Smithy

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!

Ah, but what a great way to get officially pooped! It sounds like a lot of fun.

I laughed too. I'd like to know whether those scallop shells and baby abalone shells get reused, or go out with the trash, or did you keep some? I'd love to have access to baby abalone shells. I'd also like to know about the salt baked eggs. What happens to them when they're baked in salt? Are they baked fully submerged in the salt, or on top of the layer as shown in your serving photo?

It was just the two of us, and that may have been the main drawback. (Feasts are more festive with guests, don't you think?) We had prime-grade prime rib, seasoned with a Cajun-style blackening mix, browned on all sides, then roasted to an internal temp of somewhere between 110 and 120F. Perfection! The innermost interior may be a bit too bloody for either of us but will reheat nicely. Smashed potatoes. Green beans with bacon and a sundried tomato pesto. Cabernet sauvignon with dinner, beer beforehand. Sourdough bread and marbled dinner rolls of a rye/mesquite/whole wheat mixture. The other, admittedly small drawback: doing all that with minimal counter space (3 loads of dishes before dinner!) and a single oven rack. The sourdough bread was cooked before the prime rib went in, but the rolls had to share the oven. They went on the baking stone on the oven floor, which objected with a BANG to the heat midway through the baking. The gap between the stone pieces let some of the rolls get, shall we say, too crispy and dark. 'sall right, there was still plenty of bread, and the wine eased the pain of the broken stone.

Oh, my. My, my, my. This was excellent! Based on your description I made this winter squash gratin for dinner tonight. I halved, cleaned and sliced one of these squashes and added it to the already-sliced Delicata squash that I hadn't used a couple of nights ago. I've forgotten the variety now. I had thought it a particularly gnarly Delicata, but after the initial cooking the skin was still too tough to eat. I had to peel each ring AFTER cooking and before assembling the gratin. Let's hear it for music to work by. The other ingredients (except the white wine) were these: The finished gratin looked like this: it would have looked better with a fresh herb garnish, but I have nothing like that with me. Nonetheless this was a big hit. We'll be doing it again. Thank you, other Nancy!

That looks like good food, huiray. The exterior doesn't give a clue as to how beautiful the interior is, does it?

Those dishes are beautiful, what I can see of them!

Welcome! We're glad to have you here. I don't know much about French Polynesian cookery, and look forward to learning about it. Don't worry too much about your English; if we can make out what you're saying we'll be happy. :-)

Somehow, despite my family's southern roots, this never came up in our household. Thanks! I've added this to my list of things to try.

I love oysters. I love the briny sweetness of a good, fresh, chilled oyster on the half shell, or the richness of Oysters Rockefeller. I have made a few oyster dishes that were a hit with my darling as well, but he is more in the "oysters can be okay" camp than the "oh, boy! oysters!" camp. I keep trying to persuade him. One year, my best attempt, I scavenged the beach for good oyster shells that had washed up but not eroded too badly yet, cleaned them thoroughly, then used those as dishes for previously-shucked oysters. I don't remember exactly what I did, but it went along the lines of loading each shell with a small dab of sauce, an oyster or two, a sprinkling of parmesan cheese (and bread crumbs?), and just enough heat to get a cheesy crust. Cleanup was dead easy: throw the shells back out onto the beach. This time, the oyster shells were looking too worn but I collected a lot of large clam shells with the same intent. For size reference, that's the toe of my tennis shoe. I do not have small feet. In the end, I decided against the shells and opted for a recipe from The Commander's Palace New Orleans Cookbook. Has anyone cooked from it? I picked it up for a song this summer at our Friends of the Library Book Sale. It seems appropriate for Gulf Coast cookery. The recipe I chose was Oysters à la Marinière. It looks easy. There isn't much to go into it: oysters, shallots, wine, butter, flour and seasonings. The oyster liquor is supposed to be cooked down slightly and seasoned, then thickened with a buerre manié: butter mashed with flour to make a paste. One confusing thing about the recipe is that it says, on the one hand, to cook the oysters no more than 30 seconds, and on the other hand appears to have them cooking at least a minute while all the other sauce-thickening is going on. I should have checked similar recipes elsewhere, but didn't. I opted to keep the oysters out until everything else was seasoned and thickened. The oysters were warmed, but not cooked through. Whether it was my reading of the recipe or the recipe itself I can't say, but the result was a gloppy, floury disappointment that did nothing to convince anyone that oysters can be good. If someone reading this can explain how it should be done (is the flour supposed to be cooked longer to lose that raw taste?) I'd love to hear it. To add insult to injury, my go-to brussels sprouts treatment was entirely too sweet with the Gravenstein apple-infused balsamic vinegar I'd picked up in Florida. I'll enjoy using that vinegar, but not in the purpose for which I bought it. At least the bread was good. The next morning, my darling allowed as to how he'd had enough seafood adventure for a while, and that night we had comfort food: Polish sausage, potatoes and sauerkraut from home.

That does sound crazy, as though they don't know you've put together a manuscript! Can you just send the Table of Contents and your favorite 10 pages from that? I'd suggest at least one page with a recipe, at least one with an essay, and at least 2 with photos. I'm sure it's difficult to pick 'favorites', but you must have at least a couple of 'children' who are your secret favorites. :-)

Wow! Does she have any odor? What can you tell us about how she was cured? How big is she?

The next morning we woke up - to the extent we'd slept at all - as riddled with mosquito bites as a rural stop sign has shotgun holes. We'd never seen the mosquitoes so bad there! The situation called for drastic action. While he drove to town to find a bug spray that was safe for household use, I started the generator and then the central vacuum system. There ensued a fairly entertaining hour of collecting insect invaders from the ceiling, the curtains, the floor and the air. Catching one of those guys in flight is a bit like aerial combat, involving as it does quick direction changes and mid-air focus. (A loose sock also vanished into the maw of the machine, so when I change the filter bag I'll have to do a bit of digging.) He came home, we sprayed, and a while later I vacuumed up the carcasses. When all that was done, it was time for lunch. I was not in the mood for a salad, no sirree. I had earned something more substantial. This sandwich had all the trimmings... ...including some of Shelby's quickles.

Porthos, it sounds like you feel about fried green tomatoes the way I feel about alligator. Knowing, as I now know, that fried green tomatoes (how I loved that book and movie!) are excellent in the right hands makes me wonder whether I should keep checking out 'gator. I know what you mean about the retirement dilemma. I'm a native (central) Californian but don't see my way to calling it home again except in memory. Too many things have changed, and I have a strong love/hate relationship with the L.A. Basin, and it all seems so expensive and crowded. Still there are lovely, inexpensive places in the state to visit for extended periods. Some people cut the cord completely and become 'full-timers', with no fixed address, and that cuts some costs. Cue The Who: "Goin' Mobile! Beepbeep!" My darling suggested becoming full-timers when we bought our first trailer. I turned it down flat, but it works for some people. Maybe for you? Our travels are largely dictated by warmth and sunshine. Thus it was that a few days ago, when we were confronted with this weather pattern... ...nothing would do but we had to drive from Gautier, Mississippi through Louisiana by the shortest route possible and onto the Texas Gulf Coast, where we would be behind the massive storm system and in the clear. We stopped at a Louisiana Welcome Center for a rest break and to pick up tourist information that I knew we wouldn't use. What an exercise in frustration that is! The Louisiana Tourism Bureau does a particularly good job showcasing their culinary heritage. No matter where in the state you are, there's a featured town or 'culinary trail' to be explored. Have we traveled them? No, we have not. Have we been to New Orleans? No, we have not. We had very good reason to keep driving this time, but that's small consolation when ogling guidebooks that include recipes and tempting restaurant/shop information. Here's a website to give a glimpse of what I was holding, longingly, as I dashed through the rain: Louisiana's Culinary Trails. The magazine I picked up is even better. I will also state, for the record, that the staff of the Louisiana Welcome Centers we've visited are exceptionally good at making a person feel welcome. I know that's their job, but some folks are better at it than others. These are among the best. We drove through pounding rain and puddles and past high rivers that anyone from the Southwestern U.S. would envy. Eventually we got into the clear, on the back side of the front, and out onto the Bolivar Peninsula of Texas. I don't know how much longer it will last, but for now there is still-unoccupied beach available for camping, for the pittance of a $10 annual beach permit. We set up, glad to have made it through the rain, and enjoyed the spectacle of lightning in the distance. I cooked the beautiful shrimp I'd picked up in Gautier, added it to asparagus and rice, and cooked the sourdough bread dough that somehow had survived the drive. We fell into bed, sated, dreaming of good food and sunshine... ...and spent the night swatting mosquitoes. How and when they came in we don't know, but they were voracious.

I've had Royal Red Shrimp once before, and thought they were very nice without having a chance to compare them directly to other very fresh shrimp. It was kayb's recent post on Gulf Coast Dining that made me think I should try such a comparison. I've been told that they're far out (and deep) in the Gulf and therefore more difficult to find. The Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch page on Royal Red shrimp says that (at present) they are not a distressed population and are a "good alternative" (i.e. not the best, but not the worst) provided they're caught using otter trawls. I confess that I've never asked the fishmongers in the towns we pass through how their seafood is caught. It's easy for me to think and read about it at home, even in this home on wheels, but not so easy to ask some shop owner whom I've never met and may never see again.

Ha! I didn't even know The Villages had a theme song. Does it sound anything like "It's a Small World After All"? Never mind, I know how to find out...and I don't think I'd want it stuck in my head. I didn't remember using any sort of dip for the tempura shrimp, so I asked my other half. "No!" he said, "that would have been sacrilege!" It was probably beginner's luck, but it was very good. I've promised to give some of the grouper I bought the same treatment. We'll see then whether it was just luck or I'm learning something. Thanks for the compliments, and I'm glad you're enjoying the photos! We aren't sure quite where we'll be for Thanksgiving. Someplace in central or west Texas. Last year we tooled into Del Rio, TX the day before Thanksgiving and figured we'd pick up something on our way through town. We couldn't even get into the parking lot at their HEB grocery store. The only other place with a big enough parking lot is Wal-Mart. Their meat guy didn't know what we meant by prime rib. We figure we'll plan a little farther ahead this time around...like two or three days.

Gautier, Mississippi is an old town parked just across the Singing River from Pascagoula and its shipyards. Gautier has an interesting blend of very old, antebellum-style houses, historical signs, squat brick maybe-hurricane-proof houses, houses on stilts and three-story "smart" houses designed to be proof against high winds and storm surges. One "smart house" for sale boasts that its flood insurance has the lowest possible rate because it's 25 feet above sea level! Amidst these houses, old oaks draped with Spanish Moss, and bayous subject to tidal surge sits Shepard State Park. It's a good place to spend a week or two: good access to food shops, level ground for bicycling, and reasonably private campsites thanks to the heavy vegetation. We didn't spend a week or two, but we had time to dash across the river to Bozo's Seafood Market ("Money can't bayou happiness, but it can bayou crawfish and that's nearly the same thing") and, right next door, Jerry Lee's grocery store. I never expect a grocery store to do justice to ribs, but Jerry Lee's does. I won't bore you (yet) with another shot of ribs and sausage. Bozo's did not have Royal Red shrimp, but they did have freshly caught, never frozen, jumbo Gulf Brown shrimp. I took 1-1/2 pounds' worth. I'll show you later what I did with them. The highlight of our stay there was a visit to Huck's Cove, a local restaurant on the waterfront. It took us several tries over the years to catch the place open; it looks like it should be a jumping place, but perhaps we're passing through at the wrong time of year. One year I even called ahead to confirm their hours, but when we arrived 2 hours ahead of closing time they had already closed: "business was too slow," said the waitress as she was locking the doors. It nearly happened again this visit, according to our waitress, but she had convinced the owner not to close at 6:00 p.m. that evening. Huck's Cove is one of those funny funky places strewn with signs, nautical doodads, water skis, license plates, and other local memorabilia. It has plenty of docking space for boaters to tie up and come in, and on fine evenings you can sit outside on a wooden patio next to the docks. Prominent signs point out that it's illegal to feed alligators. When you come in you're greeted with this sign: The atmosphere is relaxed, the beer is fair (no draft beer, but a reasonable selection of bottled beers) and the people friendly. I don't know whether their alligator is friendly. Our dinners were fried grouper, fried shrimp, cajun fries, a green salad, a "baked potato" salad that turned out truly to be made of baked potato, with a lot of cheese on top. It was pretty good. I've saved the best for last, although it was the appetizer: fried green tomatoes with Remoulade sauce. My darling had never heard of fried green tomatoes (where has he been all his life?) and looked askance when I suggested it. He gamely tried one or two but wasn't really taken with them. That left more for me, so we were both happy. These tasty little devils had a crispy coating and a delicious tartness to the (very green) softly-cooked tomato beneath. As much as I detest frying, I'd make an exception for these. Does anyone have a favorite recipe that you'd like to share?

Thanks for the Crepes, it's a shame you had so many disappointments in that last batch. When you say the chicken crust was neither crispy nor crunchy but fought back too hard, what do you mean? Was it just tough? Or were the flavors overwhelming? I found TJ's description of their 5 Cheese Greek Spiral, complete with a photo, so I have some idea of what it's like. It does look intriguing! It looks like something like the Moroccans do, although from what I've read theirs is generally more sweet than savory. I look forward to reading your impressions on it. Edited for clarity.