Smithy

Now that we have a fireplace and grill, I'm figuring on a meal of stuffed-and-grilled stuff before long. Stay tuned.

On a different note: today was breakfast-fruit-salad making day. I was especially interested in how much time and effort it takes me to deal with dates the way I normally do, due to this discussion. I don't think I'll be changing my method.

We went to Yuma yesterday to get some supplies, see the doctor (routine visit, nothing serious), pick up meds and mail. The Wal-Mart customers were generally good about masking up, although we saw a lot of noses. Fry's grocery store customers were even better, with people giving each other room and waiting patiently when someone was perusing the same shelf or bin area. Supplies were generally good, although the shortages on paper products and cleaning products continued. Fortunately for us there's no apparent shortage of bread, wine, beer or fresh produce! We saw some amazingly good prices. We have been extremely lucky so far with regard to the Covid-19 pandemic. Yes, there have been closures and restrictions (and more are beginning) but in the places we usually frequent the inconvenience and business impact have seemed far away. Not so for the Carl's Jr we visited for brunch yesterday. The place looked closed. I went to check while my darling sat in the pickup, and when it turned out they were open I went inside and ordered our food for takeout. I thought at first the place was just opening up and they hadn't finished cleaning. Then I realized I was looking at seating restrictions. One person sat in the restaurant, alone. I got our orders and left. The good news is that the drive-through line got busy while we were eating, so their business may be all right. That isn't so for the little place in Winterhaven where we used to get propane and cheap beer. It's closed. Whether it failed because of the pandemic or other business issues I don't know. Yesterday it looked as though the place was being remodeled under new ownership. We never thought it was well run during our previous visits, although it served our needs. Today we tooled down to the little encampment where we get the occasional ice cream bar and where we take the trailer when the holding tanks need to be emptied. The campground is open, full nearly to capacity (everyone hiding out) but the store and museum are closed. We're in the middle of nowhere, but still in Southern California -- and in a county that's particularly hot. They're abiding by the rules. Yes to the trailer dump. No to ice cream, nor will I be able to look for charming plates in their shop.

I just finished pitting and chopping dates for my husband's fruit salad. The dates were a blend of barhi and medjool, admittedly not the freshest in either case. I think I'll stick with my method: pit, then lay flat and chop with a large knife. It didn't take long. I realize that in a professional kitchen and with professional-scale quantities a faster method might be necessary, but for my purposes this was much faster than scissors. (No lectures about cutting toward my thumb, please. The dates are soft enough to do that with impunity. )

Maybe soak them in syrup, then incorporate into a sweet bread with other dried fruits, along the lines of a stollen?

I circled back and took a look because of this post, and then also bought the book. One of the things I love about these bargain prices is that I'm getting a chance to try a recipe for just the time, ingredients and a couple of bucks. If even one is a winner then I've gotten a bargain. The Nashville-style Hot Chicken looked way too interesting to pass up.

I can't decide between giving a "Thanks" or a "Groan / Wow" response above. Do you know whether Stater Bros in 29 Palms does curbside pickup? If we go that way, early morning won't be an option. 😒

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.