Smithy

And now, I wish to sing the praises of my $8 panini press! It seems a lifetime ago that I found it at a thrift store and brought it home, hoping to have a marvelous new toy. We even began a discussion topic: I bought a panini press! Now what? After a funny trial or two things went to pieces around here as previously noted, and the panini press sat unused until after my darling came home. Since then it's become quite the convenience machine. I'll post more about it in the panini press topic as my experience builds, but right now I want to write about what has and hasn't worked so far. I tried cooking bacon on it. That seemed a likely use, especially because the two plates could hold the bacon flat. I was surprised to read the recommendation in the instruction book that the press be used in the open position for bacon, but I tried pressing it anyway. That seemed to trap steam between the plates, and eventually I opened the griddle and left it open. I had to flip the bacon repeatedly, and it never got as crisp as I'd have liked. It is thick-cut bacon, and that may make a difference. I'll try it again when things settle down more, and report in the discussion topic. I haven't tried quesadillas as such, due to resistance on the part of my darling, but I've tried a few grilled wraps for myself. The Babylon Market in Tucson does wonderful shawarma, with meat, tabbouli and pickled vegetables, all wrapped in some sort of tortilla and grilled. I tried that a couple of times, with some success. It's another thing to work at as time permits. When my darling was getting ready to come home, I stocked up on sliced meats and cheeses for easy grilled sandwiches. These were a hit! And continue to be so. Turkey, corned beef, pastrami, chicken...havarti, swiss, cheddar...those are just a few things that have gone into our sandwiches. Usually half a sandwich does for dinner, and the remains make a snack the next day. I often add sauerkraut or lettuce after grilling, to get some greens or fermented foods into the mix. THe best success so far -- the piece de resistance -- has been the salvaging of a badly wrecked pork tenderloin. I overcooked the poor thing and unwittingly turned it into pulled pork. The prep of the poor tenderloin: and the finished piece. Finished, I tell you! I chopped it into fine pieces after our disastrous dinner attempt. Then the magic happened. He loves barbecue sauce, the thicker and sweeter the better. I'm fussier about it but like Cooper's barbecue sauce. I loaded sandwich bread with mayo (me) and Miracle Whip (him), mustard for both; and pieces of the chopped meat. Our preferred sauces went onto the meat. Cheese slices went atop the meat; the bread was buttered, both sides, and the panini press went to work. Magic! I lost track of how many times we ate something like that until the pork was gone. I may wreck another pork tenderloin, just for the pleasure of doing it again. 🙂

I suppose everyone in the world already knows this trick, but I just remembered it last night in time to help today's road food. We went to a local grocery store for snack vegetables. I'd hoped for more asparagus, tomatoes and red bell peppers, but had to settle for some sorry-lloking carrots and limp celery. I picked the best package of each I could find. Last night after cutting and trimming, I bundled them into containers and put water into the containers, then chilled them overnight. I'm still not impressed with the carrots, though my darling is quite happy with them. The celery perked right up, though! The container last night had a couple of inches of water in the bottom. Today there's none -- it's all inside the celery -- and the celery has noticeably swelled. Nice crunch, nice flavor! Okay, so maybe it's an obvious thing. I'm still posting it in case someone else needs a reminder.

I'm almost caught up, to the degree I can (or should) catch up. I have a couple of fine salads: one I made (and ate for several days) and one my best friend recommended. I can't swear to hers, of course, but her food is generally excellent and even lower-effort than mine. The Washington Post offered up a salad that I'll swear by again and again: Asparagus and White Bean Salad with Bacon Vinaigrette. Its sole drawback was that the bacon fat in the vinaigrette cooled too much to be good at room temperature, despite the recipe's claims. This dish needed to be warm, in my opinion, and that's how I ate it. At any rate, it was easy and gratifying enough to make although it didn't quite qualify as the brainless, no-ambition meals I ate at my nadir. It made a lot of good microwave leftovers. When I texted my best friend about this salad, she agreed that the bacon fat would probably congeal too much for the salad to be acceptable at room temperature, regardless of what the WaPo writers had written. Then she countered with her variant on the New York Times' Taverna Salad. I'd already had that one bookmarked but still have not tried it. If either of these links doesn't work, let me know: I'll try to amend the links so that they do work.

Yesterday I left my darling here in the trailer, and I went south to Palomas, Chihuahua for some supplies and The Pink Store. I really wasn't in much of a buying mood, but The Pink Store is fun to browse, and my darling was well enough to be left alone (although not well enough to come along) so it was a nice outing for me. I've written much more about that store here and here, and many other times as well. It's a fun import shop, with goodies from all over Mexico. It also has a fine restaurant. The mariachis were serenading a large table's worth of diners, and I enjoyed listening to them. If you look here you'll see an example of the restaurant's chile relleno platter, their burritos, and their margaritas as served at the restaurant. I ordered takeout: chile relleno platter for me, a pair of beef burritos for him; Spanish rice with both; margaritas to go. (I checked first, and was assured that I could take it all across the border as long as the containers were unopened.) When I got to the border crossing, I had to put my bag, with my bagged styrofoam clamshells, atop an airport-style conveyor belt to be x-rayed. The agent let me carry the margaritas around the machine. We laughed when my bag came out the other end: "Which side of the food dishes is up, do you remember?" he asked. I allowed as to how I wasn't sure.. He told me to feel free to blame him when I got home with the goodies. I quipped that I'd say he was a wannabe airline baggage handler, and we bid our merry goodbyes. This is what it all looked like when I got home: food piled up in the clamshells, but EXCELLENT margaritas in those generously-sized styrofoam cups! That was all we needed for dinner, and in fact we each at only half. Except the margaritas. We joked that I should have gotten two apiece, but it's a good thing I didn't. Those were delicious, and had a very sneaky alcohol content. I also brought home napkins from The Pink Store to go with a tablecloth I'd purchased earlier in Algodones, Baja California, before we left for home. I don't need more textiles, any more than I need all the food we have in the refrigerator and freezer, but it's a sign of my rising spirits that I wanted them. 🙂 One final glimpse of this place in New Mexico is of a place down the road with an interesting artistic bent. Over the years we watched the cagework domes go up. Then the place where they intersect was plastered, and painted. Sculptures abound; if you look closely you'll see statues of mariachis serenading the structure. I've no idea what it's like inside, but it's interesting to look at.

We've been parked in Columbus, NM for a couple of days, waiting for weather to clear ahead of us. We don't (much) mind driving through occasional rain showers, but thunderstorms and hail are beyond the Pale. As a result, I've been able to deal with this Hall of Shame. I ask you: what person in her right mind would be roughly a week away from arriving home and still have a full freezer? Some of this meat will have made the round trip from home. Here are the contents, filling into the smaller sink and three insulated containers: ...and here it is, neatly rearranged after the freezer was defrosted. Not much room, eh? Granted, some of the disuse is due to the mishaps I've described and our currently-reduced appetites as well as my currently-reduced enthusiasm for cooking. Some of it, I think, is simply because I still overestimate my ability to manage schedules. The rest of it is because he still loves pork butt roast above all other meats. This caught our eye at our final shopping trip in Yuma. "We can use it to make sandwiches!" he cried. Yeah, right. That's his excuse and he's sticking to it. $1.79/pound IS a good price. Half of the butt is wrapped and stowed in the freezer. The rest is as you see it above, cooking for tonight's dinner and tomorrow's sandwiches. And the day after, and the day after. 🙂

Strangely enough, this is usually my reaction to "take my mind off things" but this time around was different. "Easy" was the ticket! And continues to be, for the most part, since we're closed up for travel and have no dining room. One benefit of all the vegetable prep I did for our sadly-delayed travel was that I already had asparagus and red bell peppers ready to go. There were cherry tomatoes too, but they don't need much prep. We also still have a variety of tube steaks (Caprese Chicken sausage made by some artisan I've forgotten; Beef Polish sausage from Kiolbassa company, some others) that are simply made to be cut up into coins and added to some dish. One of my back-pocket-I-don't-need-to-think-how-to-do-it recipes is more or less pasta Alfredo. I'll say "more or less" because the proportions may not always be right, and the additions probably make it Alfredo no longer, but it's easy and we love it. Take a bunch of pasta and cook it. I had elbow macaroni and cavatappi, not enough of either to do a full pot of the stuff, or so I thought. I cooked it in as little water as possible in the deep part of the big pot I've kept out for travel. In the shallower half of the pot I sweated chopped onion (already in the refrigerator), the peppers. When they were soft I added the meat coins, browned them, then added the pasta, butter, cream (half and half, in this case) and grated parmesan. The steps, in case anyone's interested, are to add the butter and toss everything in it to be coated with melted butter, then add the cream (about twice as much by volume as the butter, but who's measuring?) and the parmesan (about the same volume as the cream, but whatever it takes to make a thick sauce). Stir and toss. Add the asparagus when it seems the mixture is only a few minutes from being done. Serve. Enjoy. This was the first night's iteration, as we sat with a broken suspension. I learned something important, too: if there's too much cooked pasta, bung the unused cooked stuff into a container and freeze it. I'm pretty sure we've talked before in other topics about reversionary starches. This qualifies. Henceforth I think I'll PLAN to cook too much pasta so it will be ready to use from the freezer. A few nights later, I used more of that pasta for a different iteration of the Alfredo dish. I'm out of asparagus now, and peppers, and tomatoes (I cut up my remaining Camparis and added them to the second dish). I hope I'll be able to find something in a local grocery store before we start driving again, or the road food pickings will be pretty slim!

Thanks. We should be arriving home at around our normal time, but making a quicker trip of it than usual; as a rule we take 4 - 6 weeks to come home so we have plenty of time to lollygag at other good places to ride our cycles and eat good restaurant food. Medical advice suggested we should do make a quicker trip of it. When it started getting really hot in our camping spot, we decided to head out and take a week (my preference) to two weeks (his). The day we were packed up and ready to leave, I realized on my last walkaround that the trailer suspension looked strange. (Tires rubbing together are NOT a good thing.) Of course this was on a Sunday! We were delayed 3 days while a mobile repairman came out, figured out the problem, ordered the parts, brought them out, realized they were the wrong size despite the parts guy's assurance, then came back with the right parts to get us back on the road. We've now made it as far as Columbus, New Mexico, where the weather isn't much better but we have electricity. The weather to our east is very bad (thunderstorms, hail, rain) so we're staying and resting here a couple of days. I suppose the one good thing about all that delay was that I'd washed, cut and packed a bunch of vegetables for our road trip and then we'd had to cool our heels in place. Those vegetables became the basis of some of the most "complicated" cooking I've done recently. I'll tell about that in the next post.

I love this! What a great silver lining! Thanks for the kind words, and the insights. I hope you continue to recover.

We never expected or intended to be there so long. We finally left yesterday, and these pictures show just how much the sunrise had shifted from its position at the winter solstice. Our campfire ring, which we were so pleased to find unmolested when we arrived last November, was just as pristine when we left...not because we did a fine job of cleaning it up, but because it sat unused and forlorn all season. Wind was a frequent interference. Medical issues were the other. I dislike dropping a narrative abruptly, as I did over a month ago, so I'll do a bit of catching up and wrapping up in the next few days. What happened was, my darling was a guest at a hospital, then a rehab hospital, for nearly a month. During that time I drove back and forth from the Princessmobile to the various facilities watching over him. I took care of the Princessmobile, animals, bills, my own self...checked in here on eGullet and continued hosting duties...but did very little in the way of interesting eating. In fact, you could say my cooking was minimalist and perfunctory. I now understand folks who really want good food, but only a little of it, with minimum fuss and cleanup. @MetsFan5 and her Tovola Smart Oven come to mind. So do folks who participated in the topic @ElsieD started: Help! I've lost my cooking mojo and I want it back! Well, except in my case I was too busy, tired and dispirited to even want it back at the time. Things have turned around since then. I ate a LOT of salads and leftovers. The leftovers were from when my darling was in the hospital and had very little interest in food. I can't say there was much good food to come out of there, although I had an excellent pork chile verde one evening. Even my darling had liked it, but he'd had too little appetite to eat much of it. The rehab hospital, on the other hand, had excellent food at an astonishingly low price. For under $5 I could get a full lunch or dinner, if I wished, while I ate with my darling. i didn't usually want that much, but their green salads were generous and delicious, and their tuna salad was at least as good as anything I could make. I often came home with a clamshell containing the remains of a lunch salad, and ate that for dinner if I hadn't already had enough. One thing I learned at the rehab hospital is that there actually is a bottled dressing that I like. It came in plastic packets in their dining hall, but I discovered I could buy it in a grocery store. Well, it's ALMOST the same thing. I'm a bit surprised and mildly disgruntled at the difference. The bottle needs shaking, and the individual packets don't. I think that's interesting, but haven't really investigated why it is. I also ate, and continue to eat, a LOT of hummus and tabbouli. It took at least one bunch of neglected and thrown away cilantro and parsley before I finally found the mojo to try making the tabbouli, but it's become a staple. Makes a pretty good salad topping,... ...and goes well atop a tortilla chip, with or without hummus. Sometimes this was dinner. The recipes for tabbouli and hummus both come from the cookbook Balaboosta (eG-friendly Amazon.com link), which I bought way back in 2018 and quite forgot until I began looking for tabbouli and hummus recipes from my onboard Kindle collection. I recommend this book. These particular recipes have become my gold standard for the foods in question. My only problem with the tabbouli is that it makes enough for a crowd, and when I'm eating it alone the bulgur gets mushy before I've finished it off. I need to remember to scale down the recipe. During the time we languished in the desert, waiting for my darling to recover enough to travel -- and then waiting for trailer repairs! (but that's another story!) -- I saw the entire bloom-to-seed life cycle of some of our beloved flowers. A few hardy late bloomers like the paloverde trees are just starting to blossom. I don't have any photos of them in their full, frothy yellow glory, but they've been a welcome sight on our road trip. I learned a few things about easy cooking, and will share them in future posts.

I'd think pig would qualify as an omnivore rather than a carnivore, but your material quoted brings up lots of other examples! I had also forgotten about alligator, which definitely qualifies as a carnivore even if not commonly available.

I’ve eaten black bear before and thought it quite good. I’d assumed that bears, being omnivores, wouldn’t fall into the same category as mountain lion, which as far as I know is an obligate carnivore. I’ve learned something today.

I love Hank Shaw's website and tips, and this looks good. I'm surprised, though, at mountain lion! I had some idea that apex predators weren't generally good to eat. Am I wrong about that?

Welcome! It sounds like you'll fit right in! We have a number of other hunters and fisherfolk here, as well as would-be hunters and fisherfolk who love to read about it. It's also good to see more gluten-free folks joining in. I am lucky enough not to need GF food, but a number of our members do -- and my daughter in law is one of them, always on the search for good recipes or substitutes. Given how long you've lurked, you probably have a clear idea of where and how to post -- but if you have questions, feel free to contact a host (I am one) by Personal Messenger. Raspberries and strawberries I know and love, but what are haskaps?

https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2024/04/14

My sister is considering a countertop oven. Based on your experiences, I've told her that the Tovala is worth looking at. Thanks for your reports! Keep them coming, please!