Smithy

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!

Sorry for the confusion about permissions and access to the article. For those who are interested but can't access it, here's a brief summary: the Edna Lewis Menu Trail was organized by the Orange County (Virginia) Office of Tourism to celebrate the 50th anniversary of The Edna Lewis Cookbook. The participating restaurants are all in the state of Virginia. The article discusses her widespread reach and influence in other areas, but this was cooked up (heh) to celebrate her roots. There are of course beautiful photographs of the dishes served by the participating restaurants. They all look like fine places to visit!

Elsie, did you ever report back on this particular Panetonne? If you did, I missed it. How were the strawberries and white chocolate with that?

I was on my own for dinner tonight; it's so windy and cool that I chose to stay in. My neighbors, hardier than I, ate outside but kept to themselves except for pleasant visits during the day. I had given him some of my homemade salsa yesterday, but have no idea whether they've opened and tried it yet. I dithered over how to cook the superburger I'd thawed, intending to cook it, two days ago. Finally I decided on Papa's pan in the oven, in hopes that the burger would cook nicely without spattering all over the kitchen. I still had to turn on the exhaust fan and ceiling fan, to keep the smoke / CO2 alarm from going off, but they shuffled enough air to calm the alarms quickly. This unglamorous shot shows the raw burger, on the left, and the finished burger, on the right. I flipped the pan once, over the sink, and didn't make too much of a mess. This even less glamorous shot shows dinner. A sublime salad and a ridiculous burger before I slathered it with mayonnaise. I really didn't want all the burger trimmings (bun, lettuce, tomato, pickle). A good food stylist would have, oh, put the burger atop the salad and drizzled the whole thing with some lovely sauce. I've looked around the Princessmobile. Can't find a food stylist anywhere! For the record, that method of cooking the burger in Papa's pan in the oven (at around 400, maybe 450F) worked pretty well. Not as well as over a campfire, but better than in a stovetop skillet.

If I read it aright, you just have to provide them with an email address. They'll start sending you email and of course you can cancel any time. I don't think it's an account where they charge you, as in a subscription. (I'm subscribed to their newsletters but not to the paper, either online or on paper.)

My San Diego friends introduced me to this crisp, minerally Sauvignon Blanc that they'd gotten at Costco. They bought several bottles on my behalf, and later I found the same wine at a Trader Joe's and stocked up again. I hope I'll be able to find it in Duluth.

@Maison Rustique, thanks for that! We've been to a HyVee or two in past years, I think in Iowa. I agree that they're wonderful stores. As for Asian stores near the metro Kansas City area: that sounds like fun, but I'd have to be a lot closer to the metro area and not pulling the Princessmobile. It's confession time: even though I made it into and out of the L.A. Basin with the Princessmobile, the idea of towing it through major metropolitan areas -- even on freeways -- still gives me the heebie-jeebies. There's a sweet spot for me that I'm still trying to learn to predict: which routes and times will have good roads but not too much traffic. The other day, on my way here, I took a series of county and state highways in order to avoid the Oklahoma City metro area. I got off onto the streets of a small town, thanks to conflicting GPS information and missing several turns. "Turn left on Main Street" and "Turn Right on Main Street" from 2 different voices is not something one wants to hear! My darling still could top it with one of his early trucking experiences in his 20's: somehow, he got going the wrong way on a one way street on Manhattan Island! Fortunately, it was the middle of the night. Fortunately, the police were helpful. Fortunately, the population of this country was less than half what it is now and traffic was never as heavy. But still...! It was quite the adventure, and he loved telling the story. It looks like a lot of people are clearing out today. I suppose, for those who don't have far to go, making a break for home would make sense. I think I'll have a spot of lunch: some of last night's ribs, I think. It's nice to have electricity so I can use the microwave oven.

<Cue Allan Sherman, singing "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah"> I decided to stay here in order to sit out, rather than drive through, expected rainy weather. Now that it's actually here, I'm wondering if I could have stayed ahead of it! But this is a nice place, and the die is cast, so I'll just plan on rainy-day activities. I'm glad I did my running around before the rain hit. I've never seen the campground this full, but my darling and I never were here -- or any other developed campground -- on a holiday weekend. Yesterday and the day before, it was lush, green and mostly sunny. The green spaces have been filled with people playing: disk golf, baseball or other forms of catch, volleyball (one man holding a toddler in one arm and making excellent hits with the other!) and other activities. Kids learning to bicycle or ride on scooters. Folks out on the lake, fishing or simply paddling and enjoying the sunshine. Folks fishing from the shore. Some sites have elaborate cooking setups. Some spaces have 3 trailers set up, with long picnic tables and multiple gas griddles. The cooking smells have been wonderful. I, having planned to only be here a couple of days, didn't bother pulling out the camp stove. I planned to use the campfire setup instead. And on 2 nights I've gotten a fire going, with one of my darling's superburgers thawed, only to have my kind neighbor come across the way with surplus food from their dinner! The first night it was breaded and fried catfish and hush puppies, with a nonsweet tartar sauce. Delicious. He showed me a picture of the catfish he catches and keeps. I think he said it's yellow catfish, as opposed to the channel catfish. He showed me a picture. Those things are huge! 30 pounds is a small one. He likes to go out and fish in the local streams after the rains, because the rain washes nutrients into the streams and the "cats" swim upstream to feed, then are stopped by the dams. I learned a bit about catfish from my neighbor, and why they may or may not be good eating. @Shelby often showcases fried catfish and makes it look good. The first time I ate catfish it was at a restaurant, and it was the last time I tried it for years. Nasty, muddy flavor. Tasted like a muddy bottom feeder and I couldn't see the attraction. Eventually I tried it again and found it wasn't necessarily bad. According to my neighbor, one has to clean the catfish carefully and remove not only the interrnal organs but also the dark meat surrounding the body cavity; that dark meat contains fats that will cause an off-flavor to the cooking oil. He says he still gets about 20 pounds of meat from a 40-pound catfish. Yesterday I built a fire again, had it going, and my neighbor came over with more food! He'd cooked an entire rack of ribs, and beans, and a potato dish, and it was just him and his wife. (Their kids had already gone home.) Again, delicious. He came over after I'd finished eating, while his wife was off at the shower, and we shared some wine and conversation. Maybe I'll get to that burger tonight, but it will have to be inside cooking I'm sure. Only one party was disappointed by yesterday's dinner.