Smithy

The Boojum tree is astonishing, and the Arizona Sonoran Desert Museum is a wonderful place. I don't know that we'll go this trip, although we're members. Of course most of the action is outdoors, but it can be difficult to avoid crowds. I'll certainly post about it if we go.

This morning's work: putting the fruit from the Fort Davis grocery store into my darling's new batch of breakfast fruit salad. I still have some dates left from last spring's trip to the Oasis Date Gardens. They'll be finished soon. I hope I'll be able to get more when we pass that way, assuming we pass that way. At the lower right of this picture is the garbage I generated. It's nice to be someplace where garbage disposal and pickup are easy! There are a lot of places we normally visit when we arrive in Tucson. Clearly, we'll be skipping many...but I had been looking forward to making a trip to Barrio Bread. Their sourdough bread is made from locally-grown heritage grain blends, and it's outstanding. I wanted a loaf for Thanksgiving. I also wanted to stock up on their Barrio Blend of flour. Don, the owner, has been very careful about Covid-19 since the very beginning. The trip could have been made safely, with good social distancing, and I'd have been helping support the local economy. Don has been a leader in the "support the local restaurants with takeout" movement since last spring. But. The bakery is open Tuesday through Saturday, from 9:00 am until noon or they run out. We'd have had to get in the pickup and drive there this morning. Neither of us could bear the thought. We plan to leave Tuesday, although that's subject to change. I'll just have to dream of his breads, keep slugging away at his bread-baking course, and hope that Hayden Flour Mills, which does mail order, can provide me with the right flour. @blue_dolphin indicated some time ago that it's similar. It's just too pleasant sitting here in the Princessmobile, listening to quail calling as they wander through, and working on other projects, to want to drive anywhere today.

All that driving, painful (to me) though it was, paid off. We made it to Tucson and the county park we like around noon yesterday. That turned out to be lucky. We have never seen this park so crowded in the fall. The official camping season, complete with hosts, doesn't even begin until sometime in late December, or possibly January. Is it so crowded this year because everyone's getting the heck out of the house during the pandemic? (I've read that it's happening, and that RV's have been at a premium this year.) Is it because families are doing distance learning so their kids can attend school anywhere? Has the park's new reservations system emboldened autumn visitors? We don't know. We lucked out and got one of the few campsites that (a) can't be reserved and (b) we can fit in. If we'd come later in the afternoon we might not have been so lucky. We set up the "outdoor kitchen" so that my darling could cook superburgers for dinner. (No strata yet...or will it be a panade?) It was perfect outdoor cooking weather. Our superburgers are made of an equal amount of hot Italian sausage and ground beef, with finely chopped onions mixed in. We mixed, formed and froze several pairs before leaving. One reason we opted for them last night was to make sure my darling could enjoy some of the last slices of the New England Brown Bread we brought from home. I think "New England Brown Bread" generally suggests the steamed-in-a-can brown bread. This particular bread is made in Minnesota, and to me it has the perfect texture and flavor. My darling doesn't much care about that, but he loves the size: a perfect fit for our superburgers. (What you see at the right of the collage above is the last lonely heel. I'm about to toast it and enjoy it with hummus.) Greater love hath no woman, that she'd share the last few slices. Last night's dinner: The ingredients of this bread are listed as crushed whole wheat, water, enriched unbleached flour (that includes a certain amount of malted barley flour as well as wheat flour), honey, yeast, wheat gluten, sea salt, soybean oil, vinegar, ascorbic adic, and unspecified enzymes. If someone reading this can point me toward a similar recipe for something to try myself, please let me know.

That was just the first day out. Yesterday we went 340 miles - a distance usually reserved for getting the heck away from home and the cold. The wind was at our back and my darling had the bit in his teeth. We blew through El Paso and crossed most of New Mexico (admittedly the panhandle, which is fairly narrow) yesterday. I'd like to claim that this lunch and this picnic area went together, but they didn't. We stopped all too briefly at the picnic area. I ate the snacks in the pickup, and we stopped for our sandwiches later. I note that my sandwich photos all look much the same, so here's an anatomy of my typical sandwiches: We usually stay at Pancho Villa State Park in Columbus, NM, but all the New Mexico State Parks are closed due to Covid-19. I was pleased to see that the Borderland Cafe is still open for business, at least for curbside pickup. We continued another 77 miles past Columbus, to a road turning, where we found a much-needed hardware store that had a huge dirt parking lot. Bless them, they let us stay the night. I was too pooped to pop, so the panade (or will it be a strata) remained uncooked. We ate microwaved pea stew. No photo; it isn't photogenic, but it is good. This morning we had our reward: Look to this day, for it is life: the very life of life.

We're a fur piece, as my grandmother would have said, from the Amistad Reservoir now. About 800 miles. We climbed out of the Rio Grande Valley in a leisurely meandering way, crossing the Pecos River and on into drier and flatter Chihuahan Desert: lots of yuccas, not many trees. Fascinating geology. I love looking at the vegetation, my darling prefers it when there's no greenery to spoil the view. You know you're in the West when you start seeing box cars or container cars, heavily decorated. Mobile canvasses, we call them. Some of the art work is quite good - at least, it's well beyond my skills! We drove up through little towns - some doing better than others - until we got to US 90 and the town of Marathon. It used to provide movie sets (right now I can only think of James Dean's Giant) and seems still to be getting along. There were a few pizza joints and diners. The place we stopped for fuel was spotless inside and had a little grill. We'd packed sandwiches and snacks, but I enjoyed seeing the place do so well. No photos of the interior, but here's a small taste of Marathon: Somewhere along the way we stopped at one of the many picnic areas that Texas provides, to stretch our legs and eat the sandwiches I'd packed. We turned off US 90 to go through Fort Davis, at the foot of the Davis Mountains, one of my favorite little thriving towns. We skipped my favorite shop (with an awesome deli) but stopped at their quite creditable grocery store for - yes - a few supplies. We were very pleased to see that they took masking seriously. We continued climbing, into the Davis Mountains, to a picnic area where we knew we could spend the night. There's a nature preserve nearby with one of the more creative Covid-19 warnings I've seen: That night, fatigue set in and I took the easy way out for dinner. These sausages that I'd bought in Fort Davis are a known good quantity, and it was much easier to microwave them and add potato salad for dinner than to assemble and bake a panade. Or a strata. I still haven't decided between the two.

I think I started the overbuying after I got a steady income, as a sort of security blanket, because I'd had to deal with that empty larder as a starving flight instructor. It's definitely out of control now! Glad it makes you laugh. Thanks for the other comments, too.

I just found the topic Best Use of Stale Bread. I knew there was one around here somewhere! It has some good ideas. I keep coming back to the panade idea. Or a strata. I'm not sure how different those two are. I have milk, once-fresh fennel bulb, seasoned meats, onions...and, of course, a great deal more stuff lurking around. Meanwhile, my darling has suggested that we simply have chili tonight, from the freezer, since we're headed out tomorrow and want to be fairly well packed before we go to bed. I have some electrical troubleshooting (yes, really) to do so I've pulled two containers out to thaw. It never hurts to hedge one's bets. These may look small, despite the hands for scale, but each container holds around 2-1/2 cups. If we weren't afraid of starving ourselves we'd pull out one and share it. Ha. I haven't even talked about where we are now. It's quite a shift from Llano. The Amistad Reservoir sits on a branch of the Rio Grande near Del Rio, Texas. There are many campgrounds in the area; we prefer this primitive campground for its inexpensive fees and relative quiet. It gets quieter by the year. When we first started coming 11 years ago, the reservoir level was so high that two boat ramps in the campground were quite busy. During bass fishing contests it was anything but quiet! Still, with only 6 campsites it couldn't get too crowded. The second year we came, the water was so high that it washed out part of the campground. Since then the water level has declined drastically. Although the dam was built as a cooperative venture between Mexico and the USA (the word 'Amistad' is Spanish for 'friendship') there's a complicated dance to manage the water, upstream and down, among competing users. This photo collage doesn't show it well, but just behind the trailer is one of the erstwhile boat ramps. The valley beyond is now filled with thriving greenery. You can see by the top half of the collage just how high it's grown. To get to the lake, you now have to go an extra mile down the road, which was once US 90 before the dam was built. There's usually a fisherman or two around. The road is a pretty good boat launch. It's quiet here, and the stargazing is wonderful. Unfortunately we're getting low on water -- my handwashed laundry experiments took their toll -- and there's none at this campground. So we'll move along. I'll tell you later whether the chili or the panade / strata won out for tonight. What I do know is there's enough room in the freezer now to lay an ice cube tray flat and make more ice!

Your scallop dishes always look delightful. I love scallops, but my attempts at cooking them have never resulted in that beautiful brown crust unless they also turned rubbery and tough. Is it technique, or availability of very fresh scallops? Probably a bit of both.

That's a good point, Anna. For that matter, the open-air markets we used to visit in Egypt had giant jars of olives that were never refrigerated. It might be a good idea for brine-cured olives to stay submerged In the brine.

Oh, thank you for scratching that itch! There may be other ideas too, so I'm hoping to hear more - but a panade is definitely one of the things I was trying to remember.

During our stay in Llano we ate takeout from Cooper's...well, not every night but close to it. We also ate green and yellow vegetables, and my darling ate fruit and cereal for breakfast while I enjoyed beans. Still, it was a gluttonous week. We decided this was a time for kicking over the traces and consoling ourselves while the Princessmobile got repaired. We had beef brisket and beef ribs, and leftover ribeye, and maybe even pork ribs that I've forgotten. And potato salad. And pinto beans. Here's a sampling: On the last night, I forgot to tell them not to include any of the traditional sides. When I opened the package I found pickled jalapenos, onions, dill pickles and white bread. Lots of white bread. The classic accompaniment. The other stuff I can use, and my darling made a sandwich with some of that white bread today. However, I know - I just know - that I've been looking at recipes in which plain ol' white bread, with the crust cut off, is used as a thickener for a sauce, or a base for a casserole, or...something. What? What am I trying to remember, that plain white non-sourdough bread goes into?

Years ago when we first came to Llano, we discovered Texas 'cue. Now, I know Llano is designated the Deer Capital of Texas whereas Lockhart holds claim to being the Barbecue Capital, but in our couple of visits to Lockhart we have been less than impressed. Besides, the campground isn't as good. So Llano it is for us. Until a couple of years ago it was a close call between Laird's and Cooper's, but now that the Lairds have finally managed to sell and retire Cooper's Old-Time Pit Bar-B-Que is our go-to place. Did I mention that the city park where we camp is only 3 blocks from Cooper's? It's all too easy to get there, and all too easy to spend money and eat too much. No, scratch that...it's delightfully easy! Last spring when the pandemic was new, Cooper's shifted to curbside pickup only. They still offer curbside pickup although the dining room is now open. I opted for curbside pickup. The way it works is that you text the stand you've pulled up to, stay in your vehicle, and someone comes out to take your order. Later they come back with the order and a credit card reader. It worked well last spring, and again this trip. Our first night in Llano was a Sunday, and we expected to be leaving Wednesday. I remembered that they cooked ribeye steaks to perfection and offered them only on certain days. These steaks are to die for: huge, tender, perfectly seasoned, perfectly cooked, juicy, with just the right marbling. (I hope they aren't literally to die for, of course, but one must splurge on the diet once in a while, eh?) I couldn't remember which days they offered the ribeyes, so I called and said we were in town for a few days, did they offer steaks that night? The nice gentleman at the other end conferred with the inventory folks. They had steaks. They normally cook them Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, but since I was from out of town and had called, they'd cook me one! How nice was that? They reminded me to allow 15 minutes; all the other meat and sides would have been cooking for hours, but the steaks are done on the spot. I arrived in our Razr (an enclosed 4-wheeler) and while I was fumbling around with my phone, a young man came out. "I gotcha," he said. It was Clay! The same sweetheart who'd waited on me so many times last spring! (This is last spring's picture, but he looked the same.) He recognized me too. "Someone told me when you pulled up that there was someone to see me. I thought they were joking!" We exchanged pleasantries and I placed my order: a ribeye, medium-rare, for me; a couple of beef ribs for my darling; some potato salad, beans and barbecue sauce. "No other sides?" he checked. He remembered that we usually hadn't wanted jalapenos, onions, pickles or bread. No flatware. He reminded me of the 15 minutes for the steak, went in to place my order, and came out with the beer I'd requested. I nursed it along and admired the comings and goings of customers. It was slowing down for the day, but business had been good. Let me tell you something else about that steak: the cooks are very precise. As the time was getting near I heard someone call, "35 seconds on that steak!" It was perfect. This picture makes the steak look a bit paler pink than it really was. You can see the relative sizes of the two meals; the ribs were about 1/2 pound each counting the bone. Neither of us finished dinner. The leftovers were glorious.

Oh, how very cool. I bought it too. Thanks, Toliver.

We left Llano on Friday and I still have a story or two to tell, but since I wrote about the dining room a couple of posts ago I'll show what it looks like after dark, when we draw the curtain. In some places we do that for privacy; now we're doing it to keep the place warmer. This way I can also talk about last night's dinner, rather than yet more takeout. I was testing a recipe, and the soup became dinner. The soup base is cilantro, coconut milk, seasonings and chicken broth. The first step is to puree much of those ingredients. My wand blender set has both a food processor attachment and the usual assortment of blending and chopping blades. I tried the food processor attachment first. Note to self: check quantities before doing something like that! I didn't take time to photograph the overflow, but 2-1/2c ingredients in a 2-1/2c vessel was not smart. Dumping it all into a taller pitcher, then blending away, was the better way to go. The other ingredients are chicken and broccoli. Here's the finished result. Pretty, isn't it? And delicious. I was a bit nervous about this one because my darling isn't crazy about cilantro, but he liked it a lot too. I think it's a testament to how well balanced the flavors are. Here's dinner, just before we sat down. The curtain rod was another of my darling's brainstorms when we first bought this trailer. He put up the rod, I sewed curtain rings and strung the cheap quilted turquoise bedspread, and when my mother passed away I added her quilt as a centerpiece.

I appreciate it anyway! And Porthos' praise too!

Our first pair of dinner napkins was filthy (IMO) and ready for the laundry basket. I have come loaded with 2 or 3 sets of paper napkins given to us over the years. If ever there were a time to shift from washables to disposables, this would seem to be it, in order to avoid the laundromat. (Sorry if I've mangled the grammar.) Data: (a) I did some hand-washing today. (b) I opened a package of paper napkins today. Which do you think we prefer for everyday usage?

I'm going to back up just a bit to write about our first night's stopover. We spent it in Iowa at the Lakeside Casino, fka Terrible's, and although I'd love to have seen about visiting @IowaDee this was obviously not the time to do so. Last spring everything was closed down, and the parking lot was empty. This fall the Casino and hotel were back up, I don't know to what capacity. We weren't interested in going in; we just needed a place to stay where we could easily fuel up the next morning. I've written that we had plenty of road food, but we do very much like Subway sandwiches. While my darling refueled the pickup, I went into the Subway for our preferred BLT sandwiches. The door noted that masks were required. I had mine on. The customers had theirs on. Neither of the counter clerks did. I wondered whether to speak up or leave, and opted (wimpishly) not to do either. When I paid, I asked the clerk why they weren't wearing masks. She gave me a song and dance about not being able to wear one due to a nervous condition. I bit my tongue and didn't say something like "I hope you don't plan to be a doctor" or give her a sermon. I just paid, got out, and filed a complaint with Subway on their "how did we do?" survey on the receipt. I haven't heard anything back from Subway. At our next fueling stop, this time in Kansas, I had to go inside to pay with a credit card. In that building, none of the Subway staff was wearing a mask. Is this standard for the chain? I've decided that next time(s) I go in, if they aren't wearing masks I'll either leave quietly or, more likely, say something and then leave. We have plenty of sandwich fixings anyway.

I still have lots of beans from Cooper's that I can have for breakfast - including, embarrassingly, some frozen last spring, brought home and forgotten until we were packing for this trip(!) - but today's breakfast is of the no-heat variety. While I'm eating, I'll talk about trailer improvements we made last summer. Those of you thinking about going on the road, or who have done so, may get some good ideas. Last year we more or less remodeled the Princessmobile rather than purchase a new trailer. This one is 4 years old, nearly out of its extended service warranty, and 4 years is the trailer age at which we've generally traded one in. We couldn't find one with the same features or with a better floor plan, so we decided to improve what we had. It saved a bunch of money. I've read that trailers and campers are difficult to come by in these pandemic times anyway, so it was probably a doubly smart move. First I'll talk about the dining room. For those of you who aren't familiar with trailers that are designated as "toy haulers", I'll explain that the back room is a garage for bicycles, 4-wheelers, whatever gear you want to carry out of the weather when you're on the road. The entire back wall is a gate that serves as a ramp to get the gear in and out, and then can be set level as a deck. When we're parked for several days the toys come out, a pair of dinette benches comes down, a table opens out and the garage becomes our dining room. (There's also a bunk bed that can come down, but we've never used it.) If you ever buy a toy hauler, I recommend you make a point of spending the extra money to get a "3-season door" setup. The standard toy hauler comes with a screen that pulls down to cover the back when the door is open. It may keep the bugs out, but it doesn't do a thing for dust or cold, so you have to hoist that heavy door whenever the weather is inclement. The doors are a 4-panel arrangement in which the inner two slide over the outer two, and then the pairs can unlatch to open wide for gear. Each door comes with a screen and with a clear vinyl "window" that VelcroesTM to the door frame to keep the wind and dust out. You can pull the vinyl away from the screen to allow more air through, like this: It gives a pretty good view. Problem is, it's difficult to get the vinyl stretched enough to fully cover the screen again. This summer, after my darling had a brainstorm and I wielded the calculator, we had a local window maker cut polycarbonate panels that would cover the same screens. We bought the VelcroTM with industrial-strength backing, got some plastic channels to mate the panels together, and voila! The view is even clearer, and we can consistently cover screens when we want them covered. We think it's a great improvement to our dining room. When we're on the road day after day, the garage is stuffed with toys and coolers, and doesn't provide a living or eating space. So we also improved the main living area. The trailer came with a "couch" that was really 4 leather recliners linked together. They're comfortable, but they all face the same direction: that is, the TV wall. We very rarely watch TV, and I at least hate not having any sort of conversational grouping. Not that we're likely to have company this trip, but one hopes for better times in the future. Besides, that couch was a serious space hog. So we got rid of it. My daughter-in-law was delighted to have it. We replaced it with 2 comfortable recliners and a small drop-leaf table that serves as a breakfast bar or a dining table while on the road. Everyone's happy! It's a much more comfortable setup for eating and relaxing when the entire living space isn't available.

When we first started doing this road tripping, we used to skip Oklahoma altogether, not on purpose, but because we'd go south through Mississippi and then along the Gulf Coast to Florida to visit relatives, then back again along the Gulf Coast. Once we got far enough south in Texas, we'd cut across. Alas, the weather along the Gulf Coast has not been conducive to that trip for what, 3 or 4 years? Even if it doesn't happen to be storming at the time, we figure the good folks of southern Louisiana and all the other areas cleaning up from storm damage don't need us there. This year, of course, there's no question of going to Florida to visit relatives. An alternative route is to take US 54 down through New Mexico. It's a beautiful drive, but New Mexico's state parks are all closed due to the pandemic and we aren't sure where we'd stay. Besides, we really wanted to go to Llano. 🙂

Now, on to the question of road food and packing up to leave for 6 months. If I had bothered to snap a photo of our refrigerator a month ago, it would have looked promisingly empty...appropriate for someone getting ready to transfer the contents to another refrigerator, or to move. Think of the topics Challenge: Cook your way through your freezer (Part 1) and (Part 2) as a model. There are others. Our freezers were full but the refrigerator seemed headed in the right direction. Then I started thinking of all the foods I adore locally that I can't get on the road. A particular brand of sliced salami. A favorite deli's smoked salmon. Bacon that I'd been looking for and had trouble finding. The New England Brown Bread that I can't find out of our area and don't know how to bake. Inexpensive hummus with choice seasonings. Yes, I can make hummus but this is easy. There were recipes I wanted to try, as I had time, so those ingredients crept into the fridge. There were bargains on chicken and pork. My darling wanted to stock up on specialty sausages. I reasoned that we wouldn't be going into fast-food joints much along the way because of the pandemic. Better plan to make our own sandwiches. That opened the door to a surfeit of sliced meats and cheeses. And more bread. Then there was my darling's usual approach to travel: we cover 300 - 400 miles each day for the first few days, and nobody feels like cooking when we arrive, and the Princessmobile isn't especially conducive to cooking when it's in road-mode and the "dining room" is impassible. Better make a bunch of easily-microwaved dinners, distributed into single-serving containers and frozen. His specialties are split pea soup, and chili. He cooked enough for a half-dozen containers of each. They're ALL in the freezer, or they were. The plan was that each of us would select one in the morning, leave it to thaw during the day's drive, and at day's end eat it. Simple. So here's what the fridge looked like at home, just before I started packing the trailer fridge. I didn't photograph the freezer contents at home. Too tired, I think. I haven't even discussed the pantry ingredients! Many of my impulse purchases or specially-bought-for-special-occasions purchases were still in cabinets. They're in the Princessmobile's cabinets or in coolers. Some, to be honest, stayed in the Princessmobile all summer. Simplify? Of course I could, but I fear missing out...especially this trip. My sole nod to simplification was to weed through the plastic containers and get rid of everything but a few containers of 2 or 3 types we use a lot. I left a lot of room to accommodate the pre-cooked dinner containers as they were emptied. I also rightly suspected there would be deli containers along the way, and left room for them. (Cooper's hasn't disappointed in that regard.) So, we've been on the road a week and two days now. Want to see the Princessmobile's freezer and fridge? TA-DAA! We had pea stew one night. Actually, my darling ate only half of his and finished it the next night. His appetite and waistline are getting smaller. I had crawfish fettucine that I unearthed from the freezer one night. That fettucine was an impulse buy from Miller's Smokehouse last spring, and had lain frozen at our house all summer. (I won't get it again. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't exciting.) We knew we were headed for Llano. We should have realized that all this "road food" advance preparation was overkill. So it goes.

New to me too, Anna.

We use no-heat-needed Easy-Off oven cleaner to clean the soot from our glass fireplace doors. That gets the worst, and then we finish with simple Windex. Perhaps that would help with your oven door window? So sorry to read about the mess!

I can't answer your question regarding being overly sensitive to the smells - maybe you are - but I can tell you that my kraut has never smelled like rotting cabbage unless it really was. Fermentation smells different than rot. Think pickles vs. the garbage left too long. Oh, dear. Edited to add: I think your garlic naan "pizza" looks delicious!

Thanks for the encouragement, folks. I often wonder whether this topic is too much "same 'ol, same 'ol" and this year the pandemic will certainly add a wrinkle of isolation. Since some of you are enjoying it, I'll keep going. We were back on the road yesterday. "Nice to have trailer brakes again!" said my darling, and while I agreed I was also delighted to have fresh water again without being hooked up to a city campground. This was our road snack for the day. I couldn't have done this safely a few days before; the roads were that bad. What happened to the trailer was something that no public highway, especially one that CHARGES TOLLS, should subject one to. Nonetheless, the Oklahoma Turnpike - especially that portion just south of Oklahoma City - has a terrible rhythmic jolt. (At 50 - 55 mph we're a rolling speedbump, with irritated traffic trying to get around. Perhaps slowing down would have helped. I'm not sure it crossed our minds to try it.) Roughly every 8 feet - about the length of a concrete pour - there'd be another jolt. LUMP LUMP LUMP...our teeth rattled, and we swore never to travel that road again. I think we swore the same thing last year. Maybe after this year we'll remember. At our next fueling stop: Eek! the Princessmobile's belly liner was sagging and coming loose, and water was pouring out from underneath the belly. It could have been worse: at least it was the freshwater tank, rather than one of the wastewater tanks, that was leaking. Still, it meant we had no fresh water until we could get the leak fixed, and we had no idea what had caused it. Had the tank ruptured? Had a hose fitting come loose? The question occupied a good deal of our conversation until we reached Mineral Wells, where we stopped and parked for the night in a Walmart parking lot. We bought 3 or 4 gallons of distilled water. That would be our drinking and cleaning water until we found a repair place. An additional wrinkle was that the trailer brakes were no longer working, although the signal lights were. This was safe enough on fairly flat land, but had to be fixed before going into the Intermountain West. Mineral Wells has been a preferred stopping point for the last few years. We first discovered it when we stayed for a couple of days at the Texas State Park there. It's a nice place. Whether we could have found room under the current pandemic restrictions is another question, but we didn't ask because we planned to move on in the morning anyway. The Walmart lot would do. It's noisy but safe, and a good place to get items we'd forgotten or suddenly needed - like jugs of water. We disconnected the trailer, and while my darling stayed home and safe I masked up, purchased our left-behind supplies, and went to the Mesquite Pit Steakhouse, where I'd placed an order for no-contact pickup. I wrote about the place here, when we tried it a few years ago. We loved it, and had picked Mineral Wells as a stopover point on purpose to take advantage of the place. I'm afraid it was a disappointment this time. We had ordered pork ribs, brisket and Armadillo Eggs (yes, there's a theme here) and it was ready, along with their generous sides, at the appointed time. The brisket came sliced -- my online request to leave it whole had been overlooked -- and it was dry. I thought the pork ribs were tasty, but my darling had expected them to be more tender and to be slathered with sauce. The barbecue sauce they gave us was quite good (we have more) but in his mind didn't make up for the textural issues. I didn't get any pictures of those foods. I also didn't take photos of the interior. It looked much the same as before (here's another link to that post), and I was intent on getting in and getting out. They did seem to have good business, judging by the noise. I don't know how far apart the tables were. The armadillo eggs, now, those were good. They're quite different from the ones I got at Miller's, which tells you something about recipe interpretation. The obvious difference is that the Mesquite Pit's 'eggs' don't have a bacon wrapping, but the seasonings are also different. The sauce they come with is tasty. It's a bit sweet, a bit tart, a bit hot. It has a mayonnaise base, and is probably close kin to Louisiana remoulade or, bringing it closer to home, Texas petal sauce minus the horseradish. Funny, I see that during our last visit I thought it too sweet! So the 'eggs' were good, the stopover safe. Still, between the need to find a different route (not through OK City, and preferably not through Dallas!) and the disappointing food, we're scratching the place off our route unless there's a really good reason to go. I don't know what we had for road-food breakfast the next day. Probably a sandwich. I'll talk about our road food, both as planned and as executed, in another post.

Thank you for that reminder! Yes, I've read Travels with Charley, and in fact one of my parents' good friends used to tell me that her parents did the same thing when they were on the road in their trailer. Barbara didn't describe it as colorfully as Steinbeck did, but the idea was the same. Yes, I think I'll adopt that. At least, I'll try it. Our first trailer, the Montana, came with a washer/dryer combination machine. We didn't use it until very late in our first trip, when we were hooked up to a water source and a sewer disposal. The thing relied on water to cool the dryer, so it was quite the water (and energy) hog. Nonetheless we moved it to the next trailer and used it occasionally. When we moved to this current trailer, Princessmobile Mark III, we decided we couldn't spare the space. But we didn't imagine a pandemic in which public interaction would be a problem. One clear difference between this trip and previous trips, to answer @Anna N's comment, is that there won't be as much exploration of interesting shops. I doubt we'll be meeting up with people and joining them (or inviting them) for shared meals. Shopping is, and will continue to be, circumspect - with masks and social distancing. Nonetheless (despite my overpacking - stories and photos to follow) there have been, and will continue to be, visits to food places. Yesterday, as we expected it to be our last day here (it wasn't) I went off to Miller's Meat Market and Smokehouse to acquire some of their variations on stuffed jalapenos. Their store seems to be as well-stocked as ever. I hadn't noticed the P.D.Q meals before; I don't know whether they're a new addition. Their meat counter is the main attraction. You want beef roulades, or stuffed chicken? Get it here. You want stuffed jalapenos, in many different flavor combinations? This is the place. Note that the sign in the upper left of this photo was outside the door. Most customers wore masks. As I recall, the counter clerks wore them although they weren't as careful as I'd have liked about keeping their noses covered. I came away with 4 each of their Gator Toes, Brisket Poppers and Armadillo Eggs. i'd really like to work out how to make these things! I was surprised to see that the Armadillo Eggs were not stuffed jalapenos, but rather jalapeno sausage balls (wrapped around...what?) wrapped in bacon. The "eggs" had a very different size and geometry than the poppers. They were all good. The Armadillo Eggs lacked the sweet spiciness of the two poppers I tried. Was it the lack of cream cheese, or the smaller concentration of jalapeno? I don't know. I also went to the local grocery store to get a few supplies that, incredibly, we needed. We're only a week on the road! I haven't shown you the refrigerator, or the freezer, or the cupboards or the coolers. Still, there was a shopping list. Lettuce goes off fast, and my citrus was old before we started. When I spotted the prices and quantities of limes, I thought of @JoNorvelleWalker and her woes at getting limes. On the other hand, I'd say the romaine hearts more than made up for the savings on limes. Back at home - and a day later - it was time to eat those poppers and armadillo eggs. They were all good. I wish I had cooked fewer of them and served them over rice, or potatoes.