Smithy

AnnH, please consider reporting back here with your findings. We'd like to see more of you!

Oklahoma has gotten extremely short shrift from us, except in the Winding Stair area (Ouachita National Forest). One of the drawbacks to a large trailer is that its size restricts our options for places to stay. We have yet to find a place within easy driving distance of San Antonio, for instance. We dislike commercial trailer parks because they're essentially suburbs. We put up with them for powerful enough purposes (generally family) but otherwise stay out in less-developed areas, which means it can be a bit of a hike to go exploring cultural or food activities but is conducive to cycling, walking, birding and other non-food-related activities that are outside the scope of this forum. State and National Forest/Park campgrounds are often good, and sometimes close to places to explore for interesting foods. We've spent no time in Corpus Christi, but there are excellent Texas State Parks elsewhere along the Gulf Coast that we enjoy. Thanksgiving feast prep is under way, slowly. We've decided not to start cooking until after dark, when it begins to cool off. We may fire up the generator and run the air conditioner!

ElsieD, don't you have ads tracking you across the internet? That's how my husband and I 'hint' to each other.

Judging by your post and the Amazon shot in your link, Salad Shooters have come a long way! I have my mother's old one - something she wanted one year, and enjoyed having for a while. I took it with me when we were clearing out the apartment, thinking that it might take the place of a smallish food processor for our trailer. I still have it, but it's so slow and noisy that I sprang for the food processor instead. It must be at least 16 years old. I'm glad to see the SS has improved since then.

I love the idea of a French Toast Week. @robirdstx, how difficult do you find it to make those tortillas? I haven't tried it yet, but I may do so. Your post sent me off in a search, and I found this topic: Making Tortillas at Home. It covers both flour-based and masa-based tortillas.

I'm sorry your trip was messed up. I do hope sometime you manage to come hawk watching in September. You know you'll have a place to stay! As for new places and ideas: we may go to some new places, but haven't decided yet. I'm hoping for more in-depth exploration of the areas we visit, combined with exploring the bodacious cookbook collection I've acquired... and working out ways to adapt recipes to our weather conditions. The foodstuffs on board are a hodgepodge of items we always stock (canned tuna, Zatarain's boxed rices, cheeses, and so on) and impulse buys that looked interesting and haven't been explored yet. I could probably cook through the stock, without buying anything other than fresh vegetables and dairy, for most of the trip. So far that realization has curtailed my impulse buys. The discipline probably won't last.

Thanks for the (heh) warm welcome, everyone! Thanks for the well-wishes, too. You might say my darling and I are a mixed marriage: the hotter it gets, the better he likes it - whereas I am in the please-keep-it-cool camp. A bit of heat is nice, but the mid-80's is about my upper limit before I start to wilt. Driving / riding for hours with the sun coming through my side of the truck, then getting out into that heat, is especially enervating to me. That's another reason the ready-made frozen dinners have come in handy. Since we're more or less committed to unusually warm weather for the next few weeks I'll be exploring ways to keep things cool: cooking outside, prepping early in the day, and exploring the hot-weather cuisines. Thanks to the Crazy Good e-Book Bargains topic with its host of enablers, I have a ferocious collection of cookbooks on this tablet, along with some dead-tree cookbooks packed along (and, in one case, recently given to me). Indian, Thai, Mexican and Desert Southwest cookery all may be of use in dealing with the heat. Today's challenge, however, is preparing our Thanksgiving feast. In past years we've been in cooler parts of the country where a prime rib roast, potatoes, green beans, bread and perhaps dessert have seemed like a good idea. This year for us, as for so many eG'ers in southern climes, it's predicted to get up into the high 80's Fahrenheit. We splurged last week on a prime grade prime rib; I am determined to do a version of the Hasselback Potato Gratin; we need vegetables and I'm fond of green beans. The beans can be done atop the camp stove. My cousins, in coastal California, do a fabulous prime rib on their gas grill. I could be daring and try to do the beef on our mini-Weber-kettle charcoal grill, but I'm afraid of wrecking it for lack of (grill) size and control. Barring some inspiration in the next few hours (ideas, anyone?) I'll probably be juggling the potatoes and beef in this single-shelf oven and heating the entire trailer. I may find myself trying to stick my head into the refrigerator to cool off, or dowsing my clothes with water for the evaporative cooling. There isn't much space in the 'fridge, but when that paper-wrapped prime rib comes out and I transfer the yogurt from its strainer to a smaller container there will be a bit more room. Oh, to go back a few commments: I was going to suggest that folks who follow the snow are called "ski bums" but I think "Shelbys" is much better.

Pearls Before Swine, on Thanksgiving.

Our trip wasn't supposed to begin like this. Honestly, I love the snow and was glad to be home for it, but it wasn't part of the plan. A variety of circumstances conspired to keep us a few days past our normal start. The largest reason was that the trailer didn't come back from factory-warranty work until the last Friday of October, when an early snow storm hit! What is usually a two- to three-week process of intent packing and preparations was crammed into a single frenetic week. To make matters worse, we had emptied the trailer of much of its contents for said factory-warranty work, knowing that an entire side was to be removed. We're still discovering things we overlooked. So far none of it has been major. Although I love the cold and the snow, my darling neither loves nor tolerates it well. The trailer isn't built for it either, as frozen water lines attested. Fortunately there was no damage. Another snow storm hit the day before we left. We skedaddled out between storms. It's the first time he's had to plow the driveway to get the trailer out - but plow he did, and away we went. We drove long hours, straight south, toward the sunny weather. We skipped the Gulf Coast and eastern states altogether, with mixed feelings about missing out on the fresh shrimp and some favorite places, but he'd had enough of rain and we chose the driest, warmest route we could find. We stopped for the night at convenient places - in one case a state Welcome Center - and fired up the generator to reheat dinners we'd packed in the freezer for travel. We had made giant pots of chili and pea stew, two of his favorite comfort foods, and portioned them into the 3-cup containers shown in the upper right of the freezer. The rest of the contents are most of the contents from our house freezers, which were actually showing bottom by the time we left. I haven't posted much in the Challenge: Cook your way through your freezer topic, but we've been pretty good about working our way through the contents in the last month or two. Incidentally, frozen persimmon puree is very close in color to his frozen chili. I had to reheat an extra dinner that night, after discovering my mistake. Breakfasts for him have been fruit and cereal; most of the time, for me, they've been yogurt and fruit of some sort. I've finished the last of the frozen blueberries from our freezer. I do love being able to make yogurt in our 3-quart Instant Pot Mini! On our third night we were at Lake Mineral Wells, Texas - a new place for us. It's interesting, driving across a spillway to get to a campsite! We liked it enough that we may go back sometime, but it was still too cool for him to want more than a night's stay. I think I took the time to make our "Bedouin style" tuna noodle hot dish for dinner that night. Can't find a picture, but I posted about it here. Next up: our first multi-night stop, in Llano, Texas.

That is a funny one! Here's the comic in question.

Thanks for that! I've bookmarked the web page.

Please tell more about roasting shrimp: time, temperature, coatings? That's a new idea for me, and might be worth trying in our house although I suspect my other half will object to having to peel shrimp at the table after it's been served.

Yet another reason to like the Instant Pot: the liner pot can be used as a sous vide vessel for small packages, without needing a hot pad.

The Anova Bluetooth 800W sous vide circulator is currently on sale for $94.95 on Amazon.com. Its 900W Bluetooth + WiFi big brother is on sale for $111.95. Both sales end in 13 hours, 29 minutes as of this writing.

That, or a steak salad.

I'm very pleased with the yoghurt I get from my 3-quart mini- Instant Pot. I don't get consistent results - sometimes the whey is quite clear, as in this photo of my latest batch, and sometimes there are obvious solids in it when I believe I've done everything the same way. Eventually I'll get around to taking notes. Either way, the results are delicious. Many thanks also to @kayb (and others, I think) for recommending the Eurostrainer. It's just the ticket.

Perhaps this freezer clear-out topic would be an inspiration? Note: This topic has been locked because it had begun to drift, and there is a parallel discussion, here: https://forums.egullet.org/topic/26102-chili/(and it didn't really make sense to merge these).

I'd have guessed that the salmon and broccoli needed different times and/or temperatures. What did you use?

Toliver's links led me to Opa! The Healthy Greek Cookbook: Modern Mediterranean Recipes for Living the Good Life. I love Greek food. I do not need another cookbook of any stripe, except the Modernist Bread. OTOH for $1.99 (my Amazon Prime price, at least) it's so easy to collect books. You suppose Amazon has found a nice price point for quick sales?

Is that slow-cooker curry something you've posted about before? If not, do you have a recipe or a reference for us?

Yes, we've been on the road a little over a week. So far it's been mostly freezer-cleanout food, so hardly worth writing about except in this topic. (We did pig out on barbecue for 3 days in Llano, Texas. )

This isn't from a yard sale, but it was a heck of a find. I stopped at a favorite hardware/general store in Llano, Texas to see what they might have, and to pick up some small Charles Viancin silicone lids. The store has been reorganized. After some searching, the gentlemen said they thought they must be out. I went wandering, disappointed that I couldn't get what I needed, but curious to see what they had at their bargain table. What they had was all the lids they thought they'd cleared out. I didn't clear them out, but I made a fine haul: $17. Yep, all this for seventeen bucks! Then I went around the corner to a favorite antiques mall/ junk store, and found this gem for $6.50: I'm still trying to work out the best way to shell pecans, and this looked promising. The nifty bag in the background is a routine lagniappe from this store. It appears that the proprietor loves to sew, so she makes a variety of bags into which purchases go. Since my last visit she's added a special label to each.

It may not look like much in the way of cleanout progress, but this fully-packed trailer-refrigerator freezer contains most of the erstwhile contents of our chest and refrigerator freezers from home. The containers on the right have travel/microwaveable meals; scattered at the bottom and on the left are the hunks of meat (pork, chicken, burger, etc.) and stray bits like persimmon pulp, nuts and frozen vegetables. The bottoms of both freezers were visible when we left home in our trailer. It isn't quite a clean sweep, but it was gratifyingly close. Sorry I didn't take time to snap those freezer bottoms before we started traveling!

"Breakfast, Lunch and Whimsy" - what a great title for that article! I liked the food descriptions and photos. I'd be all over that yogurt in a take-away jar - especially with a white ball that turned out to contain huckleberry sauce. Thanks for taking the time to keep us posted.

Barberries.