Smithy

@gfweb, what a lovely Thanksgiving spread, with the formal dining setting. I miss that. Please tell more about the jalapeño cornbread madeleines. That looks like something I'd like to try. If I can get it right, it might go well at our family Christmas dinner.

Here's the Amazon link for the Philips Air Fryer, for $109.99.

@FauxPas, it sounds like you took a good aproach to that gratin. I doubled the garlic but was not generous with the salt and pepper, and we both thought it needed more. That's good information about the cream, too. I'm not normally a fan of sweet potatoes, but that may have added some textural interest as well as flavor contrast. Maybe I'll try it that way!

We finally stopped for more than one day when we reached Llano, Texas. I admit that, while I love the snow and regret that we aren't home for it, I also enjoy seeing color at a time of year that we would have little at home: I made the pilgrimage to a favorite hardware store that has a great selection of kitchen items. They had rearranged the store entirely, and it took a while to decide that if anything they'd expanded the stock. Except...where were the Charles Viancin lids? I wanted a small one, and knew that they carried them. The gentlemen at the counter wandered around and looked too, and finally concluded that they had gotten rid of the stock. I wandered the store, disappointed (and finding nothing else to buy) and then went to check out the Clearance table...where everything was 75% off! Holy smokes, I cleaned up. Didn't get the size I needed, but for $17 (including tax) I got all these: I don't know why they were being cleared out, but I wasn't about to argue. I went around the corner to an antiques/junk mall, and for once didn't come away with a cookbook. I did, however, come away with a new (to me) kind of pecan sheller. If it doesn't work, then I'm going to look for the piston style that @rotuts has recommended in the past. I haven't tried it yet. I'd be lying if I claimed to cook any dinners while I was there; Cooper's Old Time Pit Barbecue is 3 blocks from where we camped, and we pigged out on 'cue: brisket one night, sausage another, ribs a third. I don't seem to have any photos of it (probably because I've shown you the 'cue here so often) except of some leftover sausage that became dinner farther down the road, probably in Red Beans and Rice. It was a very nice sausage with chunks of jalapeño: just enough bite to make things interesting. Although there was no in-trailer cookery of dinner, I did take advantage of electricity and time to sous-vide a chicken breast I'd sealed up with some basil, then frozen, before leaving home. I love the way chicken breast becomes cooked perfectly for chicken salad. In turn, that became sandwiches. The stuff in the upper left of the plate is an Achar mixed vegetable pickle that I bought at least a year ago and have been carting around in the trailer. I really must stop buying things without trying them! I opened this and tried it. Entirely too salty and too oily for either of us. Perhaps I could have worked out a way to use it in small doses, to liven up other meals. I binned it instead.

Today on Amazon.com: Instant Pot DUO80 8 Qt 7-in-1 for $81.99. Some of you might find the 8-quart capacity useful.

Those manjuba are cute little fish, @Auro. Do they have any flavor that is distinctive? For instance - are they oily, strong, mild, salty? Your sushi platter looks delicious.

Another favorite breakfast is cheese on toast, with avocado. These labneh balls have a light coating of thyme on them and are delicious spread over toast and mashed up with avocado. I'm just about out of this batch, but picked up a new jar of them - this time with no coating, since the choices were red pepper (tried that before - too hot) or nothing. After breakfast I have some "household" chores, but then it's on to talk about Llano and parts west, when we started slowing our rate of travel.

Thanksgiving dinner was a late but successful affair. I did the washing, chopping and prepping in the heat of the day, then waited until the sun went down and the air began to cool. My cousin had helpfully noted that "more beer" helps with the cooling too, and we took his advice. As I'd feared, the potatoes and roast wouldn't fit into the oven at the same time. I started the Hasselback casserole, then pulled it at about the 45-minute mark and put the roast in. While the finished roast was resting, the potatoes went back into the oven. Here's the "before" and "after" comparison of the potatoes. The Corning Ware looks a mess, but wasn't too bad to clean afterward. I went with my tried-and-true method of roasting, rather than trying to grill that beautiful hunk of meat on an undersized charcoal grill. Sorry, I didn't realize until now how blurry the pictures were - but you can still see the marbling. Here it is, coated and browned, waiting for its turn in the oven. The beans are on the back corner of the stove. I thought I'd taken a picture of the bacon with those beans, but apparently not. It's thick-cut, double-smoked bacon ends and pieces from our favorite butcher back home. One might worry about that roast being overcooked, based on the outside: ...but this was the interior... ...and dinner... Who else has tried the Serious Eats Hasselback Potato Gratin recipe? We found it to be rather bland and I didn't get the textural contrast I was expecting. To be fair, it could easily have been operator error. I had to take small liberties with it due to oven juggling and lack of some ingredients, so I'll try it again sometime when I can follow it exactly to give it a fair shake. The rest of the dinner - despite my not having made bread to go with it - was a feast that suited us well. Now it's a beautiful, quiet morning - far from the madding crowds of the Black Friday shoppers. I'm thankful all over again!

Funny that the company in question apologized to her, but didn't suggest she could start using the original name again. Is that a non-apology?

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.