Smithy

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.

I knew there was at least one Wrights-hater in the group here! Actually, I'm pretty sure there are more. Thanks for the information about their ownership. I didn't know that. Thanks also for the recommendation of Broadbent's and the caveat that it's just their bacon that's worth buying. I do like the taste of Wright's, but that doesn't mean there isn't better out there. Yesterday, before you posted, we went grocery shopping. I bought a pound of the applewood-smoked bacon Fry's had at their butcher counter, as well as a new package of Wright's bacon. I'm planning a giant broccoli salad - that stuff never lasts long around here - and that will require quite a lot of bacon. I'll have a chance to compare cooking methods recommended above (everything except the CSO) as well as bacon types. Stay tuned.

No room for it in this Princessmobile. I confess, however, that the Cuisinart Combo Steam/Convection Oven topic(s) have me interested in making room for one at home.

I just finished reading the Quarterfinal judgment on All About Cake vs. Bottom of the Pot. I am within a hair's breadth of buying Bottom of the Pot after reading that review! I don't need another cookbook (she tells herself sternly ). I have a backlog of cookbooks, both in hard copy and Kindle, already. But this reviewer did some fine writing, and the book sounds appealing. The other thing I'm noticing about the Piglet reviews is that it exposes me to writers I haven't necessarily encountered before. It's great fun. Thanks for pointing it out!

Do you cook it at full power, or one of the reduced-power settings? Any special dishes to use? I think our ridged microwave bacon cooker (brought along from a past life) is at home somewhere, but we don't have it with us.

This looks like a wonderful thing to do with tuna. I don't have tuna, but I have salmon. How do you think it would work with boneless sockeye?

@blue_dolphin, I can see that confit tuna has been taking you a long, long way. I'll have to try that when I can lay my hands on some good tuna.

Broccoli salad for dinner tonight, with a Disney-esque sunset as a prelude. I have a question, for those of you following along: what determines whether cooked bacon is tough or crisp? Is it the thickness of the cut, the temperature of the skillet, how much and how often fat is drained off, something about the cure? I know that the degree to which it's cooked is a factor, but it seems I often end up with bacon that is chewy rather than shatteringly crisp, even when it's well-cooked. I like the flavor of this Wright bacon, but the texture doesn't come out as well as I'd like.

It's a beautifully sunny day, and the breeze is pleasantly cool at the moment although I suspect I'll think it too hot by the afternoon. I need to get outside and cook bacon on the camp stove before it reaches that point. There's color outside; the variation in colors in the globe mallows here is astonishing. The mallows have a subtle but delightful perfume. There's also color inside. I was planning on my usual breakfast of avocado with something - toast, maybe yogurt - and then remembered that I had some blueberries set aside for the purpose. Pretty, isn't it? We came to Arizona earlier than usual in order to meet up with friends who were visiting the state. They drove down for an afternoon of flower watching in cold and breezy conditions, followed by dinner. Since they had a 2-hour drive each way, dinner was an early affair and I didn't get many pictures. We had a pork shoulder roast, doused with Lipton's Onion soup mix and cushioned with potatoes, cooking in a low oven in my Le Creuset Dutch oven for the afternoon. It kept the trailer plenty warm despite the cold and bluster outside. There was also a green salad, sourdough bread... ...and a dessert of persimmon bread. The Instant Pot came into its own the next day. Hooray for full-time electricity! The remainder of the pork roast was carved off the bone. There was a huge bone and a lot of meat. This bone was too long for my 3-quart Instant Pot, and stuck up above the liner pot's lid. After some thought I decided that the bone should be safe as long as it didn't keep the lid from closing tightly. It didn't. I kept the liquid level to slightly below the max-fill line of the pot, and made sure the bone end was turned away from the pressure vent. Then, for extra "safety" (that is, mess containment in case I had miscalculated) I covered the lot with several folds of towel. After the pressure cooker cycle was completed once and the lid vented I reversed the bone and did it all again. The result? A pint of good clear pork broth that has gelled beautifully. (The bottom-left photo is of pinto beans cooking in the pot afterward, using a few pork scraps and a bit of the broth. I was going to use that IP for all it was worth before washing it.) Here's the pork jelly: The pinto beans and some of the roast pork went into enchiladas. The plating wasn't pretty, but the results were tasty. Now, here's the downside, I suppose: with all the cutting, prepping, pork- and bean-cooking, there was bound to be a mountain of dishes. I washed this first batch of dishes while the enchiladas were baking! The Princessmobile doesn't have an automatic dishwasher.

You've probably said this before, but what time and temperature do you use for the sous vide tri-tip? How thick is that piece? It looks wonderful.

Me too. I also bought Gjelina today. I don't know whether to curse or thank you and Toliver.

I too like 805. I'm not sure why I didn't clue in on the Mocha Porter. Sometimes that really hits the spot! Right now I'm on a Scottish-style ale kick (a.k.a. Four Peaks Brewery's Kilt Lifter, produced in Arizona). He likes Glenfiddich and Glenlivet, but has also enjoyed some of Tomatin's and Macallan's offerings. Don't ask me about the preferred ages! He prefers the more aged Scotch Whiskeys, but not if he has to pay a lot extra for them. I'm not sure where he usually draws the bounds.

We have been unimpressed with the selection of beer and wine, much less stronger spirits, in the nearest town of Eloy. Google took us a little farther afield to Milo's Liquor Store, in Arizona City, about 15 miles from our current camping spot. It was certainly larger than anything we'd seen so far. The selection was better, but we thought it all too pricey for the single-malt Scotch my darling seeked. There were novelty spirits... ...and beer... ...and a vast selection of tequila, of which they seem to be inordinately proud. There were unexpected food items... ...and even less-expected non-food items. The wine selection was...okay, nothing worth writing about that I saw. We settled for a bottle of Maker's Mark for him (somewhat less pricey than Scotch) and a 6-pack of Kilt Lifter beer for me.

Given the mixed bag of advice I got in the What Are You Cooking Sous Vide Today? topic (including yours and @rotuts', thank you!) I decided to take the middle road and follow @Shelby's advice: 135F for a little over 2 hours, then a quick sear. I rubbed it ahead of time with smoked paprika and a grilling rub. I liked the texture and doneness of it, but honestly, I think it would benefit from a marinade ahead of time because it's such a lean cut. I've been happily putting it on sandwiches with lots of mayonnaise, mustard and other condiments to make up for the lack of flavor and fat.