areas of hunting supplies, pet and livestock supplies, gardening supplies, machinery, automotive supplies, clothing (work and casual), assorted hardware, barbecue equipment, snack food of types I generally avoid. I was looking for a propane tank heater to try for better performance in these cold temperatures. I'll tell you in the morning whether it helped, if I can tell. The strange thing is, I walked in and thought "WOW! I could spend hours in this store wandering and having fun! WOW! I need to take a lot of pictures and share them around!" About 15 minutes later I was thinking "WOW! I've spent hours in this store wandering and I'm exhausted! Lemme outta here!" So, no photos. They do have a lot of culinary equipment, but I can't show it to you. I had the same experience a few miles later, when I'd grabbed more salad mix from a mega-mall masquerading as a grocery store and only then realized that the wine I was after was in a different building altogether. Sorry, no photos here either. I did get more bottles of the Kono Sauvignon Blanc that's my current favorite. By the time I got home, unpacked everything, installed the new equipment, and did other routine chores, I was hangry. I'm very grateful to my best friends at home, whom I've mentioned before, for many reasons including helping get the Princessmobile unstuck and loading the refrigerator. Tonight an additional reason was the dinner they'd packed for me from the remains of a dinner we'd shared 2 nights before I left. Slices of pork roast from their latest locally-raised happy pig. Cauliflower from their garden, steamed, with cheese over the top. Persian rice, complete with raisins. I didn't get any of the tahdig, but I'm not complaining. I am very grateful for these friends, for many reasons, but tonight I'm especially grateful that they packed this Care Package for me.

Now that it's the work week and shops are open, I called around to see if I could find someone to come deal with my mechanical issue sooner than Wednesday. I could, but the place is so far away that the callout fee would exceed the camping fees for here for another couple of nights. Looks like I'm staying here. Later today I'll head into town for a few supplies. Maybe there will be something worth showing you. Brunch today was a reheated potato salad using one or more of Samin Nosrat's dressings. I say "one or more" because I can't remember and couldn't tell whether the original was the House Dressing discussed above or her Creamy Sesame Ginger recipe. I do know that after I heated the salad, added feta cheese sprinkles and a hard-boiled egg and heated more, it needed more dressing. I used the Creamy Sesame Ginger dressing. Here's a gift link to that recipe in the NYT. I like it, though not as well as the House Dressing. I'm glad I didn't make a double batch. Samin Nosrat's Creamy Sesame Ginger Dressing. Maybe I'll like it better if I ever get around to making the slaw I'd intended.

Thanks for that. @blue_dolphin has posted links to it in other topics also, but it's nice to see it again here. For those who don't have a NYTimes subscription, here's an unlocked link to that recipe.

Despite being "stuck" here I put a lot of time to good use. It is the first of the month, and traditionally the time to pay bills. I did. I took care of other business. I walked, and walked, and got my boots wet in the snow because I DIDN'T COME PREPARED FOR SNOW -- I was supposed to have left that all behind by now! Woe is me, poor me -- but again, things could be much, much worse. Midday meal -- was it a late lunch of the first half of dinner? -- came from the Hardee's attached to this truck stop. The basic Starburger: meat patty, cheese, onion, tomato, lettuce, mayonnaise, extra pickles and no ketchup, at my request. Hardly gourmet fare, but better than it looks here. I scrounged around and found a packet of cocoa mix in late afternoon, when I was getting cold, and loaded a freeze-dried ice cream ball from a friend into it. Pretty good. I forgot to take a picture, but the sugar helped my hunger and fatigue. I'll post a photo of one in action later, I promise. Final day's dinner -- if I show you every salad I eat in the next few weeks it will look a lot llke this, so I won't bore you with repetitions. I really, really like the House Salad Dressing from Samin Nosrat's Good Things (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) (Kindle version on sale right now!). I'm glad I made a large batch!

Do you have a ruler, so you can measure the hole diameter? If so, and if you have access to the shops I mentioned or associated supply shops nearby, you might be able to get what you need without buying a huge pack.

I have to admit, the vent holes don't bother me. Why don't you like them? Given the number of toothpicks you have in there, I bet you could find a small rubber or cork stopper to fit in there. At least, you could in the USA but I don't know your shopping situation. Could you improvise a stopper with crumpled aluminum foil? It would probably collect water, especially during the washing-up, but it wouldn't stab su esposo, el pobrecito. Depending on the diameter, one place to look for stoppers might be in an auto shop or machine shop if there's one nearby. Tubes with liquid (brake fluid, for example) are often stopped with small stoppers when the connection is opened for some work, to keep the contents from dribbling out.

I have yet to try deboning an entire chicken (with or without the legs) while keep it intact! My best friend, a physician, says she looked at the procedure and said "oh, this is easy" and spouted some surgical knowledge of hers. Someday maybe I'll try it. Yours looks wonderful.

Thank you for your encouraging words and St. Christopher support! I can share a few things right now, both good news and bad news. The good news is, it's warmed up. Why, it's 23F at the nearby airport this hour! The bad news is, when it warmed up it started snowing. Not a lot, but enough that the plows are out on the highway and in the parking lots. I'd really hoped to be out of this by now! In other news, I had looked all over during the packing process to find my list of things I wanted to be sure to bring this year. I couldn't find it. I reconstructed it to the best of my ability from memory. This morning I found it...here in the trailer, a very logical location but quite forgotten since the Princessmobile had been at the dealer's for repairs and upgrades until last November. Well, I didn't do badly from memory. I knew I wanted the small (3 qt) Instant Pot, the small hand mixer, and maybe the toaster, but I couldn't find them. I know which building they're in at home, but the contents have been rearranged and I couldn't find the right boxes. Apparently buried under other boxes. I decided to leave the panini press behind again this year, though I knew exactly where it was in the kitchen because I've been using it a lot. Will I regret it? I don't know. I did buy a reversible griddle (one side flat, one side ridged) and donate the ridged skillet. I kept the flat cast iron skillet (family heirloom) and it's here in the Princessmobile.

Eventually I plan to be at our old boondocking spot in southern California, or in nearby Yuma. I plan to be in the L.A. Basin on May 1 for a celebration, and that's my only firm date. I had hoped to be in Arizona by next weekend, but the mechanical issues have put the kibosh on that. On the one hand I'm disappointed to be stuck. On the other hand there are worse places to be stuck. I have power, propane and food all readily available, and if need be (or boredom strikes) I can disconnect the trailer and drive the pickup to town, which isn't far. Here's breakfast. In the foreground, the other half of the chicken/bacon/ranch wrap i bought for dinner last night. In the middle ground, coffee in a photo cup I'll tell you about sometime, and the sad amaryllis that really, truly did not like being frozen yesterday morning. In the sink is the small pot I use to collect water for rinsing things (and then the water can go outside onto the ground).

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.

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.

@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!