Smithy

That is a lovely turn of phrase, Anna.

I think our husbands are brothers.

I love the dedication: "For you, Mom. You were right All Along.

We think this is the last campfire dinner for this location and this season. We keep dithering over whether to stay or go: how long to stay here, which way to go home, how we can most effectively remain isolated as we travel. It's been pleasant here, much more pleasant for me than in previous years. On the other hand, we need to head home sooner or later and, we hope, keep our "social distance" as we go. We're leaning toward packing up the outside kitchen tomorrow (Sunday) and leaving Monday. I have been carrying with us a couple of sets of bamboo skewers. One set I bought at TJMaxx, a special deal. The other set came in a cooking set at a silent auction. Note to self: don't use bamboo skewers again. They splinter. @Anna N will be scandalized that I did not make tzadziki sauce for our souvlaki. (That discussion begins here.) I decided against the sauce because I have no cucumber and not nearly enough yogurt. However, I'm somewhat scandalized that I didn't make pita, or better still, pilaf, to go with this pork. Nonetheless, the pork was delicious, we didn't get any splinters, and the rest of the skewers went into the fire. The roasted cauliflower was a bit overdone, I thought, but he was sorry that I hadn't made more. I had forgotten how much this stuff cooks down. I'll try again with the other half, and watch the process more closely.

When all was said and done, I realized that I didn't have any cucumbers and I'd rather save my precious yogurt for breakfast: So here's what the finished plate looked like. It looks like a dog's dinner, and it could have used some other colors, but we closed our eyes and enjoyed the flavors. The (over)roasted cauliflower was an excellent accompaniment.

Yogurt, avocado, freshly-squeezed juice from the last of the mandarin oranges someone gave me.

Patricia Wells' book was too good to pass up for me. I love the theme-and-variation approach to learning about cooking, and I think I'll easily get a couple of buck's worth of knowledge. Thanks, Toliver!

This marinade... ...and this last bit of pork shoulder from that little store in Calipatria... ...are getting acquainted in the refrigerator. They were going to be grilled over the fire last night as souvlaki. I forgot that Friday night is our news-junkie night. We watched news instead of the fire, and ate leftover corned beef brisket and potatoes. Since our generator stopped working (again) nearly 2 weeks ago we've had to rely on the pickup to recharge the trailer batteries. We disconnect the pickup at night to ensure that the trailer doesn't drain the pickup's batteries. There's supposed to be electronic protection to prevent that from happening, but we learned at the Salton Sea that it doesn't work. The upshot is that, by morning, the trailer's batteries are nearly dead. This morning I awoke to a beeping. My darling couldn't hear it, so he couldn't help identify it. It turned out to be the CO detector, complaining that it was low on power. The trailer's batteries were THAT low. I got dressed, went out and started the pickup, connected and reset everything, then started the water for my coffee. The benefit of all that was that I got to see this: The sun has swung nearly 40 degrees northward since the winter solstice: from the right side of the notch in the mountains in the center picture, to its current position. We see this at home too, of course, but with "no trees to spoil the view" (as my darling puts it) the swing is quite dramatic.

Tzatziki! I'd forgotten all about that! Thanks, Anna.

I'm with you on that! So now I'm going to solicit ideas and opinions for tonight's dinner. I have chunks of pork marinating for souvlaki. The marinade is essentially an oil and lemon mix with oregano, bay leaf, and a touch of garlic. I had intended to also cook cauliflower* by a recipe from the same Greek cookbook: boil it, then toss with an oil and lemon juice salad dressing. Maybe that will work. Maybe it will be too bland, too much of all the same flavors. Another idea is to use one of my favorite cauliflower treatments: Spicy Roasted Cauliflower with Tahini. Those seasonings are turmeric, paprika, garlic, jalapeno, lemon, olive oil, tahini. I know the seasoning is good. My mind's tongue is not sure whether it will be compatible with the more simply seasoned souvlaki. What say some of you? Is one of those a better match than the other? Do you have an alternate suggestion? *I can already hear JoNorvelleWalker and other cauliflower haters saying "why?"

I admire your definition of "essentials", @blue_dolphin. May we come hunker down with you?

I'd love to get in on a deal like that. One of my favorite wineries, Sunce (in the Sonoma Valley) is sending out deals for their wine club members. I'm looking forward to the shipment I ordered, but it is a while and some miles away, and still not as good a deal as yours.

Has anyone else tried the recipe from NYTimes Cooking, Salmon with Whole Lemon Dressing? When that landed in my email a few weeks ago I set it aside until my sister could be here to try it with me. The remarkable thing about it is that the dressing really does include entire lemons, chopped. Our take on it was that the low-and-slow cooking method brought out the goodness of the salmon, but even lower and slower than my oven could manage (or a shorter cooking time) would have been better. It was a bit dry. The other thing was that the dressing had a bitter quality, due no doubt to the pith. If/when I do that recipe again, I'll zest the lemon, peel it, and then proceed with the recipe without including the pith. It'll be a bit more work, but worth it. (A couple of commenters said the same thing.) I didn't take pictures of our dinners last week, but here's what happened to some of the leftovers today: Salt helps offset the bitterness, just as Shirley Corriher promised. In other news: a shower just went through and gave us a beautiful full rainbow. It was a double rainbow at one end. Now we know why the Princessmobile keeps taking our money. How else will that pot o' gold be filled?

Yesterday we went grocery shopping for a few items, and splurged on sandwich food. It's intended to be road food, but I simply couldn't resist getting into the deli meat. I should know better than to get into the Genoa salami! I also opened a last jar of homemade pickles. Since they were labeled 2016, it was probably time.

The next day, we went to buy groceries anyway. We had to go to town: to return my rented car, to get propane, to check mail, and to get just a few items from the grocery store: yogurt, half-and-half, almond milk, beer, wine, some fresh produce. As reported in the Food in the time of a pandemic topic, grocery stores are becoming crowded places with scarce resources. Even though there have been no cases of Covid-19 infection reported within 200 miles of our location, the hoarding and panic-buying has hit Yuma. I got the last loaf of good bread, which may mean I actually go back to baking our bread before we get home. I have the supplies for it. We stayed pretty much with the shopping list but I confess that the overbuying fever hit me too: I bought yet more pasta, although we have a lot and I have the equipment to make it. I bought yet more canned tuna. And we saw some great deals on meat, too good to pass up: By the time we came home, the skies had opened up again. I don't think I've ever seen so much rain here! The ground was pretty mushy. We had put off pumping water from the pickup tank into the trailer tank, and we decided to wait until the rain had passed. I amused myself by wiping the exterior of every package I'd bought and giving the produce a bit of a bleach rinse. Ufda. That detail-oriented project is enough to discourage shopping! When the rain passed, we once again were treated to the sight of water running in the nearby wash. That's 3 times in one week. We still aren't tired of it. What we ARE tired of is equipment malfunctions. The pump refused to work, and we were low on water. I opened one of those new bottles of wine and consoled myself while we finished the pork roast and potatoes left from my sister's visit last week. By this morning, the pump had dried enough to work again. Whew!

I decided the other day that the refrigerator was entirely too frosty again and that it might be partly the reason the freezer compartment is relatively warm. This time, I decided to inventory the contents of the freezer, following the advice of the more efficient freezer-cleaner-outers in the Cook Your Way Through Your Freezer topic. It was an educational experience. What I didn't list was left out to thaw. Sheesh! Keep in mind that this list doesn't include the contents of the refrigerator or various pantries. If we were sensible, we'd avoid the grocery stores on the way home - both to lighten the load and to observe the social distancing needs due to the current Coronavirus pandemic. The Black Angus steak was intended for a cooking project before we left home, and I feared it would be freezer-burned. The burger and Hot Italian sausage were to be mixed with chopped onion to make our current version of "Super Burgers". We did that. I dug through the refrigerator and began to address items that needed to be cooked before they went off. The celery root had seen better days, but was perfectly edible. I chopped the greens and soaked them so they'd revive a bit, and got the root ready to use. Half the root and all the greens joined a red bell pepper, jalapeno, onion and cherry tomatoes to make a relish for our super burgers that night. It was a clear, calm night, good for cooking outside. I used the camp stove to cook the relish... ...and when it was done I moved it to the campfire to stay warm while my darling cooked the super burgers. The Angus blade steak cooked in a basket over the fire. It doesn't seem freezer burned after all. The dog will be disappointed. We probably don't need to shop before we get home - except for fresh produce and dairy, if we choose to brave the grocery stores. Coronavirus hasn't come anywhere near our location yet, but in the next few weeks it may seem as though we're running a gauntlet to get home safely.

We went today to the Fry's in Yuma. Late last week they were out of paper products; today they were running short on foodstuffs also. Pasta was mostly gone. Pasta sauce mostly gone. Ditto rice. I got the last loaf of Dave's Killer Bread. Large holes in the produce section, and in the cured meats (hot dogs, etc.) sections. The weird thing is, no cases have been reported, detected, suspected in this county or anywhere within 150 miles. People are stocking up anyway. I didn't try taking photos, but we did get some really good deals on beef and pork. I may post about them later. I did, quite unexpectedly, find rice (and antiseptic wipes) at a smaller store where we buy our propane.

Interesting that they're so difficult - I wouldn't have guessed that, since they do so well out here on their own. There's a stand of them about 10 miles south of here that's bright orange at the right time of year! There are at least 3 other species of mallow growing around here. We thought they weren't going to do much this year, or maybe we'd missed it, but with these rains they're going great guns. That goes to your observation that they need the drought stress and rain both. That makes me wonder about cotton cultivation...something else to explore.

I didn't know that. Thanks! Edited to add: after reading your comment, I doublechecked the aforementioned cookbook, and it said that the wolfberry is also called "desert goji" because of its more heavily-marketed Asian relative. My day isn't wasted; I've learned something new.

A lot has been going on here in the Princessmobile world. In addition to the Coronavirus pandemic and its effect on Life As We Know It (food discussion over here) we've had mechanical troubles (generator on the fritz again), storms, and a very fun visit from my sister, who finally made it here from Reno. We ate well, and ate about half the dishes I had intended for the holiday visit that didn't happen, but I'm not sure how much of a food story I can make about it. Instead, allow me to introduce the Wolfberry. (Its name really doesn't need to be capitalized, but I figured I'd do so once for the formal introduction.) This unassuming bush is part of the native ecological community, and shares the banks of the washes with other plants such as creosote-bush, desert lavender, and...well, there's a surprising diversity to the plant life here. I don't know what it does during the summer. In the fall when we arrive, it seems to be more or less a dusty green lump. But if you look closely, along about December, you'll start seeing tiny flowers - usually lavender, sometimes more pink or white or even yellow. The pollinators get busy and happy, and by springtime red berries begin to develop. The berries are edible. They're tart and sweet, and if you're willing to brave the thorns there are things to do with them besides eating them out of hand. I decided to try it. Did I mention that they're tiny? My darling quipped, "You'd need a lot to make a dozen!" (He's such a card.) It did take many dozen to get the couple of cups' worth of berries. I found some bushes that were far more red than green, and selected berries from them. I don't know how the locals harvest them. My method was slow, picking berries one at a time, and not trying to strip them off the branches. It was a pretty day, and after an hour or so I had what I needed. See all the leaves among the berries in that center picture? That was the next step: trying to separate them out. I didn't have an appropriate sieve. There wasn't enough wind to let winnowing do the job. Washing didn't do it. I finally had to resort to picking the berries out, one by one. That happened the next day, when it was time to bake. @FauxPas has mentioned the cookbook Eat Mesquite and More: a Cookboook for Sonoran Desert Foods and Living, and last fall I succumbed to the temptation to buy the book at the Arizona Sonoran Desert Museum. (Hey, profits go to a good cause.) I chose a recipe for Mesquite-Wolfberry bread, because the intended recipients included someone who can't have gluten or dairy. This recipe has neither. The ingredients are spelt flour, mesquite flour, almond milk (other nut milks or dairy would do), the berries, agave or maple syrup (I had honey), oil, and other items that I can look up if anyone's interested. The topping is some of the berries, and chia seeds. It's pretty, isn't it? It also smelled good while baking. I took it to a meeting, it was well-received, and very little came home: enough for my sister, my darling, and me. What's funny about the bread is that, to my sister and me, it had a sweet and flavorful beginning but a bitter aftertaste. My darling thought it wonderful, and one of the best dessert breads he'd ever had. The gluten- and dairy-intolerant person wrote me later and said, "thanks so much for the brownies! They were great!"

Thanks for that, Toliver. I sprang for that, and then went down the Kindle rabbit hole to arrive at Saffron in the Souk for $3.99. Not quite the usual bargain-basement price, but for 4 bucks I think it's a good buy.

I may just be slow on the uptake (as in, years slow) but that matches my feeling about them now. I cracked up when I read the above statement about recycled cardboard. Those oatcakes, on the other hand, do look delicious. I may have to try making them. There's also pita, as kayb notes. I've had pretty good success with that although I've been away from bread-baking (again) and it always takes a try or three to get it right.

Hello and welcome, Josh! It's delightful to see a new member arrive from South Africa. We always enjoy seeing new members turn up with different seasons and food traditions. I can't help with the pastry and confectionary questions, as I'm one of the gapers-and-admirers only, but if you have questions about how to use the forums, or where to post something, feel free to ask a host (I am one) by PM, or else ask publicly in the Moderation and Policy Discussion forum.

Breakfast this morning: the last half of a Chicken Caesar wrap I bought at Sprouts yesterday to stave off becoming hangry, followed by a walk, topped by another of those lovely grapefruits. I think I'm about done with the "wrap" concept of wheat tortillas wrapped around something else without being cooked after, as in a burrito or quesailla. Sure, they're handy, but the uncooked tortilla is too raw-tasting and bland for me. I think I've been coming to this idea slowly over the last few months, between my best friend and @heidih and their good advice on making the most of corn tortillas. I don't know where that will leave me for grocery store convenience food, though. As a rule, the bread is no great shakes either. During our walk we found the first desert hibiscus of the season. These blossoms are a little bigger than an inch across, quite startling to see coming from a bush I'd thought to be an apricot mallow.

I too have ordered from Zingerman's and wished I could visit the store. Thanks for the trip and the pics!