Smithy

Do you know if it was wider than the typical 8' width of a vehicle? I don't see how it could have been, back then, but it makes me wonder given the spacious appearance.

It's taken us at least 3 passes through Tucson, but @FauxPas and I and our spouses finally managed to connect! We had a lively behind-the-scenes correspondence, in which she clued me in to more culinary opportunities than could be squeezed into our visit. Next time we go through I'll be better organized to take advantage of the Farmers' Markets. In addition, the Food Truck scene is intriguing. We found an evening and a set of culinary opportunities that worked for everyone. FauxPas and I were all hot to try Molecular Munchies (sorry, the link goes to a Facebook page) for its Modernist techniques and locally-sourced burgers. My darling isn't tuned into modernist food, but he's never met a burger or a beer he didn't like. Molecular Munchies was going to be parked at the AZ Beer House with its dozens of taps and even more bottles. I don't know whether any of it particularly sang to Mr. FauxPas, but he was happy to be the Chauffeur and Designated Driver, and partake of the food truck's wares. They picked us up at the park, and away we went - farther east in Tucson than we generally go, chatting merrily the while. Eventually we found the place - let's hear it for Google Maps - and found a parking spot. As it turns out, the AZ Beer House is not a brew pub, but rather a newly-renovated (and not quite finished with its renovation) former auto shop with a massive variety of beers, ciders, spritzers, sodas and so on. This is the sort of place where people can just hang out visiting, sipping their drinks, reading their e-books. Some patrons had (quiet, well-behaved) dogs with them. Children sat at tables playing board games. We chose a table near one of the doors - those roll-up doors that once allowed vehicles to come in or leave a maintenance stall. We chose that spot partly to be near a door, but mostly because the door was near the Molecular Munchies truck. We went to the bar and made our purchases, then sat and visited, and pondered the food truck menu. I loved the little note in blue at the bottom of that chalkboard. It's faint, so I'll repeat it here: The burgers are cooked sous vide, then finished at the truck. The brioche buns are made by their company also, and were soft and delicious. We each chose a different setup of ingredients: condiments, fries vs. onion rings, and so on. FauxPas and I opted for Sriracha Slices to be added to ours. Its stiff jelly consistency was interesting. As I recall, it packed a sneaky wallop: not very noticeable in the sandwich at first, but then the heat burst in. I liked it. I liked my burger, too - and the onion rings, and the fries. I also ordered deep-fried mushrooms in a Kilt Lifter batter. Those were very good, and have turned me on to a new Arizona ale. I don't know how widely Kilt Lifter is distributed, but I've found it in a few Arizona places since then and hope to continue finding it. I'm anxious to try using it in a beer batter here at 'home'. The last treat of the meal was carbonated grapes. Makes me want to go buy a carbonater now! They took us home, much later than I think they'd intended to be out. We had a grand time and were glad to have such good guides, and have someone else negotiate the traffic after dark. FauxPas gave me a book from a local chef that I've been enjoying; I'll write more about it later.

So I keep saying. My darling, however, is a true desert rat. You'd think we'd have figured out our differences before we got married.... We moved on to Tucson. Ah, Tucson! When Barbara Kingsolver and her family moved from Tucson to a farm in Virginia and then wrote about the experience in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, she described Tucson (I paraphrase) as a food desert and utterly artificial way of living. I don't know whether her opinion has changed, but from what we see when we visit there's a thriving local-food scene and a growing movement for environmental awareness. Farmers' Markets abound. Magazines such as Edible Baja Arizona celebrate and encourage the growing Southwestern food tradition and the small artisan operations. I should note that they do not exclusively discuss locally-produced food and wares; they featured the Babylon Market a few years ago. That shop specializes in Middle Eastern foods, with plenty of imports, and is one of our routine stops when we stay in Tucson. We stopped and shopped at the Babylon Market one day, but bought less than usual because we still have stock left from last spring. That's all right, though: we made up for it elsewhere. Spoiler alert: @FauxPas is a world-class enabler and an excellent guide.

That certainly is an impressive interior! I'm not sure how they fit all that in, but I think I'd much prefer their refrigerator to ours. :-)

That's quite the feast! Better looking than what we did in our illicit dorm cookery. It looks like they put their electric kettles to good use, as well.

It seems non-cakey cornbread would be an absolute requirement for madeleines anyway, but I appreciate the assurance that these aren't cakey. If I leave out the sugar that will make them edible to the diabetic in our family. Now, if I can work out a way to omit the egg another member of the family will be able to enjoy them. (Our lot has quite a collection of food problems nowadays.) OTOH I don't want to wreck the recipe. Experiments are in order. :-)

So much for "far from the madding crowd". Right after I posted that comment about avoiding the Black Friday crush and enjoying a quiet morning, the ATV's started cruising by. Fortunately, most of them are considerate and pass slowly and at a distance. This dust cloud didn't reach us. We traveled fairly quickly after Llano, intent on getting far enough west to avoid the capricious Texas "Northers" that can drop the temperature a good 40F in less than an hour. The Texas hill country is lovely: hills and woods, fine picnic areas where one can stop for a night or three (we stayed only one night), and - for better or worse, freeways when one wishes to use them. With apologies to anyone from the area who might be reading, this is my sole impression of El Paso: a spaghetti tangle of freeways to be got through as expeditiously as possible. This doesn't show the traffic snarls we encountered. On the other hand, the bilingual signage can be entertaining. I was especially amused by this Chick-Fil-A sign: It's unfortunately blurry, but it continues the motif of cows encouraging people to "Eat Mor Chikun". In this case, the cows' plea is in wildly misspelled Spanish. Columbus, New Mexico was a good place to stop, reprovision, take advantage of a few days' worth of paid electricity. They also have stunning skies. Breakfasts were typically more of what I've already shown you: in this case the labneh balls on crackers, with avocado: I made more yogurt in the Instant Pot. I fired up the Joule to sous-vide some chicken thighs I'd packed with Hatch hot chiles. Those, combined with leftover pinto beans from Cooper's in Llano, became the basis of burritos one night. That sous vide experiment had a happy outcome: the chicken juices, combined with the chile bits, cooked down in the skillet into a very nice sauce. I'll be doing that again. We also used a container of lovely green chile sauce from a cooking class I'd taken in Duluth last October. Another container gone! We didn't eat out as much as we usually do there, but I dropped in on The Borderland Cafe to see how they were doing, and to bring home some burgers one night. The place looks clean and they say business is hopping. I caught them just before closing, and I hope that's the reason it was empty except for me. I suspect most of the town rolls up between 6 and 7 p.m. The burgers and fries were good, but suffered a bit from being taken home to the park instead of being eaten there. It took me two morning visits to get a couple of their burritos for road food; those sell out quickly as quick portable lunches. The Borderland Cafe folks really know how to wrap a burrito tightly so that it doesn't slop all over. I haven't figured the trick out yet; I suspect it involves much less stuffing than I usually do, and drier stuffing at that. Columbus is a nice place for walks, and I was somewhat sorry that we didn't stay longer, but we were On A Mission to get farther west. We left behind some souvenirs found along the path, and hit the road again.

Is this the eG discussion to which you referred, @Toliver?

@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.