Smithy

I returned to the service station and wandered into the office. On the counter were large, heavy (my scale says almost 4 pounds) plastic bags full of local pecans in the shell. They looked beautiful: well-cleaned, no dust, good size. The price: $10. What a deal! When the shop owner came in from working on our tire, I asked to buy a bag. "Cool!" he said, "this is *my* money" (instead of the shop's). These pecans came from my tree! I almost bought 2 bags, just for that smile. Now, what shall I do with all these pecans, once I shell them? I have some favorite uses, but I'll bet I can get new ideas here.

Shelby, the ice wasn't bad enough to freeze the door shut. The problem came with stepping out onto the icy metal steps. We managed, carefully: I went gingerly down, and he gave me helpful advice about what I needed to do outside. Fort Davis, TX is a town of slightly more than 1000 souls. It is also the county seat, and despite its diminutive size it seems to have a vitality that many similarly-sized towns have lost in this country. In a very small area one can find a decent supermarket, a number of hotels and RV parks (at which we've never stayed), a couple of very good hardware stores, and several historical sites. One also can find the Stone Village Market. Even given the disproportionate vitality of the town, this place seems unlikely to succeed. Yet it has succeeded, as far as we can tell, for at least 6 years. Maybe it's their quirky nature. Maybe it's their offering of organic foods and whole grains, or their deli case with cheeses and meats not to be found anywhere else within 100 miles, or their extensive selection of coffees from the Big Bend Coffee Roasters: I think it's a bit of all those, but I also think it's their deli menu and staff. We were stopped in town for tire repairs, and I had time to stroll through town, visit, shop and order sandwiches. The gentlemen working the place were delighted to chat, answer questions and have photos taken. Over the years I've seen shopkeeper attitudes range from 'no photos - can't control what you post' to the Hollywood attitude that 'there is no such thing as bad publicity'. These gents were in the latter camp, and I'm grateful to them. The breads could be selected from half a dozen different loaves of commercially-packaged sliced bread, or from housemade bread rolls. I selected a 7-grain roll and a sourdough roll, and let fly with a combination of chicken, pastrami, roast beef and salami - I forget in what order - along with cheese, lettuce, tomato, condiments and (on one) green olives. While the sandwiches were being made, I perused the rest of the store and selected packages of coffee. If I had needed any grains or flour I could have bought them here, but I'm still backlogged. Our sandwiches were works of art. The checkout clerk and I chatted about the town while he was ringing up my purchases and I was finding other things to buy. (Chatting is a good way to keep the customer shopping, isn't it?) We talked about what a nice town Fort Davis seems to be. "It is," he said. "I moved here from Dallas and suddenly found myself part of a community instead of a bunch of strangers living together." I paid for my purchases. He walked to a magazine rack, came back and slipped a small magazine into my shopping bag. "Here's how it starts," he said. "Find yourself a little piece of land that you like, put some money down, and come stay a while. That's how I found myself here." I enjoyed looking through the Real Estate ads during our next drive.

Oh, but the recipes!

Very nice, Shain! What are the greenish garnish things? Pepitas?

I don't usually like peanut brittle, but I'd give yours a try. It looks delicately crunchy and beautiful!

Some of those flowers have beautiful coloring. Could you grind them and use them to season sauces, or steep them for the same purpose?

There were some great guesses for the dessert I showed earlier! I never would have thought of eggplant parmigiana rosettes, but now I think that would be an elegant party food: well worth trying. I'll tell you about the rosettes at the end of this post. We arrived at Davis Mountains State Park, near Fort Davis, Texas, the day after Thanksgiving. One good thing about the rain and cold is that a lot of people left early or cancelled their park reservations, and that made room for us to visit. We drove through rain (what else?) but were delighted to see actual trees with fall color. That night we probably had leftover prime rib, but maybe we chose a more sensible set of leftovers for dinner. Whatever it was didn't seem photo-worthy. I'm not the one doing all the driving, but all the riding in the rain wipes me out anyway. The next morning we awoke to a winter fairyland: This is the sort of thing I miss when we leave for the winter and that he leaves in the winter to miss. This is also, incidentally, the reason we wanted to move to somewhere with electricity. It was a good day to mess around in the kitchen, and I chose to work on spaghetti squash. I cooked a huge squash, split it into two batches, and served the first batch with a tomato/vodka sauce from Stonewall Kitchens for dinner that night. The details, aside from the burnt toast, are in the eG Cook-Off #71:Winter Squash topic. The next day brought more rain, but not of the freezing variety; instead, we awoke to water in the nearby creek. We've never seen water there before. We have noticed that the streams in the Davis Mountains have flood gauges sticking well above the normal bank level. When we arrived we'd asked about flash flooding and been assured that it wasn't predicted during this storm although it can happen; last fall a small trailer was moved a couple of campsites' worth. We weren't worried, but we enjoyed the spectacle. We forded the stream ... ...and went to breakfast at the Indian Lodge, up at the high end of the park. I wrote about this place earlier this year. It's been rebuilt in its original style, true to its 1930's Civilian Conservation Corp depression-era roots. The interior is lovely rustic wood, with a mural depicting the history of the area. Our favorite waitress has retired, but the food is still good. If one can call it a rut with annual or semi-annual visits, I'd say we're in a rut: once again I had their massive breakfast burrito, and he had their very-generous plate of sausage, eggs and potatoes. Later in the day it cleared enough that the local wildlife came out from wherever they shelter. The park javelinas are entirely too bold, and make it mandatory that campers be careful with their food. Most other parks have signs warning that there's no such thing as a raccoon-proof cooler. This park's notice boards have photos of a full-grown javelina prying its way into an ice chest while the ice chest is on a picnic table. One would not say "Awww!" in that situation. Nonetheless, when I saw these babies (the rangers said probably a couple of weeks old) I said, "Awww!" And kept my distance. And kept my food safe. Remember the rosette I showed you? Or had you forgotten? When we checked out, the Ranger on duty had evidently been doing a lot of holiday baking. I ogled a tray of beautiful hand-sized rosettes. "Did you make those?" I asked. "I did!" she beamed. "There's coffee cake and coffee over on the table, too!" They do know how to make you welcome in Texas. "Are those apples?" I asked. "Yes," she said, and she looked a little sheepish. "They're supposed to look like little roses, but I didn't do them very well." I assured her that she'd done very well indeed, and took one for us to share. She said she'd found the recipe on YouTube. Based on her description, I think it was this one (caution, there's an advert first): Rose Shaped Apple Baked Dessert, by Cooking with Manuela I shared, but only with difficulty.

Thanks for the suggestion, Wayne. I'll keep that in mind. Firebrick *has* to be sturdier than a pizza stone. :-) ElsieD, I've seen them in hardware stores, although I've never thought of using them in my oven before now. Wayne's link (to what looks like the Canadian equivalent of our Home Depot) may be a help.

I'm definitely going to try kabocha, based on what I'm reading above. In the meantime, I still have several squash in my stash to work through. Most recently it was spaghetti squash. This particular squash was much larger than we could reasonably eat in one sitting, so a common beginning spawned two different meals. I split it raw, scooped out the seeds from one half, scored the cleaned half and drizzled it with oil, then roasted both halves, covered, until the squash flesh started to soften. I wanted to see what difference, if any, the initial treatment made. It's easier to scoop the seeds out when the flesh is softening, but I couldn't tell a difference otherwise in the final product. The freshly-cleaned half was also drizzled with oil, and both halves were roasted (covered) until the squash strands began to separate. At that point onions, potatoes and ground turkey were added, then the mixture went back into the oven. This was a convection oven, by the way. I think a microwave would have been much more efficient. Eventually it was mostly cooked, the squash was quite cooked, and there was free liquid to be boiled off. I wanted browning. I wanted the high heat of a skillet. When I had the desired browning, I set aside half of the mixture for later. The first night's batch had a jar of vodka/tomato sauce stirred in and heated. Dinner was wonderful. There were leftovers, and we were happy with those as well. A few nights later, the squash mixture that had been reserved prior to tomato sauce addition was given a curry treatment. Curry powder and coconut milk took it in an entirely different direction, and it was also good. Sorry, no pictures. It was yellowish, not especially photogenic, but quite satisfying.

That's a brilliant design, and new to me. I wonder whether those are still made - and if not, why not?

IowaDee nailed it. This isn't the first pizza stone I've broken, and I fear it won't be the last, but I think I set a record for short life for one; I bought this late in October. Here's a teaser from our next stop: Any guesses about it?

Thanks for the compliment, Porthos!Yes, we're headed west. I still have family and friends in California, so we plan to be there soon. Where exactly and how long depends on the weather, but the general plan is to be with family for Christmas.

We left the Gulf Coast and moved inland for Thanksgiving, in pursuit of drier air. We were not wholly successful, but we had some days when it was merely overcast instead of raining or foggy. We had splurged on a Prime Grade Prime Rib - the smallest we could find, but still plenty dear. Look at that marbling! I was determined to give it the best treatment and accompaniment that I could. I tend to use every speck of counter space when cooking an elaborate (for me) meal, and this year's sink disaster added to the challenge. Our sink repairs haven't made it as solid as it originally was. I'm leery of using the built-in covers - which sit directly atop the sink and are made of the same dense material as the counter - to increase counter space; one cover makes the sink sag so the counter isn't flush anyway. (We're hoping for a proper fix later this winter.) I plopped a large cutting board over one sink and we kept hitting the corners every time we got too close. I wanted a rosemary sourdough bread, and by late morning had the loaves rising. I also set up doughs for marbled rolls, with an experimental mix of whole wheat (and white) flour, mesquite flour and a touch of rye flour in half of the loaves. The doughs did their final rises atop the dinette table. That wasn't all bad; without a table, it was easier to keep our promises to eat only lightly before the main meal. We had time for a walk before the oven went on. Look: flowers, in late November! Counter space wasn't the only thing in short supply; this oven only has 1 rack. I cooked the sourdough loaves before time to cook the roast, but the roast, rolls and smashed potatoes all had to share oven space. I put the baking stone on the bottom of the oven chamber and used that for the rolls. Note to self: baking stones do not like that treatment. Midway through the afternoon there was a CRACK! as the stone broke in two. Some of the rolls, parked atop the gap, scorched on the bottoms but I rescued most of them. I was terrified of overcooking the roast, and pulled it when the internal temperature was 110F. It was a good move. The ends were done beautifully, the middlemost part of the interior was still a bit too rare even for our rare-meat tastes, but that made it well-suited to reheating for later meals. The sides: smashed potatoes drizzled with meat juice, and green beans with bacon and sundried tomatoes, on the stove top. No dedicated photo for them, but you can see them on our plates. We feasted, and were thankful for our lives, friends and family (although they were absent) and our good health. The next day, we packed up and moved on, fortified by sandwiches. That prime rib makes pretty good sandwiches.

We do Texas ribs with them instead: although they've already been cooked as the rack for the meat, we slow-cook them until their meat is fall-off-the-bone tender, then stuff ourselves further. One of us prefers a barbecue sauce painted onto the ribs while they're still in the oven, the other likes the occasional different sauce, or none at all.Then, and only then, we might consider something like a beef broth, but our canine family member usually wins the guilt-trip.

LindaK, thank you very much for that link! The instructions as printed are clearer than those in my cookbook, but the video really brought the process home to me. I'm a little puzzled by your takeaway of "very low flour to butter ratio". Theirs is 3T flour to 1/4c butter, which (I believe) works out to 3T:4T. That's 75% of your 1T:1T ratio. Is the flour:fat ratio so sensitive? With regard to the gravy slurry question, I'm thinking about a flour/water slurry and its effects on thickening and smoothing a sauce as compared to a flour/butter paste. I suspect the fats of the butter would help bring out flavors that the water might not. It would be worth testing, but if you can shed light on the two I'd love to learn more.

Prime rib leftovers are a wonderful luxury, Shelby. :-)

Thank you for those very useful insights. I didn't know that flour cooked in butter would develop that strong floury taste and that the taste would go away after long cooking. That's almost certainly one of the places I went wrong. (It sounds like there was also too much buerre manié used for the amount of stock I had.) If I'm reading the Beard excerpt correctly, the same issues would apply to a flour/water slurry used to thicken gravies, as I used to do when I cooked turkey. It sounds like I lucked out with the timing, the proportions, or both! Is that true? I'll give it another try, but not on that recipe, not for a while.

I recently tried a recipe that included a sauce with buerre manié: butter mixed with flour to form a soft paste that is then added to the sauce as a thickener. It sounded good, but that night's result was a gloppy, floury, not-at-all tasty mess. (You can read more about it here.) I know flour can be used as a thickener - gravy is a classic example - but I'm not sure how buerre manié is supposed to work. The recipe says to mash 4 tbsp butter until soft, then work in 3 tbsp all-purpose flour until the mixture is a smooth paste - the buerre manié. This paste is then added to the rest of the sauce, and the quantity of the sauce is a bit vague in this particular recipe. It doesn't sound as though much cooking should happen afterward. My questions: What proportion of buerre manié should be used to thicken a sauce? Should the sauce be cooked after the butter paste is added in order to cook the flour? Should the flour be cooked slightly before it's mixed into the butter? Am I missing other fine points of this butter-and-flour technique?

What does the baking in salt accomplish? Extra insulation? Does the salt penetrate the shell and flavor the egg?

Gracious, it's been wet. We left the Bolivar Peninsula ahead of a Texas Norther and let the wind blow us southward, along the coast, and through Galveston. The Port Bolivar-Galveston Ferry is a lovely 20-minute trip across open water, accompanied by dolphins and seabirds. "Please feed the gulls from the BACK of the ferry!" they specify. The seawall road on Galveston Island is heavily developed and trafficky, not conducive to stopping with a large rig. Someday I may just pay to stay in a hotel along the beach front for a week. Judging by the restaurants (upscale and down) I think I could eat myself silly for at least that long without duplicating dishes or restaurants. South of the city proper, but still on the island, we stopped at Allex's Seafood Market West. Their staff is friendly and their small shop is always clean, with a good selection of fresh fish and shellfish. It isn't all local, but it all seems to be in good condition and we've never left disappointed. As a rule, if I walk into a seafood market and it smells sour, or of strong fishy smells, I walk right back out. We've never had that problem at Allex's. We stocked up on shrimp (I restrained myself and did not buy more oysters, nor even crab meat) and continued southward. Galveston Island and the Bolivar Peninsula, where we had camped for a few days before the bugs drove us away, were nearly devastated by Hurricane Ike in 2008. It's been interesting to watch the rebuilding over the years: houses repaired, or replaced, or brand-new houses going up. We ate a fair amount of shrimp at our next stop: tempura fried shrimp, squash and onion rings one night - it looked remarkably like the tempura shrimp of a few posts ago - and shrimp and asparagus on rice. Much of it has already been shown here. There was my own invention, Shrimp Bolivar, although we'd left its namesake behind. Finally, I took a cue from kayb and mixed up some curried mayonnaise in which to dip shrimp that I'd stir-fried in the shell, along with asparagus, and allowed to cool before peeling. It was a finger-food lunch: dip a bit of shrimp into the mayonnaise, and bite. Dip some asparagus into the mayonnaise, and bite. I might prefer that treatment to the fried shrimp, though others in this mobile household would disagree. Somewhere along the way we also had a squash gratin, about which I posted in the eG Cookoff #71: Winter Squash topic.

Who knew?! Thanks so much for documenting this process; it's very different than I (and, I'll warrant, many others) had expected.

Oh, that video! "Thanksgiving without McRibs is like Christmas without snow..." ..from a young woman in Santa Clarita, California. The mind, she boggles. (No, I haven't tried one and have no dog in this fight.)

"Hair salon"? What was the flavor supposed to be? Shampoo? Aquanet hair spray?

I don't remember where I found mine, but I treasure it! I think I bought it as a gift for someone, and then couldn't bear to part with it. I may have had that subterfuge in mind all along. ;-)

I have the same spoon rest in my kitchen at home!