Smithy

My plans for the day changed entirely, and I found myself with time to make bread. Thanks to my best friend, I have discovered Yet Another Bread Book. Last week I visited her (yes, in San Diego) and we baked bread. The first effort was using my go-to sandwich bread recipe, from a Peter Reinhart class, adapted inexpertly to whole wheat and done without the use of scales. Can you say "brick," boys and girls? (I had kept protesting that I'd given up on using only whole wheat. I've never been happy with the results, and this was no exception.) The next day, we used what was once her go-to recipe. You'll note that (a) it uses volume instead of weight and (b) it uses a mix of whole wheat and regular flour. I'm so used to baking by weights that it seems odd to use volumes any more, but we liked the result. So I snapped a photo of the recipe in question, and my own used copy of the book is winging its way here. Today I kept notes on the weights that came out from my flour measurements, but I confess that if the bread tastes as good as it looks I may just go right on with volume measurements. The mass came together nicely. I used the last of some Tucson honey, and a combination of King Arthur Bread Flour and some of the artisan bread flour from Barrio Bread in Tucson. There's a relationship between dough temperature and rise rate. Most of us who bake bread have heard about it - perhaps even read the formula - but I've seen it in action now. Her neighborhood and kitchen are cool: maybe around 70F that day. Her oven doesn't have a pilot light. Mine does. Our trailer today was in the high 70's, maybe even low 80's, and our oven provides a natural warming environment on the back of the stove, where the oven vents. What took about 2 hours to happen in her kitchen took 30 minutes in mine! I punched down the dough after 30 minutes and let it rise again to double the size, then shaped and let it rise again, all in the time it had taken for the first rise in her house. This bottom pair of pictures is, I kid you not, 1/2 hour apart. (While the dough was rising, I established that the leftover salmon cakes are a fine carrier for mayonnaise and salt.) The raw and finished products. We needed both a loaf for slicing and buns for burgers. I need work on shaping, and the bun sizes could have been a bit bigger. Still, I think these will be good. Here's a comparison of the last Orowheat commercial whole wheat burger bun and the largest of my baking product for today. I think my efforts will do for superburgers and sandwiches.

I wonder where that leaves those of us with an active subscription? I still enjoy that magazine, although I rarely actually cook from it.

Grated onion? I've read through the recipe 3 times and still don't see it. That makes me wonder whether I got the right recipe. I very much like your "smooshed up by hand" idea. Much simpler than what I did, although of course I was starting from scratch.

Thanks, Elsie. That link takes me to a recipe search with more than one option. Is this the one you mean? It does look considerably easier than the one I tried, which began with poaching half the fish and mincing it all.

We are just over the California/Arizona border, on the California side. The nearest town of any size is Yuma, Arizona. It's still the Sonoran Desert, as you were in, but at a couple thousand feet lower and a few inches less rain each year the vegetation is quite different and much more sparse. There are no saquaro cactus here. There are prickly pear, cholla and lots of non-cactus like ocatillo and croesote bush but they are sparse enough that we can walk / cycle without worrying about thorns. I'll be including more landscape photos as we go along, assuming we stay here. None of that has to do with food, though! My darling is in charge of dinner tonight. It will probably be Superburgers for dinner and various leftovers during the day. I'm still working on my buck-apiece pomegranates and will indulge in some juice for breakfast. Squeezing one of them will probably be the fussiest food thing I do all day.

Our neighbors have cleared out, and the areas several miles south that resembled RV sales lots have only a few camping units remaining. We had to go to town today to get propane. The highway southbound toward the freeway had the heaviest traffic we've ever seen. I tried, and failed, to get a photo. It was almost like rush hour traffic! This deal was too good to pass up during our last grocery shopping expedition: I've had a bee in my bonnet to make salmon cakes, preferably Thai-style, and this promised to scratch that itch. Or swat that bee, if you dislike mixed metaphors. I finally settled on following this recipe, more or less, for Thai Style Salmon Cakes from The Food Fairy Blog. I say "more or less" because the recipe suffers from poor editing: it calls for 3 T soy sauce, and 2 T soy sauce, but never gets around to saying why it's all divided. Everything gets mixed together. Probably a typo. I showed 'em! I forgot the soy sauce altogether, until it got to the table! We liked it, but agreed it was bland. Soy sauce helped. Salt helped. The "5-alarm Fire Sea Salt" my sister gave me helped even more. Brussels sprouts provided the greens. Itch scratched. Bee smashed. This dinner wasn't a bust, but there are better ways to spend my time.

Happy New Year! There hasn't been much foodworthy activity around here since the last post. Some local folks moved into our little area, a decent distance away, and we've visited at a safe distance a couple of times. I've learned that this little area USED to be heavily occupied for Christmas, New Year's and the intervening week. They said some 50 trailers would ring the entire perimeter, gather and have grand times. Many are / were locals. Over the decades the attendance has dropped as people aged. The Covid-19 pandemic discouraged the survivors except for 3 people in 2 trailers. I've been told that there are still barbecue barrels buried around here somewhere, as well as some people's ashes. Nice to know that there are traditions. We've never been here past Dec. 20 so weren't aware of the usual routine. The skywatching has been beautiful. I got some pretty good photos of the Dec. 21 sunset and superconjunction, but had to use a good camera to get them and haven't transferred them to the computer. The phone caught a good Christmas Eve sunset. Christmas dinner was an almost complete rerun of Thanksgiving dinner, except that I didn't bother making bread. We had phone calls and Zoom calls with family, but it still isn't the same as being together. I couldn't muster quite enough holiday spirit to include bread in the food activities. For the record, the menu was prime rib with potatoes roasted in its juices; scalloped corn; green beans with bacon; cranberry relish (not shown). Standard sliced-bread toast for him. As New Year's Day approached and another long weekend started, a new bunch of revelers rolled in to the general area. The 4-wheeler enthusiasts' camping areas are packed as densely as any RV dealer lot we see from the highway. If you look closely at the bottom two pictures you'll see herds of 4-wheelers parked atop the dunes, waiting their turns; you'll also see some vehicles going up or down the dunes. They're having fun. They're miles from us, so we're having fun too. New Year's Eve was also a quiet affair, but the most noteworthy food I've eaten or made in some weeks. Well, not the popcorn we ate while watching Fiddler on the Roof (a perennial favorite, but an odd choice for NYE) but the Shrimp Creole Dip from George Graham's web site, Acadiana Table. Holy man, that's good stuff. I took some liberties with it and it's still good: started from already-cooked salad shrimp, used already-mixed horseradish mustard because I didn't have enough horseradish or grainy mustard. Oh, and like many others in this forum I refused to use green bell peppers. Red bell worked just fine, thank you. This is an excellent dip, and if it's wildly different from the taste he would get we'll never know. It's also easy. It's worth adding to your recipe files. As his web page notes, it's good right off the bat but even better after it sits in the refrigerator and firms overnight. His serving suggestions don't pair it with avocado, but I'm here to tell you that the dip, with avocado and tortilla chips, makes a fine breakfast.

I've been leaning toward spinach and feta baked in puff pastry - basically spanikopita turnovers (nod to @Darienne on that) - but I also very much like the sound of crab-filled pastry. How would one go about that, please? I have a package of puff pastry begging to be used.

Was this a second or third bowl of the salad, or did nobody try any of it? If that salad all went untried, what a travesty! Except that you are in a position to enjoy it now. Oh, and I'd like details about that salad. It happens that I have all the ingredients mentioned.

Stuffed squash tonight. Two lovely Carnival(?) squash (please correct me if I have the wrong variety) have been traveling with us since we left home. They were last seen here amongst the wreckage on the floor, when we moved the Princessmobile a week ago. Here's an excerpt from the photo of the debris. I like this treatment of such squash: halve it, scoop out the seeds, score the flesh and drizzle with olive oil, then stuff the cavity with a tomato/pepper/sausage/whatever stuffing. Cover. Roast until the squash is soft. Uncover. Top with cheese, continue roasting until the cheese is melted and, preferably, beginning to brown. (I stopped at "melted" this time. The squash took much longer to cook than I'd planned, and we were tired of waiting.) My only regret is that this is the last of the oven-roasted tomato/pepper/eggplant/sausage mix from last summer's harvest season. Another container emptied; another happy dish relegated to memory's pantry.

I have yet to make the granola, but today I found a way around it when I remembered that I still have beans from Cooper's. That's one more container out of the freezer. The clouds at dawn presaged the wind storm that's hit us. The trailer is rocking, and dust is flying by. I'm glad I did my weekly errand-running yesterday. I expect we'll lose sight of the mountains altogether before this is over. It could be worse: back home in northern Minnesota, they're predicting wind gusts up to 50 mph and a snowstorm, with temperatures hovering right around freezing. Talk about a sloppy mess! Here, the worst that's likely to happen is that the freeway will get sand drifted across it from the dunes. They keep plows nearby for that purpose. Yesterday's errands included a trip to the grocery store. Since @ElsieD and others have expressed interest in seeing what's there, I snapped a few shots of things I thought interesting. It was VERY difficult for me to pass up this deal, but we already have our prime rib (brought from home) for Christmas. On the other hand, I'd hoped for more buck-apiece pomegranates. That deal is no more. Granted, these pomegranates were huge - the size of large grapefruit - but I passed anyway. My mother's creamed corn recipe, one of our special holiday dishes, calls for diced pickled jalapenos. Mom used to get those in small cans or jars, more or less the quantity of diced pimentos. I don't know where she found them. This was all I could find: No. I'd never get through all those. I'll chop some pepperoncini instead, as I did at Thanksgiving. I needed shrimp for a recipe from George Graham's Acadiana Table for Shrimp Creole Dip, as one of our Christmas appetizers. This was a good price too. It occurs to me, looking at the picture on his web page, that his "small" may have been intended to be bigger. I think this will work anyway. I got out with a relatively small purchase despite all the temptation. It might be because I'd eaten lunch before going to the grocery store. This unassuming little taco stand has caught my eye every time we passed by it. Yesterday, since I was on my own, I indulged my curiosity. Two women were working in the trailer. A little sign by the counter window said "Thank you for supporting my small business." I ordered a taco de cameron and taco gubernador, glad the woman taking my order could understand my broken pronunciation from behind my mask. I got the tacos loaded with everything, and then added extra condiments myself from the squeeze bottles at the counter. Oh, these were good! I liked the gubernador better than the straight shrimp taco, but both had a pleasant not-quite-too-spicy heat. The coating on the fried shrimp in the gubernador was crisp. The shrimp and fish were tender and cooked perfectly. And the tortillas themselves - well, those were a revelation. No wonder people like corn tortillas. When they're warm, soft and delicately fried like this I can see what the fuss is about.

Happy solstice! This mountain range makes a wonderful set of markers for the sun's movement. Since we arrived here, the sun's rise location has shifted southward (to the right, in this picture) until what we see today: just to the right of the small tooth in the big notch. The sun's time to peek over the ridge is also about 30 minutes later than when we arrived, but the uneven ridgeline has a factor in that. After today, the sun will start creeping northward again. By spring, it will be north of the mountains altogether. Yogurt, avocado and a walnut-filled date are breakfast today, with the juice of one pomegranate to drink. I love pomegranate juice. I'm glad I scored those buck-apiece poms at the grocery store. I may buy more. I am getting almighty tired of yogurt, with or without avocado. It's about time to think of something else. I wish I liked boxed cereal. Maybe I'll make granola today, although I think there's too much else on my schedule already. The dear friend whom we'd normally be visiting today is turning 100! There's a giant Zoom party, with all of us toasting and feteing her, and each participant getting a few minutes alone in a Zoom Room with her. It isn't the same as the feasting and singing we'd all hoped for at her house in person for this momentous day, but it's better than nothing and far safer.

I'm sorry, please explain this? I don't understand it. I never think of tangelos as being ready before mid-January or early February. (One of the better Valentine's Day gifts my parents sent me one year after I'd moved to Minnesota was a box of minneolas from home. ) Do you have a different variety of tangelo, or are the seasons so much farther along in L.A. than in Visalia?

More Christmas decorations. I realized yesterday that with the trailer oriented as it is, there IS no better light for photographing some of the decorations. I suppose nighttime with a flash might be better, but then there's the complication of a reflected flash in the photo. Yesterday we drove to a rest area to drop off trash and pick up water. It gave me a chance to photograph some of the outlandish, gorgeous scenery around here: a part of the Imperial Dunes complex. These sand dunes are hundreds of feet high, some 15 or 20 miles wide and over a hundred miles long. The highways and Interstate go through them and have to be plowed clear of sand after a good-sized windstorm. Parts of the dunes are wildlife preserve, but in this area they're prime 4-wheeler recreational area. If you look closely at the middle of the top photo you can see a couple of 4-wheelers for scale. One is near the top of the dune, the other is halfway up. Or down. I've forgotten which way it was traveling. To me the dunes look like a huge, beautifully browned meringue. Nobody felt much like cooking last night, so we pulled 2 of the 3 remaining chili containers out of the freezer for dinner. We garnished the chili with chopped onions and shredded cheese. There are leftovers. Despite removing 2 containers from the freezer, it still seems pretty darned full. My darling is a bit put out about that. It probably won't stop us from shopping again soon! I have been jonesing - no, make that JONESING - for a ham and cheese biscuit. This morning I finally got out the hitherto-unopened bag of Mary White self-rising flour that I bought in 2015, and wondered whether it needed a boost of baking soda at this late date. Maybe it could have used it, but I didn't bother. Despite ambitions in that direction, I haven't actually made biscuits in, oh, donkey's years. I was none too sure how it would work out. The tops didn't brown as much as I'd have liked, but I pulled them when the bottoms were beginning to brown. They flaked reasonably well. I've had better biscuits, but I've had worse. With some good sharp cheddar and slices of ham (yes, the same ham) the biscuits scratched that itch rather nicely. When I asked my darling what he thought about them, he said he was disappointed...that he couldn't manage a 3rd biscuit! I'll take that compliment.

Very impressive...and welcome back!

The Christmas decorations are finally up. I'll have to wait until the light swings around to the other side of the trailer to catch better photos of some areas, but here's a smattering: My mother used to wear this Christmas-light jingle-bells necklace at our family gatherings. Dad made it for her when they changed to the newer mini-light strings. It jingles when worn, which would be fun at a dance. (Remember those?) Mostly it hangs as a decoration. Last night I pulled a container out of the freezer that had a mix of eggplant, peppers, tomatoes and some sausage (Italian?) that I'd roasted together at the height of last summer's harvest season. We packed along a couple of these containers. They're good in pasta, or with roasted squash. Last night I chose pasta. Then came the pasta dilemma. I didn't have enough gigli left for the dish. I didn't want to open a new package of anything. I used the remaining half of the package of farfalle I'd opened last week. Doggonitall, I think the discussion of farfalle in the Pasta Shapes topic may have ruined me for farfalle forever. Now I'm all too aware of the different texture (from flat to squished) when cooked. I was afraid at first there was too much pasta for the sauce, but it balanced out reasonably well after good tossing and a bit of sauce-lengthening with the pasta water. Dinner was good, but we both thought smaller pasta bits would have been better. I'll use the remaining containers' worth with some other pasta shapes - or with squash.

Thanks, HardyH. Welcome to eGullet!

My husband has been threatening / promising to buy this shirt for me. I just now realized, though, that the model is carrying a coffee cup! Oh, the irony. Wait...maybe she has wine in the cup.

One might think that sitting out in the boondocks and socially distancing would lend itself to elaborate cookery. It can, but it also lends itself to loads of computer work and other non-food-related chores. I'm pretty good at procrastinating in the best of times, and the pandemic social distancing hasn't exactly helped me pick up the pace. The most elaborate thing I've cooked since the last post was scrambled eggs with cheese, ham (yes, the same one) and Campari tomatoes. In retrospect the tomatoes would have been better chopped and added as a garnish at the end, but they added a nice note. He had the requisite toast with his; I found one lone roll from Thanksgiving and polished it off. Some chores are specific to the boondocking lifestyle. We drove to the nearest trailer park / campground to dump the holding tanks. We were delighted to see that they've livened up the driveway with Christmas decorations! Even the cowboy and cowgirl silhouettes were pulled into the act with sparkly bandannas. Blurry photo of the view as we left and headed "home" again, along with more decorations. I think that night we had our "Bedouin-style tuna noodle hot dish" since neither of us felt much like cooking. The whole moving/dumping/resettling process takes a couple of hours even if one remembers to secure everything properly. If one forgets, there are also messes to clean up. What you see here is the contents of our little end table shelves and our two travel coffee mugs that fell from their overhead shelf, all inconveniently mixed into the pet food dishes. One travel mug's handle broke, but it's still usable. It could have been worse. My mother forgot more than once to close and latch the refrigerator door when she and Dad were trailering around. Anyway, here's my tuna noodle hot dish dinner. He had toast with his, of course! We made the trek to town a day or so later. I haven't taken many interior photos of the Fry's grocery store in Yuma, but we like the place. This really surprised me, and added to my sense that Fry's (a Kroger chain) is reasonably upscale. I think it's pretty neat that they list the smoke points on the labels. Dinner last night was more leftovers: the remains of a pork steak for me, along with asparagus; our single remaining Super Burger for him, with potato salad from the grocery store. Maybe I'll get around to Christmas decorations today. It's on my list. It has been on my list. It will continue to be on my list until I do it or Christmas passes!

That makes two of us. Mind you, I've never made toffee despite having (long ago) gotten a wonderful recipe from a friend of my parents. That recipe is probably lost forever. Yours, Darienne, looks delicious.

I have serious brisket envy. Everything else I could manage on my own, but we're far from good Texas 'cue now. That looks wonderful. Where in Yorkshire were you? I worked in York for a couple of months in 1980 and I don't recall any Indian or Greek food there. I suppose it's possible I was too enamored of the fish and chips I could get from the street stands anyway. Even more importantly: how did you make that moussaka? I've taken to an Egyptian version, but yours looks so good I'd like to try it.

Hello and welcome! I'll be interested to hear not only the sorts of foods and drink you like, but how you accommodate to doing those off the grid. Do you have solar power and inverters? Generator? What powers your stove (i.e. propane, the aforementioned solar power, or...)?

The sunset was almost as unusual as the sunrise had been. Tonight's campfire was a great way to cook the bratwursts and hot dog buns we'd thawed earlier. As it turns out, I should have planned on one brat only for myself. Not shown: I microwaved the bejeesus out of some of last night's green beans. They finally became tender, but as I'd feared the lemon dressing had lost its oomph. There's another container yet. Next time I'll try draining the dressing before cooking the beans, or - if there isn't enough dressing - just make another batch.

You're bringing him up right, @Duvel!

Well, this is an unusual morning. We saw fog over the sand dunes yesterday morning, but fog (as opposed to dust) here is very rare. The outdoor kitchen was downright wet when we got up. As the sun heats the air everything is starting to dry, but I enjoyed the cool damp air. It reminds me of home, growing up in the San Joaquin Valley, around Christmas time when fog was common. It also enhances the smells. I wish we had smell-o-rama over the internet, so I could share the desert aroma! Plants that are only beginning to turn green put out subtle spicy odors that we can't usually smell. Last night's dinner was simple, but didn't come out as well as I'd have liked. I bought a couple of pounds of green beans at our last grocery store visit. I love green beans. I don't love trimming them, so cooking them is a production that had Better Be Worth The Effort. The treatment is a simple Lebanese recipe from @linda dalal's cookbook Alice's Kitchen (eG-friendly Amazon.com link): steam them and toss with a dressing of oil, lemon juice, garlic and salt. (I prefer steaming to blanching because it uses less water. I love the fact that the author advocates saving the steaming water for other uses like broth.) This recipe has been a big hit with us before. Unfortunately, I didn't steam the beans long enough for them to be quite done, and they're tough. We'll try cooking the leftovers more today, but that will change the flavor of the dressing. The rest of dinner was breaded and baked chicken thighs. It's one of those nearly effortless dishes that minds itself so we can watch the Friday night news on computer. This morning my darling wanted to plan breaded and baked pork steaks. We looked through the freezer. We found thin-cut pork steaks suitable for schnitzel. We looked harder. We unpacked the darned freezer. No thick-cut pork steaks, but at least I confirmed that we have a prime rib for Christmas. We settled on campfire cookery for tonight. Then, with effort, we put the genie back in the bottle. It's hard to tell anything has come out, isn't it?