Smithy

From time to time, we pass through Tucson, Arizona and go to the Arizona-Sonoran Desert Museum. From time to time, they offer cooking or harvest classes featuring native Sonoran Desert ingredients. The closest I've managed to come to attending such a class was last fall's Desert Harvest Festival, which I wrote about here. One of the best parts was a presentation titled A Pot, A Pillowcase, and A Propane Torch, in which Sarah Lee-Allen showed how to make prickly pear syrup, mesquite flour and cholla buds into edible goodness without getting stuck. Since then I've had my electronic ears tuned to other class offerings. I recently received this notification about a class coming up on April 6, 2019. I think it will be an interesting class; unfortunately, we are mobile snowbirds and will have moved on by then. I'm posting about it here in case someone else IS interested and able to attend! Disclaimer: I have been in communication with Sarah, and I have a general membership with the ASDM. I have no financial involvement with the organization, other than paying dues!

It's going to be (already is) beautiful! Sorry if you said this before, but what is the wood in use for the back bar and the bar? The color contrasts are striking.

We made it to Barrio Bread. See here for the difficulties we experienced the first time around. This time, we had landmarks to help us find it. This time, we knew to arrive earlier in the day - and we made it slightly before noon. The shelves were much better stocked than they had been during our last visit! Where last fall there had been few choices because the bread was already sold out, this time the selection was plentiful and choices were difficult. I wanted to get one of each! I knew I couldn't keep them or use them quickly enough. But this was my only opportunity for this trip! I had plenty of time to agonize while in line. I selected a loaf each of Heritage and Khorasan bread, and a Barrio Baguette. The loaves are works of art. (These pictures are lower-resolution for ease of posting. If you want more detail in the pictures, I can post higher-resolution versions.) The heritage grains are locally grown, drought-tolerant. I had never heard of Khorasan before now. The Heritage loaf includes Sonoran white wheat. I also bought 2 5-pound bags of their Barrio flour blend. I haven't taken photos of that. Here's the bread part of our purchase, along with a money shot of the Heritage loaf: Directly we got home, I mixed up some chicken salad and sliced some of the Heritage loaf for sandwiches. We were happy.

I'm glad I asked about the quail! They looked small to me, but the last time I had any was when my father brought them home from hunting trips. My fists were quite a bit smaller then. It's a good question about the 1-week limit. The County owns and operates it, so they get to make the rules. My guess is that since it's first-come-first-served (no reservations taken) they want to maximize the number of people who can enjoy the park...as you say, because so many people want in.

Tucson is a nice place to spend time. In my case, that almost always means spending money too - probably too much, but I love the food scene here. Add to that the fact that we're camped in a pleasant area - much more lush and bird-populated than our previous stops - and it makes us happy for a week. (We'd stay longer, maybe, but the campground we're in has a 1-week limit and we haven't found anything else acceptable so far.) We've had a couple of shopping expeditions. One involved a stop at the Babylon Market, where we could restock certain dwindling or empty supplies: barberries, Egyptian feta cheese, cumin. We had already stopped at a Fry's grocery store; otherwise I might have purchased olive oil and balsamic vinegar here. The prices were lower at Babylon Market. The business continues to thrive, but on our particular visit they were tearing around in overwork. There was a "help wanted" sign, written in at least 3 languages. Sorry, I forgot to take a photo of it. If you know someone who lives around here and might be looking for work in a Middle-Eastern food market, send them to Babylon. These caught my eye, although I didn't buy them. I thought of @heidih when I saw the dried mallow leaves. I thought of @Shelby when I saw the quail, and wondered what she'd think of the sizes. They're advertised as Jumbo quail. There were 1/2 - 2/3 the size of my fist! I remember quail as being bigger than that, but maybe I'm misremembering. This also caught our eye, though we didn't buy it. This party-sized flatbread took up most of the top of their freezer case. Look carefully above the words "flat bread" and you'll see our pickup keys and fob for scale. While I waited in the checkout line - one of the owners answered 3 phone calls and dealt with a butcher-counter problem - these also caught my eye. Before I knew it, they'd fallen into my basket. My darling preferred the original flavor and thought the sweet & sour was too hot; I preferred the sweet and sour (and did not find it hot). I wouldn't get them again, though. Like every other variety of kettle-cooked chips I've tried, these were tough. I think kettle chips just aren't my thing.

Hilarious, indeed! But the food looked good...well, except for the cheese. The "loaded fries" looked interesting, too. I'd try that, if I could. I seem to be seeing a lot more variants of poutine / chili fries (depending on which side of the Canada / US border one is on) than I used to. The "dirty fries" I saw at a restaurant recently included chili, cheese, jalapenos and perhaps something else. The "garlic fries" I had around New Year's included parmesan and parsley. Is this variation on a theme a new trend, or am I just slow to spot it?

What makes something "Balti"? Does that specify a particular flavor profile?

I have an EZ-DUZ-IT at home. I like it, but not well enough to justify that price! IMO it is not as good as the old Swing-a-Way. Mine is a couple of years old and starting to loosen/show signs of wear. It does not get heavy usage.

I would so like to be there for the grand opening! It's going to be special. Those bonbons are wonderful in themselves.

What a shame the ribs didn't come out nicely! I have the same question @TdeV has. You'll probably get some good "what to do next time" advice, once you answer. In the meantime,... If the texture is the only problem - that is, if the flavor is good but the meat is just tough - there's hope. One possibility is to cut it into small chunks (bite-sized, or smaller) and make hash. In a skillet, cook potatoes, onions, seasonings of your choice, and the meat chunks.When we cook hash we add the onions after the potatoes are nearly done, so the onions don't overcook; since the meat is already cooked it goes in at about the same time as the onions. There are far more experienced hash-makers than I who can give more thorough instructions if this sounds appealing, but it's a very forgiving dish. Here's one example. Another possibility is to cut the meat as above, and use it in a stir-fry. Finally, you might be able to stew the meat and get it more tender - or at least extract flavor from it - but I think it depends on how it was cooked in the first place. More information, please!

Last night's dinner was a test of a new (to me) recipe: Skillet-Roasted Salmon with Avocado, Pomegranate, and Bulgur, from the April/May 2019 issue of Fine Cooking. I had to take a few liberties with it, since I had no pomegranate and went lightly on the cilantro out of deference to my partner - so our dinner was much less colorful than it is on the cover of the magazine. (It looks much, much better on the cover of their magazine, of course. Garnish and better plating would have helped this photo!) So why am I writing about it here? Because of the unexpected way the avocado augmented the dish. The salmon, with its seasoning of lime, cilantro and aromatics, was excellent. The bulgur, with the same seasonings (and ginger, garlic, scallions, all sweated before the broth came in) was excellent. Taken together, they were great. But when a bite of buttery, silky avocado was taken at the same time, the dish gained new depth and complexity: something was added that I hadn't even known was missing! This recipe is a keeper, when I can get good avocado. Even my husband, who flinches at the idea of salmon or cilantro, liked it and wants me to make it again. Make this dish. Enjoy it. Make it look better than I did, and enjoy that avocado!

That is a lovely tutorial, @sartoric. You and @Okanagancook both turn out lovely dishes, clearly explained. Thank you!

You nailed it right there! We both prefer our hot food on hot plates, but he has a special bugagoo about it because of his past life. He, his then-wife and daughter worked in a backwoods resort restaurant with exactly those heavy china platters. He could NOT get them to warm the plates ahead of time, so those lovely eggs and bacon/sausage/whatever went onto cold plates and were cold by the time they arrived at the table. I think it's a travesty too, but it isn't quite the burr under my saddle that it is for him. He knows all that (well, except maybe the bears' preference) but still is firmly in the burger / brats / red meat / "the more sat fat the better" camp. It happens that salmon is my favorite fish, so I occasionally make a command decision and buy it. Then the trick is to find a way to cook it that we both like. Just this morning he said again that he really liked that dish last night! It's a keeper.

Tonight's dinner was a new recipe from the latest issue of Fine Cooking: Skillet-Roasted Salmon with Avocado, Pomegranate and Bulgur. Never mind that I'm out of pomegranate and may not have access until next fall; I wanted to cook that dish! It looked so beautiful on the cover of the magazine! The recipe involves lime zest and juice; cilantro; bulgur with vegetable broth (I used chicken); minced ginger, scallions and garlic, and oil for the fish and for heating the aromatics. Get the aromatics started on stovetop. Add the bulgur and broth, stir well. Put the (seasoned) fish on top. Bake in the oven. Remove from the oven and let it sit, covered (why? to let the bulgur finish?) then remove the fish, fluff and season the bulgur, put the fish back, season all and serve. Well...food stylists do a far better job than I, and this would have looked prettier with the pomegranate arils and more cilantro. The whitish stuff coming out of the salmon suggests that it might have been overcooked. It didn't taste like it to us. My darling, whose face fell at the idea of salmon for dinner, liked it. He liked it despite its having cilantro, which I downplayed (hence the lack of garnish). His only complaint was that the fish and bulgur were cool by the time they got to the table, and he prefers his fish and grains to be hot. That can be corrected with higher-heat-capacity plates, I told him. Melamine just doesn't cut it. I think I have a new justification for purchasing new dinnerware.

Once again, my day is not wasted: I've learned something. Thanks, @robirdstx!

@Thanks for the Crepes - you asked whether you missed it, so maybe it's worth clarifying my throwaway line? The non-rhyme I was alluding to was a single-jingle: "We're usually in a hurry when we drive through Missouri". The way I was raised, that sentence would have rhymed with itself. I've learned the error of my upbringing since moving to the Midwest. In order to make it rhyme with the Missourians' pronunciation of their state, it would have to be "We're usually in a hurra when we pass through Missoura". Anyway, back to food.... @rotuts For our purposes, bacon ends & pieces are usually the way to go. A well-laced bacon covering, such as we see with certain meat loaves or with Porthos' recent "Redneck Turtle Burgers", needs whole slices. A bacon, lettuce (and avocado, and pickle) and tomato sandwich needs whole slices. The above-shown broccoli salad (thanks, ElsieD!) would have been fine with ends and pieces. Our problem is that we rarely find packages of ends and pieces on the road. Once we're done with whatever we brought from home, that's it. I do suspect the cure matters. Our favorite butcher shop at home does a fine hickory-smoked bacon that I'll have to try up against the Wright's when we get home. Remember the sous vide chicken breast I mentioned here? I cooked it at 150F for 2:09. Today it came out of the bag, and I sliced part for sandwiches. The texture is much, much better than I got with 160F for 1 hour. Next time I may try @Shelby's version at 141F. (It feels like I'm doing the Limbo: see how low you can go!) The meat texture is good, but the meat itself needs help. Much of the rest will probably get chopped up for chicken salad, so I can mix it with crunchy and fattening bits to improve the flavor. Hmm, might it make a decent shortcut for a curry? We drove today, and ate breakfast on the road: the last of the persimmon cake I'd made for our dinner party with friends, 10 days ago. I really can't taste the persimmon, but the cake was moist, tender and flavorful to the last. I'm surprised at how well it held up, simply wrapped in its pan and set aside in the kitchen.

I've spent a couple of hours testing bacon-cookery and bacon brands, then making a giant bowl of broccoli salad. Puzzling over the Joule will wait for another time. The contenders were the bacon I bought a couple of days ago, as noted in an earlier post: our standard Wright's Hickory-smoked bacon, and Hempler's Applewood-smoked bacon, purchased at the butcher counter of Fry's grocery store. You can see that the applewood-smoked bacon is considerably more trimmed of fat than the Wright's. It has more of a handcrafted look as a result. It also looks a bit leaner, but that might be an illusion because of the trimming. I tried both microwave and oven-rack cooking. Here, for comparison, are two slices of each type on the rack before it went into the oven. The Wright's is at the top of the photo. Both brands are sliced to about the same thickness. I forgot to ask about a proper oven temperature, and assumed 350F. The oven-roasting took somewhere over a half hour, and after a couple of bacon-flips and pan-turns I had this: The microwave oven cooking, on the other hand, took about 6 minutes, with a paper-towel change partway through, to get this: That bacon is *crisp*! I had to run the oven-baked stuff through the microwave for maybe a minute to get a similar crispness, even after that cooking - just as @blue_dolphin had noted. Here's the before and after: The microwave method had the advantage of being quicker and less messy. The oven method gave beautifully rendered bacon fat: "liquid gold", as kayb put it once. Both were better than my skillet work. I think I've been cooking the bacon over too high heat all these years! I think the brand of bacon, or at least the cure, may also matter. I liked the flavor and "snap" of the cooked Wright's better than the cooked Hempler's. Even the crispiest Hempler's was tough compared to the Wright's. I like the note of hickory smoke in the Wright's. I couldn't really detect much applewood - or pork, really - with the Hempler's. We can get other hickory-smoked bacon closer to home, and I'll be interested to compare it to Wright's when I can for a better comparison. (I will also keep an eye out for Broadbent's, at the risk of being utterly spoiled for lesser stuff.) Thanks, everyone! I've learned a lot more about bacon cookery than I knew yesterday, and it's because of your collective help. I'll hoist an extra glass to y'all tonight as we enjoy our broccoli salad and beer brats by the campfire.

It seems to me that this site is filled with food porn. Just go look at the Dinner, Breakfast, Lunch topics for starters! As for restaurant reviews: have you checked out the Regional Cuisine forums?

Good question, and with a 6-month living quarter rotation I'm not sure I know. At the house I chalked it all up to having switched routers, and sometimes having a phone talking directly to the printer or some such nonsense. That particular pitfall is sorted out here, now. I may have to go through it again when we get home.

Does anyone else have to troubleshoot the phone / Joule connection every time they set up? At first I tracked my problems down to things like having the phone on one wifi router and the Joule on another (don't ask) but now I know my way around that one. It seems that every time I take the Joule out of storage and plug it in, I have to go through a not-so-simple connection process. The phone program has the Joule listed, but it doesn't simply connect - either by Bluetooth or wifi - without starting and stopping equipment and programs more than once.

The steaks' 124F bath was more nearly 2 1/2 hours, I think. Here's how they looked afterward. I thought they looked pretty good. In the skillet, browning: Dinner: Overcooked, I'm afraid. I'm not sure how I could have dried the surfaces more for a quicker sear. I may have weenied out on the "screaming hot cast iron" because I was doing it inside. However, the (safflower) oil film was starting to smoke when the steaks went on, so there should have been plenty of heat. We both agree that these steaks were cut too thinly in the first place. Ah well, we're done experimenting with this batch of steaks. I find using the Joule very frustrating in the Princessmobile, and I think next year (assuming we hit the road again) it's going to be the Anova instead. I always have to troubleshoot the connection between my cell phone and the Joule before they'll "talk" to each other. Last night the phone went to sleep twice, once while the water was heating, and again while the steaks were in the bath. I had to stop and restart the Joule (and the phone program) to reestablish the connection. Does anyone else experience this problem?

That is so gorgeous, I had to quote your photo. At what stage did you make the gravy? While the chicken was resting in the buttermilk? I'd be wanting to eat that chicken the very instant it came out of the pan...

The ribeye steaks (and roast) that we bought at home have been a disappointment this year. We aren't sure why; that butcher shop has always been our favorite, but this year's purchase has been tough and not very flavorful as that cut goes. We're down to our last two. We've had 1 wild success, where the partially-frozen steaks were cooked at high heat over a very hot campfire flame. (The next time I tried that method, the results were not as good.) I liked the steaks in wine sauce that I did at Death Valley, but he wasn't impressed and I admit the meat was slightly overdone. We're down to our last pair, and the final ribeye experiment for the trip. I oiled them, sprinkled them with a Texas Sweet Hickory grill rub my sister gave me for Christmas, sprinkled with fresh parsley left over from last night's dinner, and packed them. I bought a little hand-pump vacuum packer, with reusable bags, for the Princessmobile last year or the year before. It may not be as satisfying as the motorized hmmrrooOOMM of the FoodSaver, but it takes less space and works surprisingly well. In a couple of hours these steaks will go into a sous vide bath: 124F for 1.5 hours (or so), to give them plenty of time to lose their toughness. Then, because our plans don't include a grill or campfire tonight, they'll go onto the hottest cast-iron pan I can manage for no more than 30 seconds on a side. We'll see what happens!

I'd like to try some of that!

You're helping us figure out a new route through Missouri, maybe. West Plains, MO is not quite 200 miles south of Columbia, MO along US 63. We have talked about taking that road to revisit a drop-dead wonderful restaurant / brewpub in Columbia that has the best smoked brisket and corned beef we've ever had. The craft brews were nicely balanced: not too hoppy, not too sweet. We've been looking for a kolsch that good since then, to no avail. (The music was good, too: an old-timey jam session that had me tapping my feet and going to check out the fiddler's technique.) I recommend the Broadway Brewery to anyone passing through that way, but there were a lot of other wonderful-looking restaurants in the area that we'd like to have checked out. We'd be rolling and wallowing if we were to travel only 200 miles and check out fine smoked turkey, but maybe we could work out some camping along the way. We're usually in a hurry when we pass through Missouri.* Maybe we should change that. I've seen smoked turkey thighs and drumsticks in the Duluth stores, and smoked turkey breast (sliced) in the deli sections. Should I be checking them out when we get home? Or are you describing whole smoked turkeys? *That will not rhyme, if one pronounces the state's name as the natives do.