Smithy

I need to remember that this summer. My lovage plant is massive, and never gets enough use.

Well, maybe I'll have to try the Kewpie. I'm sure this is the Japanese product. It appears I'll have another trip to town before we leave, so I'll have one more chance at temptation. My darling is getting his hash settled! Well, not in the colloquial sense of that phrase, but he's fine-tuning it to the consistency he's been after for years. Dicing potatoes finely has been one of the keys. Not crowding the pan has been another. Many of you have suggested that, and he's finally seeing that you were right. We were short on potatoes and tried supplementing them with Tater Tots. They probably should have gone in sooner; they weren't crisp as they should be. The actual potatoes were quite crisp, as he likes them; the onions were still crisp as well. The kielbasa was labeled Polish Kielbasa (not smoked, and not spicy-hot) but now we can't remember which brand he tried. The prep work was done yesterday and the garbage went out today. Anyway, it was good, and the campstove got some use.

I always had the idea that Kewpie was a sweet mayo, and I detest sweetness in mayonnaise. (For that reason, Duke's (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) is one of my favorites.) However, I didn't see any sweetener in the Kewpie, unless I read too fast, and I did see something about spices. That piqued my curiosity. So, those of you who've tried it and liked it, or not, or gotten over it: what's the flavor profile?

Yesterday I did a last load of laundry for this trip. The laundromat shares a building with an Oriental Gift Shop that I visited years ago. When I could walk away from the laundry, I went into the gift shop, which carries quite a bit of food and cooking implements as well as a boatload of non-culinary items. The window displays are inviting. I love ornamental fans and pottery. These vases are beautiful, I think, and none was over $50. I wasn't tempted: wouldn't fit in the Princessmobile, nor would it go with our house decor. But I could enjoy looking. I could also see woks, rice cookers, skimmers, scoops and so on inside. Inside, there are scarves and dresses and a wild array of makeup and doodads - false eyelashes, wigs galore, beads - and toys and...well, I could have spent hours, but I only had minutes. Given the inexpensive cost of the vases, and the cavelier way they'd stowed the Zojirushi rice cooker, I thought I might find a real bargain. Nope. $235. They know what they have. On to the frozen and refrigerated food sections. This is just a very small sample. Can you make out the frozen octopus? I mentioned a couple of posts ago that I'd run out of rice. I stopped here and considered, but left it alone. There was a fine selection of sauces and oils and spices, and many curiosities for me. If I'd had any idea of its quality, I might have tried this one. But I don't, so I didn't. Here is the one thing that tempted me. I have read so much on eGullet about Kewpie mayonnaise, and I've been curious about it. Here was my chance! Then I decided that I wasn't $6.65 curious. Maybe some other time, some other year. Maybe I'll get a chance to try it without buying a whole package.

I don't think we called it a "foldover" or had any other special name for it, but you reminded me that when I was a child we did that a lot. Peanut butter and margarine, or bologna and margarine, or even margarine coated with sugar. Yum! (Suppers were much more balanced and healthful. 😎)

The wind came up this morning during our walk, and increased all day. The nearest reporting station shows it gusting over 40 mph. Grr. At least we were set up to cook inside tonight. I mentioned a couple of posts ago that I was covering my food bets with multiple preparations. Tonight it was Peruvian Chicken, using this recipe from Fifteen Spatulas. Take Aji Amarillo paste... ...add lime juice, olive oil, salt, cumin and other spices, and use it to marinate chicken. She spatchcocked and marinated a whole chicken. I used thighs, and let them sit in the refrigerator a couple of days. Bake about 40 minutes at 450F, until done. I served it with rice... the last basmati in the Princessmobile, along with the last of a package of wild rice. If I had any sense I'd leave it at that until we get home. I'll probably buy more when we go shopping next. Dinner was wonderful. Almost too hot... that chile paste packs a wallop. Next time I'll dilute the paste a bit. We liked it well enough to expect a next time.

Harrumph. I just finished downloading my extensive cookbook library to a new device, and when I saw the cookbook count I decided to diligently avoid this topic. "No more e-cookbooks for a while!" I said to myself. But this book, unwieldy though it is, has been a favorite among my dead-tree books and it's too heavy to carry along. I bought it. Thanks, I think.

I mentioned in the previous post that I'd kept my options open for tonight's dinner. I'm glad I did. I didn't have the packaged marinade for beef that I'd thought, but I do have a lovely espresso-ancho chile rub that my sister gave me. Some time ago I bought an inexpensive cut of beef and most of it went into an unholy-hot green chile stew. I cut and chunked the remainder today, then coated it with the espresso-chile rub for a campfire dinner. We dithered longer than we should have over how and where to cook. The wind was dying. So was the light. So was our energy. At last, we started a campfire. I had already chunked and microwaved some potatoes, and added quartered onion rings to them after the nuking. I also chopped some fresh asparagus to add at the last. There's an art to campfire cooking. I wanted a good hard sear on everything, not the gentle heat from well-established coals. I separated the interlocking halves of a campfire "basket" that under normal circumstances would be clipped together so the contents could be flipped. In this case, one half held the beef and the other held the potatoes and onions. When the contents were nearly cooked, I added the asparagus to the potato/onion basket. After a little more cooking, I tossed everything into a giant salad bowl, and we ate. The verdict: delicious, with some caveats. It needed more asparagus. It needed liquid of some sort. Melted butter did the trick, but in past years I've actually done a marinade and cooked it down, then turned it into a vinaigrette. and that would have given a better result. In past years I've also had cherry tomatoes to add, but we happen to be out. Finally, he thought the meat too tough. I rather liked the chew, but if I'd cut the chunks smaller we both might have liked the texture better. We used to do campfire grilled dinner salads like this on a regular basis. This is the first of the year, and we're leaving in a couple of weeks. It's nice to do something like this again.

Happy spring! I realize it's a few days after the Equinox, but I was away in San Diego on the actual day and I don't have any worthy food photos from my visit to share on this blog. We ate Thai takeout one night and home-cooked goodness the rest of the time. I've commented before that spring is arriving late here, but the flowers are at last showing themselves. We were talking this morning about how the pandemic has allowed us to spend more time here than usual, because we haven't made the long traveling/visiting loops we'd normally make. In a normal year he'd have been more restless to move around and I'd have been more anxious to visit people. With the simple expedient of a car rental, and with certain socially distanced events, I've been able to get the social contact I needed. It has also helped that this winter has been cooler than usual. A few years ago I was expiring from the heat by March. This year it's been too cool and windy for us generally to want to sit outside, with or without a campfire, to cook. We still hope to do a bit more fire cooking before we move on for the season. It's very windy again today, so once again we aren't likely to have a campfire. I have beef thawing and ready for a marinade (preferably for skewers and campfire cooking) and chicken thighs thawing for a Peruvian treatment that will start using the jar of aji amarillo paste I've been carrying around. The candidate recipes for the latter are this recipe for Aji de Gallina from The Spruce Eats and this recipe for Peruvian Chicken from Fifteen Spatulas. I just remembered that I don't have the cilantro recommended in the Fifteen Spatulas recipe! Oh, well. It looks easier and I'm leaning toward it anyway. Yesterday was a blustery day, entirely unlike the forecast. Again it wasn't good for cooking outside, but it had its own compensations. We settled for grilled cheese and ham sandwiches on sourdough bread. "Settled" is the wrong word. "Luxuriated" would be closer.

Score! A friend's neighbor in Yuma is gone for several weeks and invited anyone interested to help themselves to the citrus harvest. I picked half a dozen each of pink grapefruit and some mandarin orange variant. The mandarins are delicious. The grapefruit have yet to be tried. A single orange blossom is perfuming my room as I write.

Left-handedness is a huge issue with certain equipment and setups, it's true! My mother was a leftie although she grew up at an time when it was actively discouraged in school, so she wrote right-handed. She preferred some left-handed setups in the kitchen, and I still tend toward them. That said, I'm a rightie. As you surmised I needed my right hand for the camera, but before that I needed it for the knife and chopping, so the left hand managed the board.

You're welcome. I'll post one more photo anyway, since it's a good one and some other reader may be interested to see it. (I may have been misremembering my preferred handle angle. )

No, it doesn't. It must be up slightly to make the board lie flat... you can see the hinge running across the board, near the handle. I like raising it to almost a right angle, but right now I can't remember why I thought that was useful. Also, the handle has a lengthwise curve, I presume for a more comfortable hand fit, and that prevents it from lying flat. The upshot is that this board won't fit into a very flat space like a drawer. I think the depth of the handle curve is about an inch. I can measure it and post more detailed photos if you'd like.

Oh, I say! The more I use this new cutting board the more I like it. I just finished the latest batch of breakfast fruit salad. The board got a workout as I chopped and poured citrus, pineapple and dates into the bowl. I'd say this was $10 or $11 well-spent at the half-price blowout sale. If I were to buy it at full price I still might think it was money well spent, except that I'm a cheapskate. The only question now is how well it will last. Here's a (fuzzy, sorry) picture of the back, so you can see the non-skid strips and dots, and the flex joints.

Basically, yes. I measured mine at 18-3/4" x 10-5/8". That length includes the handle, by the way. The actual cutting surface is 14-1/2" x 10-5/8".

It seems to be this Joseph Joseph Chop2Pot, size Large (eG-friendly Amazon.com link). My measurements are slightly different than they advertise, but it looks like rounding error. I wouldn't call them non-skid "feet" as the advertisement does, so much as non-skid strips or rails along the bottom of the board. Based on my limited experience so far, I think it's pretty good non-skid. It's certainly better than the flimsy plastic cutting boards I'm replacing.

Happy St. Patrick's Day! I'm afraid there won't be much Irish about this post or the food we eat today. Yesterday I was in Yuma at the farmers' market for music-making. We played a fair amount of Irish music in honor of the day. I celebrated after with tacos. I kept my sparkly green "good luck" bowler on for the day, and received a surprising number of compliments in town. My counter briefly wore green the other day when I tested out the new cutting board. It folds even more neatly than I'd realized: if the handle sides are folded in, the board sides fold with them for easy pouring/scraping into a bowl. If the handle is folded at right angles to the board instead, it flattens the board. It's a nice design. The first "chopping victim" was the boned chicken leg meat we bought in Calipatria when we made that small road trip. After I'd cut it into bite-sized pieces I marinated it in one of the packaged marinades I bought way back here in Tucson. Those packages have been sitting in a cooler since I bought them, and it's time to decide whether I want more if we go back that way. That afternoon and evening were yet another in a series of windstorms. Usually even the strong winds die down by evening, but not in storms like this one. The wind was gusting to nearly 50 mph. I could see the glides pushing inward from time to time in the gusts. There was no question of skewering the chicken and cooking it outside over a campfire. I cooked it in the Dutch oven instead, roasted some brussels sprouts in olive oil and tossed them with salt, and cooked pilaf as well. We both liked it, although it was salty. "Try some white wine Worcestershire sauce on it!" he insisted. It gave the sauce an extra tang that I can see why he liked it. Something in white wine Worcestershire sauce (now known as Lea & Perrins Marinade for Chicken, if you're wondering) goes a very long way with me. I think it's the sauterne. Will I get another packet of Turkish Taouk marinade, given the chance? Maybe. I could make something like that for much less than $4 but there's the convenience factor. That night we felt the trailer rocking and rolling until 2 or 3 in the morning, and congratulated ourselves on having reoriented it earlier in the day. We had gone to Gold Rock Ranch for one more trailer dump before we head out sometime in the next few weeks. The store is still closed, but the residents are still around enjoying the "El Rocko" golf course. Unfortunately the swimming pool that was once there has been filled in, an irrevocable loss to the community as far as we're concerned. (The owner made more camping spots a few years ago and overreached her water allowance. She had to choose between the new spots or the swimming pool.) This area needs rain - it fell on the coast, but not here. Nonetheless we're starting to see more flowers.

It goes on the kushari. The kushari joints we visited always served up the bowl without the seasonings. At the table there would be a bottle of garlic/lemon sauce (the Egyptians call it "limoon") and a bottle of hot pepper sauce ("shatta" I think). We called it liquid blow torch. Holy smokes, that stuff was hot! I suspect that's the dark red container in the middle of your condiments. Although the red sauce was hot, it was also delicious at our favorite place, with a delightful piquancy and fruit as long as it was used sparingly enough that we didn't sear our taste buds. One year I bought 2 quarts' worth of it to bring home to the States. That isn't something they normally do, but they were happy to fill my jars. I closed the jars tightly, double-bagged them in Ziplock bags, wrapped them in dirty laundry, double-bagged again...basically gave them the hazmat treatment to get them home without wrecking our luggage or the airplane. Two weeks later all the sweetness had gone away, and there was nothing but savage heat. What a shame! What a surprise for our Egyptian food party!

I agree with @rotuts about the apparent selection in the GTA. I'd love to have been there with you! The menu looks quite promising. I can't say that I've ever had liver or calamari in Egypt, so I wouldn't have been able to advise you about that. What was wrong (in your opinion) with the kibbeh and the kushari?

@Porthos, that kitchen is coming along beautifully (despite flooring-timing issues)! I'd be reluctant to leave now, if it were my house. (I know that updating can be a necessary part of getting a house ready to sell. Still, it would be difficult to give up after all that work )

Think of all the steps you save! (But I too am impressed!)

Not to diss the food, but that plate is what catches my attention. It's beautiful!

That's a beautiful set! I look forward to the results. I asked this question a few weeks? months? ago, with an unsatisfactory although well-meaning series of responses. Now I'm going to ask you, directly: how do you control the thickness of the outer crust, whether in Dutch Ovens or on bread stones or whatever? I find that in my cast iron Dutch Oven the crust is beautifully caramelized - that is, almost reddish golden brown - but downright tough on the bottom. The sides and top are satisfying for a good crusty bread. I almost need a hatchet to cut through the base. I've had the same result, without as good color, with bread on a baking stone. What should I change so that the crust is the same thickness and texture at the base, where the dough has direct contact with a hot surface, as on the sides and top, where it doesn't?

We went for water and fuel today, and got rid of our trash. When we got back I had a chance to compare and photograph the citrus squeezers we've been discussing above. I need to note that @andiesenji gave a tutorial on the use of the standard (I'll call them "Mexican") citrus squeezers way back in 2011, here. Those posts clued me in to the idea that I was using mine wrong, and that the cut face needs to go down as noted by @rotuts and @lemniscate a few posts back. The question at hand was whether the new squeezer needs to have the lemons oriented the same way. I was also curious about which of the two squeezers is more efficient. So, the setup: I had 7 lemons. I weighed them all and found 4 lemons relatively close in mass: 134, 136, 140 and 143 grams. I processed the largest and smallest in the new squeezer and the two middle sizes in the older one, so that nearly the same mass of lemon was being squeezed by each. (This was to compare the juice squeezed by each method as an efficiency estimator, but it assumes the same ratio of peel to pulp and that may not be a good assumption.) I began with the new squeezer with the rotating reamer. I cut each of its lemons in half. First, I tried putting the cut side up so that the reamer made direct contact with the pulp. The pulp got pretty well reamed out this way. It conformed to the reamer beautifully so that I had to pull it away after squeezing. Next, I tried cut face down. I got a rather pretty citrus "flower" out of the deal, thanks to the rib in the base that catch the seeds and juice! Since the lemons are shaped differently at the stem end and the blossom end, I tried one of each way: stem half of one lemon face-up; stem half of another lemon face-down; same for the blossom end. The results were the same: a more efficient reaming, it seemed, if this squeezer had the lemon halves placed cut-side up. Next, the traditional "Mexican" squeezer. I used the same methodology: two lemons cut in half; the blossom end placed face-up one time and face-down the next; same for the stem end. Right away I remembered my troubles from 10(!) years ago trying to figure out how to work this thing. If the cut side is up, the juice can't get through the holes easily, and it spills over the sides instead! The picture doesn't quite capture the spillage properly, since it's difficult to do the pictures one-handed. The face conformed pretty well to the rounded squeezing surface. When I put the cut faces down, as is proper, it all went better. Note that the lemon half is almost turned insde-out. I didn't get around to trying the spiffy method lemniscate pointed to in this video, where you cut the ends off the lemon and then put the cut face up with this squeezer. In the video, the juice SHOOTS out through the bottom holes. Gotta try that next! I wonder how much practice it takes to learn how much end to cut off? In the meantime, I'm pretty well satisfied: although the lemon should be put cut-face down in the handheld squeezer, it works better to be placed cut-face up in the new countertop squeezer. Which was the more efficient squeezer? The new squeezer got 77g of juice from its lemons. The old squeezer got 100g of juice from its lemons. When I used it on the remains of the lemons squeezed in the new one, I got another 12g. So maybe the smaller, handheld squeezer is more efficient at getting the juice out. It's easier to clean. Still, I like aspects of the new squeezer's design: it sits stably on the counter and collects the juice in its own tank, and doesn't require as much hand strength. Besides, it's fun to mess with new toys.

Breakfast this morning: yogurt, half of an excellent avocado, and the new batch of granola. The usual these days. The granola is better. I like the crunch; the sweetness is about right; the raisins aren't too intrusive. (He would say the same about the cranberries.) But I'm still getting mighty tired of yogurt for breakfast! Its benefit is that it's easy, quick, healthful...and probably lower in calories than the avocado toast I might otherwise have. The scales this morning told me that something has paid off in weight loss, so I'll stick with it a while longer. This morning's walk took me out across area that I haven't gone on foot yet this season. I was rewarded with a string of mallow bushes that are starting to blossom. Everything here needs more rain, but we'll take what flowers we can get. I was also rudely reminded that one needs to watch one's footing even out in the open. Ouch! Next up: lemon squeezers.