Smithy

It's more of a stretch than most. As JoNorvelleWalker commented regarding another rebus, there's a bit of an accent involved. Accent from where, I'm not sure.

I confess that making crumpets has been on my to-do list for a very long time, given the difficulty I have finding them in stores. I'm pretty sure there's a recipe from @andiesenji floating around here somewhere, although I haven't found it. What I have found is this discussion, with a rough recipe, from @jackal10. Edited to add: of course we have a topic on crumpets! Here it is. Okay, back to the normal program.

So did he (and by extension, you) get it?

I've never had an English muffin that I liked, and I've never had a crumpet that I didn't like. In my experience the flavors, as well as the texture, are completely different. I suspect a crucial difference in the batter.

I keep reading about the noise level from portable induction units. Are full-sized induction ranges also noisy? That would be an issue for me.

We're home! We spent the final road night in yet another Walmart parking lot, and were up very early thanks to a street sweeper cleaning the parking lot at 5:30 a.m. The happy result of that was that we got going earlier than usual. I threw together very perfunctory breakfast sandwiches, and away we went. This may not look inviting to you, depending on the environment you're used to, but to me it's a sign that we're coming home, and spring is beginning. The pictures don't show it, but there's a faint blush of pink on the maple trees and the barest hint of green wash on the birch. My flower bed is starting to sprout! The ramps and chives are coming up! We have room again! I've been shuffling food from the Princessmobile's freezer and refrigerator and pantries back into the house. I realize that as trailer kitchens go the Princessmobile's is pretty good. Still, it's nothing like home. Princessmobile: House: Of course, in a perfect world there wouldn't have been much to move back in -- but you already know that I failed utterly at paring down the food when grocery stores were readily accessible and filled with items we can't get here. Now the excess should help us minimize trips to town. I have access to the CSO again! We really, truly finished the last of the meats from Llano for our homecoming dinner. There was one pork rib from Cooper's to be reheated, and 4 stuffed jalapenos from Miller's that got a steam-convection bake treatment in the CSO. Dinner included potato salad and cole slaw from Cooper's, neither of which is shown here. The peppers were wonderful. When we finished dinner, my darling said, "See? I told you we should have bought more barbecue in Llano!" It's been 6 months and some 8,055 miles. You've been great company along the way. I saved this last Lone Star rebus for y'all, since it's so appropriate. Thanks for reading along!

Which way does one do it: soak potatoes in vinegar, then boil; boil potatoes in water that's had vinegar added? If the latter (as I suspect) what are typical ratios of vinegar to water?

Click on the "Melty Cheese Calculator" tab near the top of the screen. (I've circled it in the image below.) Figure how much cheese you want to make melty. I wouldn't do 2 pounds at once, but it depends what you want to do with the final sauce. Convert that number to grams, and enter it in the calculator. Select the texture you want. It's a pull-down menu. The calculator will then display, in the bottom lines, how much liquid and sodium citrate you need for the sauce texture in question. If you click on the blue "Advanced Settings" then you can tweak the ratio of liquid you want and sodium citrate you want for the calculations. I haven't played with that.

I'll look for that recipe. It sounds great, especially with your additions. My parents' trailer fridge had that sort of sliding lock. (It was to my father's everlasting woe that Mom forgot to lock it not once, not twice, but three times!)(On the other hand, I don't think he ever tried to doublecheck before starting to drive.) I didn't know it could be purchased as an aftermarket addition. Thanks for that idea!

I know the cleanup wasn't fun, but the visual of the dog is hilarious!

A year ago, this was the scene at the Lakeside Casino (once Terrible's) in Osceola: The game show team for "Wheel of Fortune" was there with their bus and mini-show, auditioning for contestants. The place was jammed. This year, the scene was utterly different. An upper parking lot for trucks was open, and we took a spot. I had time for a long walk, and discovered that the Lakeside Casino really is on a long lake, and there's a small parking area with launch ramps nearby. The ramps and restroom were closed, but the walking was great. Last night we had - what would you guess? - more leftovers from Cooper's! No, we aren't tired of it yet. You may be. And we still have some left. We've agreed that the exorbitant amount of money we spent there in 5 days isn't as outrageous when amortized over the number of dinners we're getting from it. Besides, we like those people and want to see them stay in business. I'm looking forward to being home and doing something similar with some of our favorite restaurants. It will be more of a challenge, because of the drive to and from town, but we'll make it work. I went for another walk after dark. I didn't get a picture of the casino all lit up. It was at once beautiful because of its gaudy cheeriness and sad because of the lost business it represents. Today I had time to take a better picture of the (second) Italian Sub Hero I bought at Walmart yesterday. The crust had a beautiful reddish orange color that may have gone along with crunch when the sandwich was fresh. This one tasted good anyway. I'm looking forward to bread-baking again, and want to learn how to get that color. I seem to remember that Dutch Crunch bread (aka giraffe bread) gets that coloration. Other road food: cheese and crackers (not shown) and asparagus and red bell pepper. Neither of the latter is as flavorful as it should be. I think they'll be better cooked and added to something. Tacos or burritos, perhaps.

Billboard seen in southern Minnesota: "Spam Museum: not a tasteless tourist attraction!"

Did you cook them wrong, or were they the wrong fiddleheads? What did you do then, and what will you do now?

Life on the road has changed - improved, I say - dramatically thanks to cell phones and the Internet. I did some Googling, found a tire shop in El Dorado (the town where we stayed the night) and within 2 hours of our phone conversation the gentleman had retrieved our tires, tried unsuccessfully to repair them, and replaced them with new ones. It was an expensive morning, but successful as these things go. We were on the road by 10:30 a.m. That's unusually late for days when the trailer is mostly packed, but not at all out of line for days when we've had to do a full repack-and-close. While we were waiting on the tires, I donned a mask and went into the Walmart whose parking lot we'd used for the night. I found hand sanitizer, bread (we're running low and I didn't make any in Llano), tomatoes, celery and asparagus, and a few types of salami. I'd never seen Calabrese-style salami before, so I bought it. I hope I like it as well as the New York Style Calabrese sausages I like so much. Maybe I'll be able to figure out the seasonings. I also grabbed what Walmart likes to call an Italian Hero Sub. Seems like a redundant name to me, but one made a good breakfast. Once on the road again, we found ourselves dealing with yet more road construction. Uneven pavement! Road equipment! At least they're fixing the potholes and building some new bridges. We suspect road debris is what blew those two tires yesterday. It's ironic that most or all of our tire failures have happened on Interstate Freeways. When we stopped for a brief rest, I glanced casually at the refrigerator / freezer. All looked in good order. Then I looked again. Why were there freezer containers in the sink? What were the ice cube trays doing there? I opened the freezer compartment. (I know, it's still full. Mostly.) See that big gap on the right? Somehow, during one of our lump-bump-swings (maybe going through Kansas City, where I-35 gets pretty wild) that door popped open, a bunch of stuff jumped out, and the door slammed shut again. Maybe the gremlins are still having fun with us. That's a ROUGH road! I put it all back together... ...and made sure the door was firmly shut. Here's my road sandwich for lunch: looks soggy, tastes great. Uses the last of an old lettuce heart. The redbuds in Kansas and Missouri are blooming. I love the sight of them!

May 1 is traditionally our time to arrive home, since we're splitting our time between being home (where I prefer) and being warm (which he prefers). In addition, we have a number of medical appointments scheduled for May -- although we don't know yet which of them, if any, will still happen on schedule. We have friends watching our home. Edited to add: once we're down to half of our living space, we don't really like to spend much time on the road. This is our back room / garage / erstwhile dining room right now:

We're beating feet north as fast as we can reasonably go. Last night we stayed in a Walmart parking lot in Mineral Wells, Texas, and admired the steady stream of cars using the drive-through at a local fried chicken joint. That place was doing a land-office business. We had leftover brisket, cole slaw and potato salad from Cooper's (you've seen that oodles of times already) and some of the alligator toes and brisket poppers from Miller's. They were delicious. I really must learn to make them myself. This morning we were on the road early, our lunch cooler packed with hard-boiled eggs, sandwiches like yesterday's, and fresh vegetables. We stopped occasionally to stretch our legs, and kept commenting on the picnic areas we'd forgotten about along the highway between Mineral Wells and Wichita Falls. Texas does beautiful picnic areas. Like most, this one is spacious enough that we'd be able to stay overnight. Like many, it has fire grates for outdoor cookouts. We let a strong tailwind push us northward, giving us great (relatively speaking) fuel mileage and a quiet ride. It seems as though the gods of mechanical malfunction weren't done with us yet, however: we had another flat tire at a fueling station along the Oklahoma Turnpike. (For those of you keeping score, that's 4 flat tires this trip.) We lost an hour and a half over that, but the delay may have helped us miss the really bad storms that passed through Oklahoma City. Seen along the road: See that weather in the bottom photo? That was a nasty line of storms that passed through ahead of us. More might develop yet tonight - at least, that's the forecast - so we're pressing along into the now-headwind for another 100 miles or so. It's a lot of driving and/or riding, but it will pay off tomorrow. Dinner probably won't be anything to write about, though. Edited to add: just got another tire alarm. We must have really annoyed someone.

As Garrison Keillor said during one of his skits about life in middle Minnesota: "by February you would KILL for a ripe tomato! Not those tomato-flavored things they strip-mine down in Texas, but a REAL TOMATO!" He said that by way of explaining why Midwesterners go crazy overboard with the seed catalog orders in late winter and early spring.

Thanks! I bit on Preserving by the Pint.

Aha! It's an ink pad! Yes, I find that credible.

We've done the final trailer packing-up for this trip, and will be living in half of it only until we're home. Today's road food includes a Tale of Two Sandwiches. I had enough chicken to make 2 chicken salads yesterday: Miracle Whip in his; mayonnaise in mine, with chopped pickles and the last of a jar of capers to give it an extra kick. Today's sandwiches were custom-made. I added some of the chicken-skin croutons to mine for some extra crunch. Note to self: make sure that skin is really, completely crisp! A couple of pieces, thicker than the rest, are most chewy than crunchy. Not very nice. Some road sights: pecan groves near San Saba, trimmed very differently than in Picacho, Arizona; a neat downtown store in San Saba; a bridge that gave us pause. The trailer is 13'3" high. We went very carefully, and still flinched - but didn't scrape.We've been under this bridge before. It makes us flinch very time. I haven't figured out last night's puzzle. Yes, I know we can look it up! But can anyone get it without looking? That thing in the lower left still has me stumped.

I can't tell you how much that means to me! Unfortunately, we're taking the most direct way home possible now: northern Texas tonight, northern Oklahoma tomorrow night, somewhere in Iowa, then into Minnesota and home on May Day. Thank you for the offer, though. I hope, by this fall, assuming we're still doing this, we'll be able to arrange a visit.

It's a warm, sunny day. The activity is dying down now, but there's been a steady stream of swimmers and splashers playing in the river, or families bringing picnic lunches and having their own private tailgate parties. This road of dredged materials, which is built to be reclaimed by backhoe and hauled by truck to the aggregate plant, has made an excellent swimming beach. A bunch of kids came down with their inner tubes and launched off that ephemeral beach. I'd love to have been able to join them. I spent part of the day dealing with the chicken that we hadn't ordered from Cooper's. The first step was to strip the skin from the meat and the meat from the bones. The meat became chicken salad for sandwiches, minus the few bites I snitched during the peeling and chopping. The skin I reserved to try crisping up according to this recent article in Food 52: Why Lindsay Maitlin Hunt's Roast Chicken is Genius. That article advocates roasting the chicken at a low and slow temperature, then removing the skin and crisping it at high heat. Why not? I tried it. It's quite crispy. I like it - I think someone here at eG has called it "chicken croutons" but I may be misremembering. My darling isn't so sure about liking it. It certainly depends on the seasoning and quality of the chicken skin! The bones went for broth in the Instant Pot. I didn't bother with pictures, but I got almost a quart of broth with very little effort. We probably won't need it for the trip home, but I'll need some items when we arrive. Tomorrow we'll leave these wildflowers, and the river, behind. We went into town to refuel the pickup before hooking up the trailer. While we were there, we checked out their beer supply. There must have been a heck of a party somewhere.

OK, then - yay! I can get more beans at Cooper's tonight!

As I eat breakfast this morning, I realize I haven't gotten an answer to an earlier question. It may have been lost in the shuffle of puzzles. What will happen to cooked pinto beans if I freeze them? Will it destroy their texture? Will they come through all right? I have a lot of this delicious stuff (the sour cream is my addition) and we're running lower on refrigerator space than on freezer space.

A little past the middle of the documentary is footage of Oudolf admiring the spring wildflowers during a visit to the Texas Hill Country. They also pay a visit to Cooper's for barbecue. His comment on the wildflowers, "Beautiful, there is only one word." And on the barbecue: "Completely insane. No other word." The documentary is lovely and very much worth a watch if you get a chance this weekend. Not to mis-represent it. It's about a renowned landscape designer and not focussed on Texas or barbecue! Thanks for this recommendation, @blue_dolphin. It really is a lovely documentary. I know nothing about garden design. This was an eye-opener.