Smithy

No, we're just across the border in California. Still desert. Quite a bit less crowded than Tucson.

Ham 'n' mac 'n' cheese last night for dinner. The ham will keep on giving for a while - there's a lot of it! - and bolstering it with pasta and cheese sauce just added to the congestion in the refrigerator. No cooking will be necessary for a while, except for vegetables. It's funny: the last time I made this dish I used penne rigate and we thought it perfect. This time, we thought the penne too long. Maybe I used a smaller gauge last time around. I finished this pasta, though. That made room to move another pasta from an outside cooler to an interior canister. I also finished the deli-sliced cheeses that I bought for sandwiches before we started our trip a month ago. They were getting a little long in the tooth, but they were perfect in this. Sharp cheddar and pepper jack are a nice cheese sauce combination, especially when it's augmented with paprika (sweet and smoked), white pepper, cumin and Dijon mustard. Today the desert wind is blowing like stink. It would be great for sailing, if we had water and a sailboat, but it's not so great for being out walking. I'm glad I have a lot of inside work to do. I may have to close the lid of the camp stove to keep it from blowing over.

Assisting kayb here, since we happen to have a couple of smoked pork shanks purchased last fall at a favorite meat market. This shank weighs 1.79 pounds so is plenty for two of us, with leftovers. Hmm, since we have two of 'em, I may try Kay's treatment with one instead of our usual pork shanks with spuds and sauerkraut. Her idea seems a fine one.

I'll be curious to see what you think about the book, Porthos. I thought it an interesting idea, then decided I make up my own mind about that anyway, so I saved a couple of bucks spent that money elsewhere.

Cotton-pickin' sonofagun, Toliver. Every time I open this topic my tablet gets heavier and my bank account lighter. At least I was reminded that I'd already bought The Cuban Table (and no, I haven't cooked from it yet). Nonetheless I've added Diana Henry's book and For the Love of the South to the collection.

In my very-quick search of this new-to-me technology, it looks as though the autoclave strip indicates a minimum temperature but not time at that temperature. Don't you need both? https://ehs.princeton.edu/book/export/html/485 That's pretty interesting stuff, though. I'm glad you mentioned it. ETA or is that high temperature enough to kill bugs regardless of time?

Sous vide is out of the question for now, but for future reference: what time and temperature?

The neighbors have cleared out, we've relocated to our usual location, and there isn't another trailer within a mile. If we hadn't been here for Thanksgiving Week, we'd have had no idea how 'crowded' it can get. Crowding is a relative concept, though. As noted before, there was plenty of room between them and us for privacy. Still, we didn't want to go to the trouble of setting up an outdoor kitchen when we expected to move in a couple of days. Yesterday, we (mostly my darling) set it up. It was more of a production than usual. Our neighbors, or somebody before them, had torn apart our usual campfire ring and replaced it with a huge one. It's difficult to tell by scale, but the new one is at least 6 feet in diameter. Plenty big for social distancing; too big for efficient cooking. My darling built a smaller one, to our specifications. The previous group left a neat campsite, but unfortunately (in our opinion) were eager to clear out dead wood. The paloverde snag that has been our hummingbird feeder hanger for years is no more. Somebody -- probably the proud 11-year-old who told me about the work he'd been doing -- cut it and uprooted it. You can see the remains in the stack of firewood they left. The tree was quite dead, having given up the ghost over the years we've been visiting, but still. We'll miss it. Here it is, with one of last spring's flash floods as a backdrop, in memoriam. We haven't actually used the outdoor kitchen yet, but there will be superburgers and hash and a stir fry or two before long. The Thanksgiving prime rib and sides have kept us well fed. Last night we cooked a ham that my darling spotted and simply had to buy when we shopped in Tucson. Picnic ham, or a near facsimile, at less than $1.50/lb is too good to pass up these days. So it's been taking space in the refrigerator until yesterday, and we will be enjoying the leftovers in many ways... ...including breakfast snacks this morning.

A small hardware store out in rural New Mexico that we visited recently actually had both sizes of the Ball canning lids, as well as full sets of jars! It was all I could do not to buy some. I don't expect to need any more until next summer, and someone else in Animas might need them sooner. But boy, was I tempted.

Let me know how the scissors work! I've always pitted them, then laid them in a heap on the cutting board and chopped them with a large knife the way I would chop nuts. Never thought about oiled scissors until I spotted this topic.

It's a couple of days after the hubbub of Thanksgiving, and I have a bit of time to write about where we are and what we did. I posted a summary of the dinner here. We arrived, we thought, in plenty of time to get our usual camping spot, only to find that 6 trailers with 3 family generations had got there first. Not a big deal, as there's plenty of room around here and the area is wide open, but we're surprised to discover that moving a couple of hundred yards has had a major impact on wireless connectivity. It played havoc with our attempted Zoom family call. Oh, well. I puttered around the Princessmobile much of Thanksgiving Day, having done no more advance preparation than making sure we had the supplies. The menu: Prime Rib, brought from home Potatoes Scalloped corn casserole Green beans - did I want the Italian treatment with gremolata, or the traditional cooked with bacon? Bacon won out Cranberry / orange / walnut salad Fresh bread rolls, using some of last spring's bread flour from Barrio Bread in Tucson Have I mentioned that the oven only has 1 rack? I wouldn't mind adding another, but I've never found one to fit. Every trailer stove seems to have its own arrangement and sizes. When the oven failed in the previous Princessmobile and we had to replace it, I saved the racks for the new one. Woe was me, they didn't fit! I think those racks are still at home, having been used over a campfire more than once. This means the competition for the oven, and the timing required, are pretty tight. The green beans were a stovetop item. The bread, corn casserole, roast and potatoes all needed the oven for different times and temperatures. I had initially planned scalloped potatoes, but instead decided to cut and roast them along with the prime rib and let them collect the drippings from the roast. It turned out to be a good move. After the bread dough was mixed and rising, I began hauling out the cooking vessels and utensils I'd need for the rest of the work. A heavy enameled cast iron pot for the green beans, from under the bed. The special covered "all-purpose" roasting pan that I'd bought from Sur la Table a few years back in a moment of retail weakness, from under the office supplies. A 1-quart Corningware baking dish. The food processor for the cranberry salad. The best dinner plates. The Reidel wine carafe I won as a door prize last year. I think it was about then that my darling said, "You know, you'll have to do all the cleanup, because I've never seen this stuff before and have NO idea where it goes." It was actually a fairly relaxed day, since we had no particular timetable for eating. The Zoom family call was a disappointment, but we briefly saw each other's faces and heard each other's voices. It was better than nothing. The dinner-prep steps: (Those photos look so much better on my phone than on the screen. Sorry.) The bread steps, with the wine breathing unmolested in the background: Dinner: We didn't actually get to the cranberry salad. It was intended for dessert, but what you see above was a gracious plenty. It has been breakfast since then: (I do not put Cheerios atop mine, but I confess to the whipped cream, even when there's yogurt with it.) He was pretty funny about the cranberry salad. His family had traditionally made it with a hand-cranked grinder, and he doubted that the food processor could do the job. Now that he knows it can, I think I'll be making a lot more of this as a change from his traditional breakfast fruit salad! The bread rolls make gratifying little sandwiches.

There are some gorgeous poultry photos in this topic! We haven't done a bird for Thanksgiving for, oh, a long time but I always appreciate seeing what others do. Wouldn't mind eating it, either. Our menu was prime rib cooked along with potatoes that roasted in the meat fat; scalloped corn; green beans cooked slowly with bacon; rolls made that day. (I had no idea how poor that photo was! Too late to improve it now.) A lush Arabella Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon was the perfect accompaniment. We didn't get to dessert that night: the classic salad made of cranberries, orange and walnuts, ground together in a food processor and sweetened with a bit of raw sugar. It's been breakfast a couple of mornings in a row since then. Yes, that's whipped cream on it. For breakfast. So shoot me. He adds Cheerios to his, along with the whipped cream!

If the US / Mexico border and the state park in Columbus are both open by the time we head back in the spring, I probably will. Right now neither is open, and we're well west of New Mexico. I will be pleased to do more proxy shopping for you, if the stars align properly!

Barhi is my favorite variety, too. I love its soft squishy texture, and it seems to me to be the ideal date for making pastes. Not that I actually get around to doing that very often...well, maybe I've never done it? But I keep intending to! I didn't see Barhi dates there at Dateland, but the mysterious black dates and Khadrawy are pretty soft. I have got to try roasting bacon-wrapped stuffed dates. I think we'll be making at least one meal of appetizers sometime this trip. It could have been yesterday but we were being lazy in the pre-Thanksgiving windup. Thanks for that link to Hadley Fruit Orchards! I didn't know about them. Their web site has some interesting recipes. I remember the idea of bacon-wrapped dates from the '60s. Back then, I thought dates only came in those hard bricks with the camel on the label (Dromedary brand?) and didn't know what we were missing. We were only a few hundred miles from the date-growing areas, but up there in citrus and stone fruit country it was another world.

Roughly 30 miles east of Yuma lies the little town of Dateland, Arizona. It has a distinctive look from the freeway: a compact grove of dates, just south of a freeway exit, rising from otherwise undeveloped land. We've always wondered about it but never stopped until yesterday. There a bit of history there, of which we were unaware: originally a water stop for the trains; General Patton's troops trained in the area....for more information please see this page. Since we began the Princessmobile routine we've visited the Oasis Date Gardens in California because they were close to one of our camping spots and made an easy day trip. This year, we don't know whether we'll be going that way - nor whether the Oasis Date Gardens' shop will be open if we do. (The charming sample room, shop and cafe are closed for now, except to prepare date shakes to go.) So we stopped briefly at Dateland. Dateland has quite a different look than the Oasis Date Gardens. There's an RV park nearby. The cafes and shops are all in a modern Travel Plaza. The cafes include a Pizza Hut and something else I've forgotten, along with an ice cream vendor. Fuel pumps are part of the plaza. In fact, the cash register receipt for my eventual purchases read "Dateland Petroleum"...not a very appetizing idea. I'm glad I didn't see that before going inside! The shop has some nice handcrafted items, jewelry, non-food things... ...but I was really there for the dates. And boy, do they have dates! There must have been a dozen varieties. There were many varieties familiar to me from the Oasis Date Gardens, as well as a couple of new ones. One description noted that there's a single tree of that variety in their grove, and they don't know what breed it is, and invited anyone who knew to tell them. Another variety came from only 2 trees in the grove. What I found somewhat disappointing was that all the dates came packaged, and there were no samples. However, that's probably why this company could be open safely and the Oasis Date Gardens are currently closed. I picked up packages of the varieties I know we like. I also grabbed a box of their walnut-stuffed medjool dates. (I meant to grab the pecan-stuffed dates, and just now discovered my mistake. No matter, they'll be good too.) They may be an appetizer, or dessert, for tomorrow's feast. A small date shake finished the purchase, and we shared it on the way west toward Yuma. How often do you have a milk shake so thick that it only slowly drains back down through the straw? If we lived closer, those shakes could become a habit.

Makes me wish I'd gotten more cranberries! I promised the family's traditional walnut/cranberry/orange salad. I'll have to try that recipe another time.

I'm so impressed with those of you who start early and who manage a feast for a crowd - whether or not that crowd materializes this year. The last time I fed a crowd for Thanksgiving was about 25 years ago. It was great fun, but times and circumstances have changed. The pandemic has only reinforced our normal routine. Since it's just the two of us, appetizers seem like overkill, but it's hard to pass up things like devilled eggs and celery stalks with pimento cheese. Maybe I'll make them for tonight's dinner. As for the feast tomorrow, the menu includes prime rib, potatoes (method tbd, probably dauphinois), green beans with bacon and mushrooms for me, scalloped corn for him. Bread of some sort. Cranberry/walnut/orange salad, along with pecan-stuffed dates, for dessert. And it will all be too much, and we will delight in the leftovers.

That looks delicious. Does this look like the same recipe? It claims to be a recipe from Bon Appetit, Feb. 1995.

I don't think I've ever made Baked Alaska, but I remember my mother and sister making "Grapefruit Alaska" when I was 10 or 11. The base of each serving was a grapefruit half, cut across the equator, with the ice cream and the meringue on top. It worked well, and our family was fascinated by the fact that the ice cream didn't melt. I don't remember what we thought of the combination of ice cream and grapefruit, though. Since we/they only made it once, our family probably thought those flavors were better kept separate.

Thanks! I had missed the fact that she'd gotten an answer.

This sounds soooooo good. As with most recipes or procedures of my experience, it still allows for mistakes. (It seems I learn through trial,error and repetition.) I got a bit carried away with the oil tonight. Still tasty, but I had to work to remove excess oil...and still had overdark surfaces. I'll know better next time. It still tasted good!

It sounds unlikely to me, but I'm fuzzy on baking ratios. I'm bumping this up in hopes that someone with more insight will jump in.

Yesterday we ventured into town to get the rest of the supplies needed for Thanksgiving, and to refuel the truck. The little mountain pass between our county park and the main part of town makes for interesting driving. This is not the way we go with the trailer in tow. In fact, the road is marked "no trucks or trailers" with good reason, although a truck pulling a small travel trailer was coming up the pass when we were going down. We didn't see it on our return trip, so the driver must have gotten through without blocking traffic. So many places I like to visit had to be left off the list this trip, because of the shortness of our stay and/or because of pandemic restrictions! But we did make it to the Babylon Market. This Middle Eastern grocery store, founded by a couple of Iraqi brothers, has grown over the years and been a favorite stop of ours. I wondered how well they were weathering the pandemic. Pretty well, as it turns out. They had the plastic shields and markings on the floors that we have come to expect, but I saw no evidence of weakened business or short supplies. In fact, they're relocating (and, I assume, expanding) their little restaurant. The unfortunate thing about that is that we couldn't get the shawarma wraps or the tabbouleh that I'd so looked forward to enjoying. They have a very small section of fresh produce, and an enticing Halal meat counter, and an ever-expanding selections of spices, preserves, rice, Asian goods, cooking utensils. I've written about this place before and didn't take many photos this trip, but here's a small sampling. The Fry's grocery store where we did our main shopping had gaps in their supplies, as many grocery stores do at the moment: paper goods, cleaning supplies were all marked as "one per shopper per day". I don't know whether they were really enforcing it. We didn't need any of those items. Back over Gates Pass we went, and were surprised to find a stiff breeze when we got back to camp. It had been calm in town. A cold front was moving through. I unpacked and stowed the groceries. The only thing I thought worth photographing was the haul from Babylon Market. I just had to try some of those prepared quick marinades - a new offering since our spring trip. The cheese and spices are a usual purchase for us, as well as the fresh yeast. Yay! My old stuff was losing its oomph. Dinner last night was leftovers: pork steak and panade, both reheated gently in the microwave. It was a very brown meal, but we liked it. There's still some panade left, so I look forward to giving it the fry-pan treatment from the Zuni Cafe Cookbook. I thank @Anna N for reminding me of that in this post.

The leftover "extras" from Cooper's finally were incorporated into dinner last night: a panade based on a recipe in Judy Rogers' Zuni Cafe Cookbook. (You can read more about that particular recipe, and find a link to a blog post summarizing it, here. As it happens I have a Kindle version of that cookbook and used it as a guide.) One reason it's taken me so long to do something with that leftover bread is that by the time the afternoon heat rolls around I'm too hot and dispirited to do anything in the kitchen. My darling has done most of the dinner cooking as a result. So yesterday I got smart. Before it got too hot I set to clearing out the refrigerator and finding what needed to be put into the panade. Fennel bulb, half a pickled onion, a pickled jalapeno, 8 slices of white bread (including a heel), 3 onions, a bunch of chard, a wilting bunch of scallions, a chunk of sharp cheddar, some grated parmesan. A red pepper was too far gone to use, more's the pity. I set to work washing, chopping, dicing. I pulled some corn stock out of the freezer to thaw. Then I took a break, mixed a fresh batch of salad dressing, and had lunch. The rest of the afternoon was devoted to non-cookery. After our evening walk... ...and some time out on the deck enjoying a beer, I set to work cooking. This photo collage shows sort of a time-lapse of what happened to all those vegetables. The large plastic bowl, barely visible in the upper left corner, was nearly full when I started. By the time I'd finished sweating it down and caramelizing, I was thinking about the discussion here about Vivian Howard's R-Rated Onions. The result was a very filling meal. We had intended the panade as the vegetable side for leftover pork steaks from the night before, but neither of us needed or wanted more to eat. The astute observer will note that my darling still insisted on toasted bread with his panade, but that's the way he swings. We'll probably have leftover panade and leftover pork steaks tonight, but who knows? It's shopping and errand time today, so dinner will be simple.

Time to bump this topic. Over here I've been dithering whether to use some unwanted white bread to make a panade or a strata. Last night I opted for the panade, based on the Zuni Cafe's recipe. I played fast and loose with it: there were onions, fennel bulbs, green onions, and chard (stems and all) that needed to be used. I had corn stock and chicken stock. And that white bread, cubed. I didn't bother cutting the crusts off. This Zuni Cafe recipe is good as a guide and inspiration, rather than a formula to be followed strictly as written. We loved the results. The panade was sturdy enough to serve as our only course. We are delighted that there are leftovers!