Smithy

I admit: that Kindle feature has saved me more than once!

For what it's worth, I have used sous vide on deer meat - it was an old round steak that had been vacuum sealed and forgetten, I think - and it came out delicious despite its inauspicious handling. Unfortunately I don't remember what I did for time and temperature. You're so far ahead of me in the SV experience department that you'll do better following your instincts than my guesses. Thank you so much for bringin' us along on this huntin' trip! Now go enjoy that wine.

Yes, yes! These are wonderful. I'd also suggest wild rice, but I've become so spoiled by the stuff harvested in northern Minnesota that I'm not sure what to recommend. Nonetheless there may be varieties of true rice (wild rice is not) that you may wish to consider.

I too am grateful for these in-depth tours. The food looks wonderful, the serving and greeting (and clothing) traditions are amazing. It's fortunate for us that you are willing to post, and that your subjects are not camera-shy! It occurs to me to wonder whether peanut allergies are heard of over there? In the USA there has been rising concern about food allergies of all types - including peanuts. It looks as though it would be nigh-impossible to avoid peanut products in your part of the world. I do not wish to derail this discussion, but if you can address it quickly I'd be interested to know more.

I think the Tabasco Family Reserve is more complex and flavorful than their standard. I got it at Avery Island. If you have time you might find the self-guided tour interesting; I wrote about it here. Heck, you might want to take home a sampling of hot sauces: Tabasco's standard, family reserve, and green pepper (jalapeño); Inner Beauty, and Crystal, another hot sauce that's widely favored here on eGullet. Have a hot sauce taste-off when you get home! Canned fire-roasted tomatoes, yes...and Ro-tel tomatoes, a Texas favorite that's spread outward to other states. Diced tomatoes with fiery diced chilis into the mix. Those are two of our stock favorites for trailer travel. @Duvel, is that the sort of thing you might like? They'd add quickly to the weight allotment. In the lighter-weight category: look for Zatarain's boxed dinner mixes. We lean heavily on their Red Beans and Rice, with the addition of a sausage like the andouille that @gfweb noted. (I firmly support his recommendation for local sausages.) There are also mixes for jambalaya, dirty rice, and - well, you can see the full lineup here. They were my first exposure to Cajun and Creole cuisine. I have no doubt that those dishes are better when they are made from scratch, but I still like 'em.

Those bacon-wrapped tenderloin steaks look delicious. Sorry if you explained this and I missed it: how did you cook them?

Yah, me too...sez the woman who's presently camped in the desert southwest! Thanks for interrupting three simultaneous games to get those answers.

The few sourdough recipes I've seen discussed have included commercial yeast. Do they explain why? I thought that was considered cheating.

If I may bring up meat handling and meat safety, I have some questions for your hunters. In Minnesota and Wisconsin (and other states) there's concern about Chronic Wasting Disease. Hunters are encouraged to avoid the nervous system tissue (brain, spinal cord, etc. - there's more information in this Outdoor Life article. There's testing for it with the harvested deer in Minnesota; I don't remember now whether it's mandatory or voluntary. Is it an issue in Kansas? I'm also curious that your hunters are gutting bare-handed. We were taught to use gloves in order to avoid contact with internal parasites. Is that not an issue? Did I get the 'girly' version of the training? Finally - how long will that meat hang, and how cold is it where y'all are right now? During our hunting season it was usually cold enough to freeze the carcass if we waited too long. My father, who hunted in the California foothills, had to deal with the meat quickly and carry dry ice on his trips.

I had a pleasant surprise for last night's dinner. Back before we left home, I had cooked too much rice for some dinner dish. I put the leftover rice (jasmine) into a Food Saver bag and vacuum-packed it. As I watched the rice being crushed together in that vacuum I wondered whether it would be any good later, but went ahead and froze it. If nothing else, I could use it as a starchy thickener. Yesterday was the moment of truth. Out from the freezer came these four packages. (Ignore the lemon juice, that's for today.) I chopped up a red bell pepper and some mushrooms, sweated them until soft, added the sausage, cooked until it was mostly done. When I opened that package and started pouring the cooked rice in, it fluffed out as though I had just cooked it! The broth tied everything together. We had had some discussion about whether to chop the sausage or leave it whole, so I did some of both. We liked each version, but I think the cut bits browned better. Dinner, before going into the bowls (because those pictures are rubbish): I'm very pleased to learn this trick for the rice. Too bad I didn't pack the Food Saver.

Isn't that the truth! At least, it is for me as well. Your kitchen looks great. Thanks for showing us the finished result. I may be able to take an idea or two away, lest my husband reorganize our kitchen.

Congrats to the hunters! In the meantime, that dinner looks wonderful - as does all your cookery. Do you have a place to buy those frog legs, or are those caught and butchered from your back 40? I've eaten frog legs but never tried to prepare them myself. They just chirp and croak and shrill and clack at us from our pond in the summer, safe from predation unless kingfishers eat them.

I like @Robb Walsh's writing. Thanks for that link.

@heidih, I love the turn of phrase "Tetris-skilled only" to describe accessibility in a storage box! @FauxPas, we do have a cast iron griddle - the kind that's flat on one side and ridged on the other - that I bought after breaking 2 or 3 baking stones in our various trailer ovens. That's one of the things we managed to forget at home. Last year my various attempts at baking bread on it tended to overcook the base when I set the bread directly on it. That didn't stop me from trying again, this time with a cast iron pan. I think I get better results when the pan and the bread don't connect and the bread goes on a center rack, farther from the fire. By "better" mean I can get good oven spring without overcooking the bottom of the loaf. I'm not sure why; maybe someone else has some ideas. The baking stones I've seen are all too big for this oven, but that discussion on the CSO topic has me thinking there might be hope for a small enough stone after all. Would a baking stone, with its porous surface, be less vicious than cast iron? I suspect it might.

Campfire cookery has begun - and bread baking, not over the campfire. I've cleared another package out of the freezer. My darling's daughter recommended this particular cut and treatment from her favorite butcher, so we bought a package when we visited last. She grills it. I grilled it, more or less: I gave it open campfire flame on the grate until it was seared, then wrapped in foil for ease of maneuvering to a cooler section of the fire. These bacon ends and pieces (double hickory-smoked, very thick cut) also came from home, from *our* favorite meat market. They found their way into both the green beans and the potatoes with onions. The potatoes, onions and bacon, seasoned with Lawry's Seasoned Salt and wetted with a bit of oil to improve initial heat conduction, went into two foil pouches. The green beans went into Papa's Pan. The lot went onto the grate over the fire, and we sat or stood by - juggling packages and adjusting the flame to maintain the correct sizzling sounds, and drinking beer. Eventually it was finished cooking, and into the trailer came the works. The beans were a bit more cooked than I'd have liked. We were concerned that the meat also might have been overdone, despite careful poking with a thermometer. Nope, we were pretty happy with the results. The next evening, nothing would do but my darling had to cut up the leftover meat, mix it with the already-cooked potatoes, and crisp them up in a pan over the fire to make hash. Earlier in the day, nothing would do but I had to bake bread, for the first time in months. I need to review my notes on regulating temperature in this oven, however: That truncated shape you see isn't due to having sliced the bread in half; it's because the bottom was charred into a black Frisbee due to the cast iron that began the baking. I cut it before taking the pictures. The flavor's good, though. Dinner didn't make the photo cut. Hash isn't especially photogenic. Breakfast this morning, however, is better: toasted herb sourdough bread, with some of those lebnah balls and avocado, and pears on the side. Life's good!

Thank you for the reminder of Andiesenji's Creamsicle Cookies, Toliver. They're going on my baking list.

I don't need a cast iron comal OR a 10.5" cast iron baking pan that would fit in my CSO if I had one. I don't need either, but I sure am tempted to buy one or both. On a related note: if you look at the cast iron comal on Amazon, you'll see that it's filed under Department: "unisex-adult".

Let's see...drive to Yuma, take a flight to Duluth, drive home, grab my huntin' gear, drive back to the airport, fly to Kansas City, rent a car and drive to your place. Think I could make it before the season ended? I really want to share those lovely meals!

I'll add that if someone can post an Arabic-style pickle and explain why it isn't the same as an Indian-style pickle, I'd love to see it. I don't know what distinguishes one from the other. I suspect that there are at least half a dozen different Arabic-style pickles, depending on the country of origin. it's probably the same for the Indian-style pickle.

A package of once-freshly-caught fish gone. I will not admit to their age. I was inspired to try beer-batter frying, and had the chance to do it without making a frightful mess. Success! I'll have to try this again, even if I have to buy more fish to do it. I'll just have to be sure not to put said fish into the freezer when I get it.

This could go as easily into the Freezer Cleanout Challenge topic or a "fear of frying" topic, if we had one, but since I've mentioned Kilt Lifter Ale I'll note that it made its way into a beer batter for some ancient fish. Those frozen filets of northern pike ("pickerel" to our Canadian friends) have been taking up space in a freezer for far too long. They came with us. I mixed up a beer batter with the aforementioned Kilt Lifter, girded my loins and fired up the camp stove. Frying isn't so messy outside. Dinner: a nicely browned set of filets. The money shot: Flaky, juicy and delicious. Hey, maybe this isn't so bad after all!

The differences are noticeable, and it isn't a silly question at all. I remember my dismay at getting a daylight-temp light for the hallway and being dismayed at how blue it seemed. That said, I can't remember what we settled on for the kitchen. Bright white, I think, but we have dimmers. When I'm working in the kitchen I want it BRIGHT - my husband jokes about the operating room - but when I'm done we dim the lights to a softer level. Do not omit the dimmer switches, and make sure your LED lights are compatible. The do-it-yourself hardware stores like Lowe's, Home Depot and (our local favorite) Menard's should have displays so you can check them out.

Everything inside those cardboard boxes is wrapped in butcher paper (there may be some plastic instead) and frozen in individual packages. The multi-content boxes are a bit like the old-style grab bags, though: when they're under other boxes, it's difficult or impossible to pull them out. I had to keep fishing to get what I wanted to look at. Imagine wanting some crayfish tail meat and coming out with a python sirloin instead.

Tucson, part the nth: Thanks to FauxPas, we've discovered another expensive and tempting food store: Dickman's Meat and Deli. There are actually two of these shops now. The original, near downtown, was quite close to our normal route on our big day of shopping; however, thanks to the vaguaries of my internet search we didn't discover that until we were a few blocks past the store in question. Rather than backtrack a mile we went to the other one...about 15 miles away. Well, we'd never been up Oracle Road before, and saw new areas. At last, we arrived - having taken one false turn and having to do a U-Turn in the approach to the Oracle parking ramp. It's an old-fashioned meat market with knowledgeable butchers and a well-stocked meat counter. The proprietor seems to be a displaced Wisconsonite, judging by the Green Bay Packers memorabilia festooning the walls. We perused their meat counter for a prime rib and didn't see any. Other meats looked good - there are two propriety cuts that aroused my curiosity - but we were hoping to get a prime-grade prime rib for Thanksgiving. I have to give their salespeople credit for hustle: one overheard us marveling at the lack of prime rib as we wandered the aisles of preserves and condiments, and he said "Oh, we have them, but we custom cut them. How much were you looking for?" Before we knew it he was off cutting, without our having had a chance to look the meat over or check its price. We looked at the freezers while we waited. They have an astonishing array of game, seafood and exotic meat. Here's a small sample: They also have a deli. We ordered Italian sub sandwiches and ate them there while we took the place in. In the interest of balanced reporting I'll note that my darling (who was hangry before we ever arrived, thanks in part to the unexpected and unreasonably long drive) thought his was just so-so. I thought mine was delicious: juicy meats, good bread, and a nice touch of Italian dressing. I, on the other hand, didn't much like their pasta salad, and my darling happily scarfed down both our servings. Of such balance is a marriage made. I really wanted to pick up a few packages of frozen meats - it's been ages since I could find duck or rabbit - but the prime rib foreclosed on that idea. I hope, by the time we head back, there will be room in the trailer and the budget.

What a very nice set of finds, Porthos! Your daughter and her family are fortunate to have you looking out for them!