Smithy

Thanks, @OlyveOyl. I think I understand it now.

That looks like a huge room. Is it all one room in those photos, or are you showing us more than one kitchen? What's this in the foreground, if you remember? And is this a long-handled wok with a lid on? Is it set into a recess atop the stove?

Last night's dinner wasn't inspired by anyone's recipe: I just wung it. Chopped chicken thighs seasoned with Italian herb mix, chunks of potato, onion, and bacon; a jar of Trader Joe's marinated grilled artichoke hearts, and a few cherry tomatoes. Not bad, but it needed...something. I put the last of my tahina sauce on it (a Clark recipe, there) but it needed something more. We won't have any trouble finishing the leftovers, but it wasn't one of those dishes where he said "I hope you wrote down what you did!" This morning I've broken into a jar of rabbit rillettes I bought at a favorite restaurant at home before we left. Pretty good stuff, but quite rich. I think I'll cut it with something...green onions, perhaps? Chopped parsley? Quick! If you're a cake baker, wouldn't you love to be able to put a finish like this on your chocolate cake? It's actually mud drying and flaking in a nearby puddle. I can't help thinking it looks like chocolate curls atop chocolate glaze.

Thanks for that recommendation. I'll bite, so to speak, particularly because I'd like to see Ms. Clark get some money from me for her hard work. Granted, the Kindle version (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) won't give her much, but it'll ring something at the cash register.

You raise a very good point. When I cook rice from scratch I don't salt it either, so why would some of those pouches contain salt? I'll have to see if I can find a pattern to the salt/no-salt packages.

I had to look this up. Is this Chinese water jar (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) similar to what you have? I can't figure out how the water seal works. I'd appreciate photos and an explanation.

I'm not sure yet what I'll do about dinner tonight. He began agitating for pork roast. A large (3 - 4 lbs) pork roast came out of the freezer today, but no way will it be thawed in time. I remember that @Pam R, way back when, discovered Cooking a Frozen Roast Without Thawing but I don't think I'm going to try it today. So the pork roast is thawing for tomorrow, and I pulled some chicken thighs out for today. How exactly I'll cook them remains to be seen. Strange...sometimes I can't wait to try out new recipes, and other times it just seems like too much work to read, process and follow a recipe. I've had Melissa Clark's beautiful book Dinner: Changing the Game (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) checked out from the local library for a while. I'll probably use her for inspiration instead of following one of the recipes I've bookmarked. This is, incidentally, a gorgeous book. I usually find Clark's recipes in the NYTimes to be reliable. I may spring for my own copy of this book, but it seems a bit silly if I haven't cooked from it in a month of ogling. I'm still benefiting from all the washing and chopping of broccoli, onions and cauliflower I did last week. I had tossed the cauliflower and onion chunks with oil, turmeric, cumin and salt in preparation for Melissa Clark's cauliflower shawarma, then not used all of it. Some of the remaining uncooked vegetables went into a pan dish last night, along with coins of Polish sausage and yet another simmering sauce. Thanks to @rotuts' questions, I looked this time at the sodium content of the simmer sauce and the rice package. The sauce had a fair amount of sodium, but the rice had none! I noticed the other day when I was shopping and looking at the Ready Rice packages that some at least have no salt added. Their basmati and jasmine both are salt-free. I wondered how my darling would like a coconut curry korma sauce, and whether I'd like it with Polish sausage. We both were happy. Last night, before I began cooking, we saw the Wolf Moon rise. This morning, we had a good clear shot of the sunrise.

I looked at spring-loaded jar lids to take the place of weights, but users noted that finely shredded items would come up through the spring, so a layer (like a cabbage leaf, or FauxPas' mesh) was still necessary. I have a bit of leaf under the weight in my jar. I didn't save an entire leaf as I should have.

Thanks. I'm happy with either regular or wide mouth jars. I had some giant jars, but gave most to my great-niece.

Thanks for that information. I'd never heard of cheese mesh before! I'll look into it, because the jars' shoulders are a problem. I also appreciate the proportions and the quantity expectation. I had 359g of cabbage. That's pretty much proportional to your 1 kg per 1L jar. I'm surprised the fermentation would work with such a low percentage of salt. I thought more would be needed to suppress the bad bugs.

It was 3 poms for roughly 500 ml. (I'm sorry, I just remeasured that glass jar. I was misremembering its size; it's only 250ml. I'll go back to edit and correct that post.) Poms do vary in size, but the ones that have been showing up in stores lately are pretty big. The juicer is wonderful. It's a vintage aluminum juicer made by Wear-Ever, and I consider it a family heirloom. My mother rescued it from a Navy wife's trash when that family was getting ready to leave Okinawa in the early 1950's. We grew up using it to squeeze lemons in particular, for summertime lemonade or my mother's wonderful lemon meringue pies, but at some point she realized it was also great for pomegranates. If you ever see one in a secondhand store or online (they turn up on eBay from time to time), buy it. You won't regret it. I have one for the Princessmobile as well as one at home (I think The Heirloom is at home). I've bought several and given them to friends who like to cook. Edited to add, for anyone interested: there are several on eBay right now, at various price points. Make sure it comes with the strainer.

We dodged a bullet this morning: the refrigerator was flashing an error code and up to 44F. Couldn't be frost this time! The code indicated a propane error, but we have plenty of propane and the furnace was working. I remembered a helpful service man a couple of years ago who wouldn't/couldn't come this far out to help, but told me what to look for. Quick! Which has more influence on desert landscapes: wind or water? If you answered "water" then you're right. Those flash floods, and the water streaming down mountains when it rains, do more to shift the landscape than wind and its transport mechanisms. Similarly, rust -- of all things -- is the most likely cause of refrigerator tube blockages out here in the desert boondocks. Much more likely than dust. He told me he'd seen it so many times: rust develops in the burn chamber and prevents proper ignition. Bless him for telling me (he wouldn't take money for the phone call) and bless my memory. We took things apart, blew them out, and tested. Ignition!! The refrigerator is merrily bubbling away. 37F and cooling. Meanwhile, all that water from recent rains is beginning to turn the desert green. The last time we looked we couldn't find any desert lilies in the nearby patch. Now there are 7. That's dew decorating the leaves. (The farmers closer to town probably aren't as happy about the rain as I am. The broccoli and cauliflower fields are sloppy messes, and it's harvest time. The workers are out there slogging away in the mud. I'll add a picture if I get a chance.)

I may have to buy more pomegranates. And juice them before they're months old. The juice has beautiful color.

Nice ideas! How would I go about doing either one? I think the molasses is simply cooked down to thicken, but I might not be right. No idea how to make grenadine!

Lots of errands yesterday, started late because...well, because. The upshot was that we had pea stew for dinner. There really is a lot of it, and it's handy and easy. Quite good too, without the pepper. This shows just how much it's thickened since cooking and cooling. (You can't tell from the photo, but this had already been heated in the microwave.) I think a little water to thin it to a smoother consistency will stretch the dinners even more. As I reported over here, I got a fermentation kit...having given most of my stuff to a great-niece...and despite my fatigue decided to tackle the half cabbage in the fridge. I really expected it to make 2 quarts of kraut. Surprise! A pint jar would have been adequate. 4% fine sea salt by weight, in case you're wondering. I thought I remembered 3%, but the book I was using had it closer to 5%. I split the difference. Yesterday morning I decided finally to deal with the pomegranates taking space in refrigerator or coolers for the past month or two. I love the idea of pomegranates: their jeweled look, their tart sweetness. But extracting those pips...even using the easiest way ai know...is time consuming. Worse yet is that the seeds seem to disagree with me. So why do I buy them? I love the idea...their jeweled look...(lather, rinse repeat 🤷‍♀️). I juiced 'em. Pomegranate juice in kefir isn't bad. Made a nice switch from a banana. And I still have 250 ml of juice for some other purpose!

If my nightmares were as bad as that "crime scene" I'd be a happy person indeed! It looks delicious!

I gave my fermenting weights to my great-niece last summer, and now I'm on a fermentation kick. I got this set. Actually, I got 2 sets: one for wide-mouth jars and one for regular-mouth jars, but one set hasn't come. What I like about this is that it has vented lids as well as weights. We'll see how it goes! The acacia pounder is quite gratifying to use. 🙂 It's easy to underestimate the value of that pounder, though. The jar on the left contains half a head of red cabbage after shredding, salting, kneading, packing and pounding. The jar on the right would have been the better choice. [Note: For reasons understandable only to the software gods, the remainder of this post is actually @FauxPas, quoting me. We don't know how or why it happened, but the quotes don't make sense otherwise. -- Smithy] The planets finally aligned for me this year, and I was able to snag two sets of the fermentation lids while they were on end-of-season clearance. Still pricey (to my admittedly minimalist eye) but I expect to use them for many years. I just recently bought the same stuff! I did a fermentation class not long ago. The guideline we were given is to use approx 1 kg of cabbage (or whatever combination of stuff) per 1 L canning jar. That's what we used in that class and almost all of it fit into the jar using a tamper with moderate force. We tasted ferments that ranged from 1% to 5% concentrations of salt and almost all of us preferred the taste in the range of 1.5 to 2.5%. Class instructor said that was almost always the preferred range in her classes. She also suggested using coarse cheese mesh instead of weights and if you have canning jars with a bit of a shoulder, they work really well to keep the cabbage submerged in the brine. Like this: https://glengarrycheesemaking.on.ca/collections/cheese-making-accessories She cut the mesh into 9cm circles which click into place in the neck of the standard 1L canning jar.

I'm not seeing any shortages in Yuma, Arizona -- but this place bills itself as the country's winter produce capital (I probably don't have the slogan quite right). There may be some empty meat sections, but they seem to correlate to bargains.

We had plans for this afternoon, but Mother Nature discouraged us. Despite the forecasts of clearing skies, we watched thunderstorms develop in the direction of our event -- as well as here. We decided not to risk dealing with road closures or washouts after dark, and stayed home. A half hour after our originally scheduled departure time, we got the word that the event was canceled due to flooding! I built myself a nice green salad for a mid-afternoon lunch, and mixed a fresh batch of lemon vinaigrette. The vinaigrette is lemon juice, garlic, salt, Dijon mustard and olive oil. It's one of my favorite dressings, and -- unlike things like curry sauces -- something I can wing it on reliably. The salad was simple: green leaf lettuce, cherry tomatoes, raw broccoli from food prep a few nights ago, croutons, and Lindsay Naturals Green Ripe Olives. I've been hoarding those. It was nice to open a can, after a year or so of forgetting they're with us in storage. I expect we'll be clearing out planned-overs for dinner tonight.

Fortunately, we've managed to accommodate each other...mostly...by seasoning at the table. The rest of the time we have to arm-wrestle.

Since you're a subscriber, when you get around to making it feel free to say a couple of non-subscribers thought it was way over-salted. I thought about joining for purposes of commenting, but discovered I'd have to pay money for the privilege.

I'm not much of a pea fan under most circumstances, but he's adapted his version enough for me to like his soup. When we first met, his idea of split pea soup was just that: split peas, simmered in a pot of water with a ham bone (no added meat) until it was thick enough to stand a spoon upright. About half a can of black pepper!* That's when I discovered the calming values of sour cream (to tame the pepper). This was early in our days together, and he was rather defiant about that stew being Exactly The Way He Likes It. He was insulted that I'd added sour cream to mine. Over the years he's adapted his recipe to include potatoes, meat and sometimes carrots and exclude the black pepper until the end. I like it well enough. And it's really nice to have him cook sometimes. *(He's one of those who likes a bit of egg with his pepper at the breakfast table.)

My Kitchen Brownie cooked dinner yesterday again, this time from start to finish. Well, I helped by pulling out the ingredients and the pot, and stirring occasionally. Split pea soup. Stew, really. With the ham bone and a few chunks of ham saved from a freezer package we'd brought from home; carrots; potatoes; and runaway salt. He added more potatoes and it may have helped control the salt. Topping with sour cream and/or yogurt helped. Unfortunately, split pea soup isn't very photogenic. I did my best. It was a good day for long, slow cooking. The trailer was dark and the air cool, and the slow stewing helped keep the place warm. Rain was in the forecast, and was beginning by the time I got home from town errands. Not long after I got home, the skies really opened up. I suspect our main road was closed for a while due to floodinng. By late afternoon we were treated to the sight of the dry wash next to us become an active river. I love the sight! One year we were treated to it 3 times; some years we never see it at all. This is a time-lapse of sorts. A couple of hours after the rain had stopped, the riverbed was empty again.

2 - 3 hours. I never time it carefully, but that's the ballpark in my enameled cast iron covered pan.

It turns out I'm married to an occasional Household Brownie. A few days ago he spotted my exhaustion and volunteered to prep the brussels sprouts by cutting them in half. After one or two he realized he needed to cut them from pole to pole instead of along the equator, so we didn't have too many leaves fall off. 🙂 That particular vegetable dish involved my opening a package of pecanwood-smoked thick-cut bacon we've carried with us the entire trip. It's excellent stuff; I recommend it highly. I'd intended that bacon/sprouts/tomato dish to be dinner, but my Household Brownie wanted more meat than that, so I consented to cooking one of two remaining half-racks of pork ribs from the freezer (until we get more). Woe is me, I used up the last of a package and a bottle of favorite seasonings from the Spice and Tea Shoppe in Reno. I'll have to see what it takes to get them to send me more, and whether they even still make those blends. I braised the half-rack at about 275F, coated with those spices, until it was nearly cooked. Then I bathed it with a barbecue sauce acceptable to both of us, and let it finish. We applied our preferred sauces at the dinner table. I shot this before we added the sauces. One morning right around that time, we watched the sunrise crown the leftmost mountain peak on its seasonal march back northward. We'd hoped for one of those "Paramount Films" logo moments, with the peak framed perfectly, but the clouds didn't cooperate. Now the sun is rising to the left of that peak, and the sunrise is noticeably earlier every day.