Smithy

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.

I'm getting a pretty good stock of Cooper's pinto beans, which for some reason are much better than the ones I make. I'm running out of refrigerator space, though. What happens to cooked pinto beans if they're frozen? Does it destroy the texture?

I confess, I thought at first that one was "Hang yourself" and it seemed like an odd first clue...and unusually rude!

Green chile cheeseburgers are one of life's pleasures, I think. Nice job on that one, @Steve Irby.

On Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, Cooper's offers ribeye steaks and baked potatoes in addition to their usual offerings. I've been wanting to try that for a while. Last night was the night. I pulled into a slot and this cutie greeted me. (I'm posting his picture with his permission.) Things were winding down, and we had time to chat while I was placing my order. I asked if they're open on Sundays, because my darling thought they weren't. "Well," he smiled, "is it Christmas?" "Nope," I said, "although when this coronavirus thing is over it's going to feel like it!" Laughs on both sides. I ordered a ribeye for myself, a rib for my darling, some beans, potato salad and beer. "Want that beer while you wait?" he asked. "The steak will be about 15 minutes." Gotta love small-town Texas. The order eventually came, I paid, we thanked each other, and I headed the two blocks back to the park. When I got there, I learned that we'd also gotten things we hadn't asked for: An entire chicken! And these plates and flatware that we didn't need. They will be useful along the road sometime when we don't feel like doing dishes, but I hate the waste. It also appeared that we'd gotten the rib but no steak. I went back up to Cooper's. "Did anyone get a ribeye when they'd ordered chicken?" Nope. no ribeyes sitting around, no disappointed customers. They offered to cook me a steak, but it was already closing time and I didn't want them to hang around. We'd paid for the chicken, so that would do. "Come back tomorrow and you'll have a steak on me," said my waiter. I assured him it wasn't that big a deal. "Hang in there," I said, and headed back home. When I got back to the Princessmobile and started unpackaging things, I discovered that the steak and the rib were packaged together. We had paid for it, and we'd gotten it. We'd just also gotten a chicken we hadn't ordered. Well, we like chicken too. It will go well in salads, or for sandwiches. My darling is of the opinion that there is one, and only one, way to cook a ribeye steak: by doing it ourselves, on our own grill. I'm so glad I tried this one. It was juicy, and tender, and flavorful. It might have been a shade more done than I'd have done it, but at worst I'd give it an A rather than an A+. Delicious. It was also huge. We have leftovers! Hooray!

I checked on The Outdoor Kitchen: Live-Fire Cooking from the Grill [A Cookbook] at Amazon, and it does look good. It's quite new! Maybe I can talk my library into purchasing it; in the meantime I've saved it to my list. Thanks for the recommendation!