Smithy

We've tried a few of theirs, but never this one. He's fond of Subway Vidalia onion sauce, so he has high hopes for this.

What's the flavor profile? Is it sweet, tart, sticky, hot,...?

We're back to pork again. This time, it was an entire slab of spare ribs that jumped into our cart oh, a week or two ago. It's been taking up an impressive amount of space in the freezer all this time, while I went to San Diego and back. The price, and my darling's love of pork, was the incentive. Two days ago I wrestled it out of the freezer and into the refrigerator to thaw. It's been so windy and cold that we've been essentially trailer-bound due to strong wind and blowing dust. It hasn't been pleasant to be outside and we've done it as little as possible. A slow braise in the oven yesterday seemed a good idea for helping to keep the trailer warm. 6.5 pounds is a lot of meat. Even if I'd wanted to cook it all at once I'd have had to layer it somehow; it was too long for the oven! So I cut it into 3 pieces, cooked one and vacuum-packed the others for later. They're back in the freezer again. I finally found, by accident, the Espresso and Ancho Rub that I thought I'd left behind; it was stashed along with some extra spices I'd been looking for, in a container that used to hold dates and unshelled pecans. This rub is wonderful stuff. I didn't make it to this spice shop when I visited my sister in Reno earlier this year, but they also do mail order. When I exhaust this package, I'll probably buy more. I put a generous coating on the ribs, snuggled them into an enameled cast iron pan with a small amount of water in the bottom, added a temperature probe and the cover, and set the oven for around 285F. I'm not sure how helpful the probe was. This is a small, fine needle but it's still hard to find a spot with no bone. I'd set the alarm for 165F, and it came up to that temperature long before the meat was done. After that it was a game of adjusting the oven temperature down and physically checking the meat. Two thermometers said it was around 195F before I thought it done. The question in the meantime was which barbecue sauce to use. We're out of both our favorites from Texas, so we've bought some at grocery stores. We didn't want to open all four bottles for a taste test. All need refrigeration after opening. We still have a little bit of refrigerator space open, and I'm trying to keep it that way! I let him pick, and he went for our old standby. Toward the end of the cooking, I painted some on the ribs and let it set up in the oven while I prepped and cooked broccoli. Dinner! He added sauce at the table; I didn't. We both thought these were perfectly done: tender, toothsome, with the bones coming out cleanly. (We know that meat coming off the bone cleanly is considered to be a no-no in some barbecue circles. We don't care. This wasn't so overcooked as to be dry.) The broccoli was barely steamed, then dressed with Meyer lemon juice and zest, butter and julienned sun-dried tomatoes in olive oil. Quite good, and a nice accompaniment to the meat. We were surprised and a bit disappointed in the Jack Daniel's. It's much, much sweeter than we remember it being. A look at the label explains the sweetness. Do any of you use this stuff? Have they changed its recipe? I think I'll be messing with it to try to tone down the sweetness. He wants to open more of the sauces and try them now, of course. eta: This reviewer and at least one commenter say that yes, the formula has changed -- and not for the better.

This could easily go into the Hot Sauce topic, but since I don't plan to open it soon I'll post it here. I discovered Mazavaroo when visiting my best friends in South Africa, and until recently thought it was a South African chili paste. It turns out to be Mauritian, but the South Africans are quite good at adopting cuisines from other cultures. My friends were back in Capetown over Christmas, and were good enough to pick up a jar of this for me from the place where I first tried it. I've found many recipes for it, so when I'm in a position to open and test it I'll also want to be in a position to try making it. South Africa is a bit too far to jaunt for more.

I love the header "Weird/Cellar Beers"...and the name at the bottom, "Brew York Rhubarbra Streisand". Not sure I'd try it, but it's fun to see! What is IIPA, as in "Cornella Heavy Rain IIPA"?

I had a pile of jalapenos and a pile of suggestions for what to do with them, and in my haste to deal with them did something else entirely. It was most nearly connected to @Shelby's and @FauxPas's quick hot pickle ideas. I had been keeping the brine from a jar of dill pickles, and couldn't bear to toss that brine. I used it as a base for the hot-pack liquid: pickle brine (about a cup), 1 cup of mixed cider vinegar and rice vinegar (mixed because I ran out of the cider vinegar), 1 cup water; salt; pickling spices. I cleaned the pickle jar, packed it with the seeded and deveined and minimally sliced jalapenos, boiled the brine / vinegar / salt mixture, and poured it into the jar atop the chiles. Now I don't remember whether I poured the pickling spices into the jar atop the peppers or into the brine prior to heating. Result: not bad at all. I'm not crazy about cloves, and the pickling spice mix has them in abundance, but otherwise the flavors are good. I'll show better pictures elsewhere as I use them.

I fall more into the cook-at-home-and-save-money camp, with the occasional restaurant splurge. That said, I could see myself using Viv's Fridge or something like it in the case mentioned above: arrive late on a vacation, grab some things for the morning. The other way I could see myself using it would be to try something new that's too complex or requires too many new ingredients for me to make easily. Vivian mentioned a blueberry barbecue something in her clip. I'm aware of her blueberry barbecue sauce but have never made it. Would I prefer to make a batch, or try it first as it's "supposed" be cooked and used? Sometimes, the latter. I did this with meal kits from a favorite restaurant, The New Scenic Cafe near Duluth, when they were selling such kits during the pandemic. I found the kits to be a decent way to try something new without having to buy a bunch of new ingredients.

Recipe for that potato dish, please? Looks delicious! (So does the Leberkase, but I doubt I'd ever try making it.)

I'd eat that, and I don't think you need apologize for the presentation! Tell me more, please, about shrimp egg noodles. I Googled them and came up with numerous recipes involving shrimp and egg noodles, but I also found noodles that include shrimp roe (shrimp eggs) in the noodle itself. Is that what you used there?

This should give some of you a laugh. Our kitchen faucet is like many faucets these days: with the press of a button it switches from spray to stream, or back again. Unlike many faucets it stays in the selected mode rather than springing back to a default position, and I like that feature. However, I have trouble remembering sometimes which button is for "spray" and which for "stream". That is not consistent among faucets, and in fact I think our faucet at home has the opposite arrangement. Just today...after years of living in this trailer for months on end...I noticed the "decorations" on the faucet and realized what they are for.

The sun has cleared the highest peak on its way back north. The days are getting longer at both ends, and we expect (hope) to be enjoying campfire cooking again. Someday. I drove to San Diego last week to visit my best friend. She's a creative cook who takes great pride in inexpensive meals that use up little dribs and drabs of stuff in the (sparsely populated) refrigerator. Here's an example: a soup she made using chicken stock, stray bits of chopped onion, red pepper, carrot, broccoli, red cabbage, bedraggled spinach I'd brought from the Princessmobile, and some Costco meatballs. Very, very little food goes to waste at her place, and it's always delicious. The trick for making that soup -- I write this as much for my own sake as for yours -- is to lump the ingredients together by cooking time. The carrots, peppers, and broccoli all went into the 3-minutes-to-done stage; the spinach was thrown in at the last minute. We had tortellinis in soup one day also. I haven't had tortellinis in years, because my efforts at using them had seemed no more satisfying than using unstuffed pasta. I decided to try again, and on my first or second night back home made a quite satisfying pasta from porcini mushroom tortellinis picked up at World Market in the San Diego area. I made a point of visiting Trader Joe's and World Market while I was over there. I do love those stores!

Thanks for that link. I followed it through to your blog, and thoroughly enjoyed revisiting it. I'll try those proportions next time. Question: why Creole mustard? And what sets Creole mustard apart from other mustard? I've been on a curious search since reading that post, strolling through grocery stores that I visit, both in Yuma and in San Diego. So far, no Creole mustard...and no Durkee's sauce. Go figure!

That was an outrageous error on the part of the delivery service. Had you already paid? Did you have any recourse?

We've had a few grey days, and this morning the wind is plenty noisy. The ground is damp from overnight sprinkles, but there hasn't been enough rain to make puddles. I didn't get around yesterday to doing anything with the jalapenos, but I did get the green beans trimmed, and had a chance to try the butter/mustard/lemon treatment on green beans. It was pretty good. I think I put in too much mustard, though; the sauce was slightly bitter. Maybe more lemon would have helped. Or maybe I should have stopped at that first dollop of Dijon. 😁 Mac 'n' cheese 'n' ham was the main course. Whenever I have a big hit from a guess-and-by-golly dish, then I have to make multiple attempts to recreate it. Sometimes I finally manage to get it the same way again, and then write down what I (think I) did. Eventually I get it into a "recipe" that works for us, but it takes a fair amount of record-keeping. The mac 'n' cheese 'n' ham is a case in point. The mustard sauce may become another. In the meantime, he's still flailing away (again) to get exactly the right quantities of potatoes and oil for the pan we have with us in order to get his beloved hash right. We forgot to pack The Good Hash Pan this year, and he's been trying to adapt to the smaller pan here in the Princessmobile. Will he keep records? Noooo. Will he let me keep records? Noooo. So we had mush a couple of nights ago....

Yep. That's almost exactly what Fifi said! 😄

For a savory use, consider making garlic sauce. To get an idea of the flavor profile, think of it as aioli using only the egg whites. I learned this trick in Egypt, with the sauce named "thomeyya" or some such. So far every recipe for Lebanese garlic sauce I've scared up hasn't included eggs at all, but this one did. If you're interested I'll look to see if I can find the original recipe. Hmm. I wonder if you could make hollandaise sauce using only egg whites? I've never tried it. I know the yolk is supposed to have all or most of the emulsifier.

I certainly have a lot of good ideas for what to do with those jalapenos! Thanks, folks. I should be able to get to them today or tomorrow, and I'll be able to do more than one thing. I have a glass quart jar that once held pickles, and now only has the brine. I think I'll use the container and at least some of the pickling brine for one treatment. The relish idea is appealing, too, for its compactness. Heaven forbid that I should put too many containers into the refrigerator. Woe is me, I ate the very last Harry & David pear for breakfast this morning. They don't last forever, even refrigerated, but it was a sad Last Taste. It's going to be cool today, with an overcast sky and possibly a bit of rain today or tomorrow. We won't see much of the sun today, but the pre-dawn sky was fabulous.

What do you like to stuff them with, that freezes well?

One thing I need to deal with before it goes off in the refrigerator is a passel of jalapenos. What happened was that I bought some -- beautiful, large jalapenos suitable for stuffing -- and then forgot I had them and bought more. There are at least a dozen. We have no party plans, and that would be a LOT of jalapeno poppers / atomic buffalo turds / whatever for us to be eating. I think I've seen casseroles along the same lines, but can't find those recipes. I've found a few good-looking pickling recipes, like this one from Fifi, God rest her soul, and this one from @FauxPas (God keep her with us!). I'm sure I've also seen things from @Shelby but haven't figured out where. I'm going to town today and have put pickling spices and salt on the shopping list, but there's still probably some sort of good main dish to make with some of these beauties. What would you do? And yes, I admit this makes my darling's point about Too Much Stuff in the refrigerator. 🙃

It was a by-guess-and-by-golly approach, but roughly speaking here's what I did: I started the asparagus, about a pint's worth of chunks, in a couple tablespoons of olive oil. Once they were warming, I added about 4 Tbsp butter, in chunks, to melt around the asparagus. Once that was melted and the asparagus was close to being cooked I stirred in about 2 Tbsp Dijon mustard and kept stirring to get it to emulsify (more or less) around the asparagus. The finish was half of a large lemon's worth of juice, also stirred in. The result was a fairly thick coating on barely-cooked asparagus, with a bit of sauce left to pour over them. It was easy, and we both liked it. I'll do it again. I may try it on green beans next.

Mechanical issues struck again, this time more or less of our own making. "Why is the pump rattling like we're low on water?" I asked, "the gauge still says 2 lights." The tank isn't supposed to be empty until the gauge has been on 1 light for some gallons. We couldn't figure it out, but went to get water and pumped it into the Princessmobile's tank. That was the problem: the gauge wasn't reading properly. So for a day the poor pump was sucking air (and some water) and for 2 days after we refilled the tank the faucets spit on us every time we turned one on. Most annoying! But now I know to trust my ears more than the gauge. We had a bit of a kerfuffle today over the refrigerator. "There's nothing to eat in here!" he groused. "There's plenty in there!" I retorted: "enchiladas, leftover ham, leftover pork, beans, plenty of salad stuff!" "Yes, but I can't find anything!" he complained. He pulled everything out while I was working on something else, and demanded that I come look at it all. Grr. We consolidated, and I threw away the remaining unused tortillas and some old grapes, and allowed him to put my pinto beans into his wretched sweet deli beans. Here is the result: There's empty space on the shelves! I admit it's easier to find things now. We'll try to keep the refrigerator this sparely stocked for a while. We're shoveling sand against the tide, so to speak, but maybe we can change our ways. Dinner tonight was also spare: some of the pork roast from the Crown Rib experiment, warmed and cut and thrown into dishes of our choice again. I cooked asparagus in a butter/mustard/lemon sauce, and added my pork chunks to that. He put his pork chunks into his beans and kept his asparagus separate. It made for an easy cleanup. That pork roast is a gift that keeps on giving: like ham, it seems to be taking an eternity to use it up! While the country to our east and west is inundated, we've had barely a drop of rain. I think the plants would appreciate some rain, but they're starting to flower anyway.

Today's dinner was an easy one, with little effort: some of last night's pork roast, as we wished to eat it. This is a study in contrasts. 😉 For him: store-deli baked beans, augmented by some of my precious home-cooked beans, and with chunks of last night's pork tossed in. Alll heated in the microwave. For me: chunks of the pork, heated in the microwave, then tossed onto a bed a lettuce and spinach, and mixed with a vinaigrette. We were both quite happy with our choices, and neither was tempted to steal from the other's dish. Of such freedom is a good marriage made.

2 bucks at the library book sale. How could I pass it up? I like cookbooks from good newspapers. This one has the added cachet of promising Callifornia treats, and although I moved away from the state decades ago I still fall for the mystique. The jacket says the recipes come from restaurants, contests, and skilled home chefs, and have all been tested in the LATimes' test kitchen. The book was published in 1981 and updated 1990. Some recipes I'm very unlikely to try but there are already several that look appealing: a Tunisian tuna salad with eggplant (I know some of you will shudder at that); a chef's salad with creamy mustard dressing that incorporates bacon drippings; Steak Picado (attributed to Sal Ramos, who cooked it for food workers at the wholesale produce market in Los Angeles). Broccoli Chantilly. No, I don't need any more cookbooks! But for two bucks, how could I go wrong? Edited to add: it has several persimmon recipes. Boy, I could have used it back when we had access to overgown and neglected persimmon trees!

It's going to be sunny today, mostly, but the past few days have been generally cloudy and overcast. I haven't minded, especially in light of the weather (read: rain and more rain) to our west and east. The clouds have made for spectacular sunrises and sunsets. We've been having visitors not far from our campsite. We haven't seen the burros / donkeys themselves, but their tracks are all over. Behold one of my impulse purchases in the days leading up to the holidays! At the time I thought we might be having company for Christmas and/or New Year's. Of course, we already had the ham we'd brought from home...but how could I pass up this deal? The "deal" has been occupying space in our freezer and driving my darling crazy. "When are we going to cook this?" and "Can I slather it with barbecue sauce like regular ribs?" have been the main questions. Or, sometimes, he wondered whether he could coat it with his go-to pork breading. My answer has been a steadfast "no". I'm not going to slather this with barbecue sauce or pork breading. At last, I'd have a chance to try doing a crown rib roast. I've dreamt of crown rib roasts ever since I had a crown lamb rib roast for an anniversary dinner at an excellent restaurant outside Chicago. (I know, pork isn't lamb, but in my darling's opinion that's a Good Thing.) To my surprise the crown pork roast didn't turn up in any of my cookbooks. I turned to the New York Times and Sam Sifton's take on it: https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1015807-crown-roast-of-pork?smid=url-share (I hope you can see the recipe. I tried to share it). This image is the cover photo from the NYTimes' Crown Roast of Pork recipe page. Well. The first adventure was trying to tie half a rib rack into a crown like that. Turns out the "crown" requires both sets of ribs! (Go ahead -- laugh!) The muck you see on the outside is the paste I made, loosely based on what they used in the recipe, from garlic, rosemary salt, white pepper, paprika, mustard and olive oil. The interior of this "crown" was completely filled with meat, and I doubted it would produce the desired effect. Commenters on the NYT recipe had noted that it's better to leave the stuffing out of the crown's interior and cook it separately, so the meat would brown properly. I abandoned the crown idea, flattened the rack back out, and pasted it liberally with the rest of that rub. That all went into a roasting pan lined with chopped potatoes, a few ribs of celery, and a touch of water to get the cooking started. Into the oven it went: 450F, keeping an eye on the meat's internal temperature. At around 140F on the thickest part I started getting nervous and checking other internal temperatures; this meat looked pretty lean. I turned the oven temperature down to 350. By the time the coolest part of the roast was up to 135 or 140, other parts were hitting 155F. I turned off the heat and let it all rest until we were ready to eat. Dinner. He'd eaten cole slaw earlier and didn't want vegetables; I had a cauliflower / broccoli combination. The potatoes were the real star of the show, but the meat was pretty good. I hadn't overcooked it, but I'd forgotten about building any other sort of "dressing" or a sauce, except what was in the pan. This would definitely have benefited from a sauce. We have a lot of it with which to experiment! He already wants to use barbecue sauce on his. Of course.

Hello and welcome! What's your method for cauliflower steaks? What did you have for dinner tonight? I adore Texas 'cue and can be counted on to eat a LOT of it in the right places. On the other hand, the Gulf Coast has always been a great source of shrimp, oysters and fish. Are you anywhere near there?