Smithy

Next time I'm near a Trader Joe's I'll have to remember to look for this. It'll be a while, but I'd love to have smoked salmon available on a whim!

That might be what we have to do. We also discovered that the KitchenAid meat grinder attachment is too wimpy, so we bought another grinder at Gander Mountain. It lasted us a few years, but the last time we tried it the grinder made a horrible noise as though the gears themselves were grinding. We haven't made sausage in a while so haven't pursued the issue, but if we can't repair it I'll look for something sturdier when the time comes.

I said I'd start working my way back through our trip to date. Here's a grocery store we'd never tried before, near where we stayed for 2 weeks in Arizona. Rather than going to Fry's as we normally would, we decided to try a Food City grocery store. This is a big store; there are at least 2 in Casa Grande, near where we were staying. For some reason I didn't get any pictures of the produce department, but it was good: a wide selection, pretty good prices. We stocked up on our fruits and vegetables there. (How could I have failed to get pictures!? Sorry!) Their meat department is good too. We didn't need any meat, but that didn't stop us from ogling. Some of their selections were sold out that day. The meat counter had plenty of prepared meats. I found this party pack especially tempting, but passed it up. As you can see, they cater to the Hispanic crowd. Not only were there piñatas for children... ...there were also adult-style piñatas! Gives a different meaning to throwing a bash! Lots of spices, and a selection of chilis. I availed myself of some of their hibiscus buds. I love this stuff!

I've never tried that! We have a 3-quart IP in the Princessmobile, and electrical power when the generator is running. How long do you do the ribs for? How much apple juice do you use: just brush the ribs with it, or put some in the bottom of the pot?

It's almost too late for this to do anyone any good, but All-Clad is having their final factory seconds sale of the year. All of my All-Clad was bought as a factory second, and I've never been sorry. All-Clad Factor Second Sale supposedly ends Dec 8.

Yesterday was a day to drive to town: drop off garbage, get more water and gasoline, go grocery shopping, pick up some trailer supplies. I know, you've seen the refrigerator and freezer. Why on earth would we need groceries?! But there are consumables (fruit, vegetables, half-and-half for me and Silk for him) that simply must be replenished regularly. We had a list. We almost stuck to it, although one rack of pork ribs made it into our shopping cart. The reason that rack made it into our shopping cart was the success from the last rack. I haven't said much about grocery shopping along our route so far. The last stop in Arizona had been fairly expensive. The groceries in Llano, Texas had been horrendous. ($5 for a small head of lettuce?! We went without.) Prices in Yuma are up in general and sometimes astronomical, but there are bargains to be had. The rack of St. Louis-style ribs was one of them. If you've been following along, you'll know that my darling's favorite protein source is pork. We spotted a bargain a couple of weeks ago and bought it. (We did not buy the pork butt at the top of this collage. I put it in there for price comparison.) Then the question was how to cook it in the Princessmobile. None of our heavy covered pans will hold all those ribs without stacking. We thought we wanted to cook it all at once for time and fuel efficiency. Finally, we settled on a pair of cooling racks strung atop a baking sheet, with foil tented over the lot. He likes the syrupy barbecue sauce from the Mesquite Pit Grill in Mineral Wells, TX (another place I haven't shown you yet this trip) and I like the vinegary sauce from Cooper's in Llano. We each got a half-rack, with occasional basting using the sauce of choice. The initial rub was a Cooper's salt-and-pepper combination, since I can't find the coffee-ancho rub I especially like. (The spice rub is probably something else I forgot to pack. I keep discovering lapses and omissions. Our housesitter sends them along if I think it's important enough.) Here's a mid-cook photo, from when I removed the foil to baste again. Low and slow it was, for I-don't-remember-how-long, until the ribs seemed done that night. Meanwhile, I made a huge batch of green beans with walnuts and feta. Dinner was good. Fast forward a few days, and one night when neither of us felt like cooking we each had another couple of ribs, slow-braised in the oven. They seemed better. Last night, by the time we got back home, unpacked everything, went for our evening walk and enjoyed the scenery... ...we were out of energy and ambition. Leftovers are a good thing. We slow-braised the last 4 ribs, microwaved the vegetables of our choice (beans for me, brussels sprouts for him) and noted that this time the ribs were best of all! As Paula Wolfert said long ago, repeated braising can improve the meat's flavor and tenderness. That rack was a bargain in the first place, but by the time we got 3 meals out of it, it was a basement bargain! We're glad we got another yesterday.

We talked about butter shapes vs. American geography in the Camping, Princess Style topic, starting here. You might be thinking of that discussion. However, it ended up referring back the same topic you noted above.

The refrigerator and freezer have been on the wimpy side for a while -- probably due to increasing dirt and maybe rust -- and seem to be working better now. When I said "now maybe we'll have ice" I wasn't joking. Back on Hash Cooking Day, my darling was doing his prep work in the afternoon, as he usually does: chop the onions, then the potatoes, and pull out the tube steak of his preference. He makes smaller batches than he used to, and one sausage is more than adequate. We're loaded with pairs of delicious Llano Links (I'll show them to you later, when I back up to Llano). He had pulled out a fresh package. "Wait," I said, "we already have an opened package with only 1 sausage in it. Here, I'll get it out for you." I opened the freezer. "Don't touch that!" he said. "I'm using it to stabilize the ice tray!" I do hope we'll have ice by tomorrow morning.

That's fog. (I love it that you know the word 'haboob'!) This was the view out our other window. We couldn't see all the way across the wash! Neither of us remembers seeing fog here before. The trouble with boondocking is that it's difficult to get repair people almost any time. At least there now are mobile repair operations; we couldn't find any here 5 years ago. However, most of them are out near the other end of Yuma, roughly 45 miles away, and don't want to come out here. We don't blame them, but of course we didn't want to break camp if we could help it. The good news is that the refrigerator would run as long as the generator was running, so the refrigerator itself still worked. Sort of. We knew we had propane. When we realized what was happening, we kept the generator running long enough to get its temperature back down below 51F, where it had arrived overnight. We (that is, I) called around, finally found someone who would come out...but probably not that day. We started thinking about what might need to be cooked that night. And would all the contents of the freezer thaw before we could get help? Should I drive to town and get ice? Another mobile repairman who specializes in appliances but wouldn't come out saved us. He noted that propane refrigerators, especially in boondocking situations, often develop rust around the burner. He advised me to check the burner and look for rust, and look and listen for sparks. My darling and I removed the heat shielding and took a look...and swept away some dirt...and tried again. The sparker sparked, the propane whooshed, and the whole refrigerator started working again! We cleaned it out a bit more, then waited to see what would happen the next time we used the generator. When the refrigerator is on 110v, the propane shuts off. Would it restart? So far, it has. Maybe more cleaning needed, but this morning the temperature was back down to 36F. Maybe we'll get some ice made. 🙂 We celebrated with leftovers from this pork rib dinner of a few nights ago. Oh, and of course we celebrated with wine and beer.

This narrative is going to skip around in time like some demented Dr. Who. I'm going to talk about our arrival at camp and a few events here, THEN go back to Llano and parts in between. We arrived on Thanksgiving weekend, expecting to find our old campsite occupied at least through the weekend. Nope. Nobody here. Not only was nobody here, but nobody had been here since we left last spring. We usually have to rebuild our campfire cooking ring. It was still intact. All the wood we had left behind was still there! Our decorative rocks were still there! Bit by bit, we got the camp kitchen put out and put to use. Hash, of course, was on the menu that night. He hasn't been completely satisfied with his latest efforts. Is the camp stove not getting hot enough? Does the type of potato matter? We only brought russets. He wants to get Yukon Golds at our next shopping trip to see whether the variety is the issue. The weather has been a bit of a surprise, and the the camp stove gave us the biggest surprise the night he cooked hash. We've never seen a propane bottle develop a frost layer. Yes, the propane was getting low (he had to finish inside) but still, for the bottle to get that cold and for there to be enough humidity in the desert to get that frost was fascinating. We've picked up a bit of decoration on one of our walks, from someone else's abandoned campsite. We didn't know whether it was functional, but we're inveterate trash-picker-uppers, so it came home with us. That night, it shone on my darling's cooking efforts! We've had beautiful sunsets, as always... ...and, often, beautiful sunrises. Then there was yesterday: ...followed by learning that the refrigerator had quit!

I have glasses very much like those -- maybe the same pattern -- but they're in storage at home. How nice to see some in use! Yup. Thank you for an excellent blog - it's always lovely to see you popping up again with the hunting and cooking adventures!

We have no doubt that both our metabolisms have changed with the years, and that as children we were much more impervious to temperature swings. He's farther along than I am, and there may be temperamental differences as well. Speaking of getting far along: as we age, managing the Princessmobile becomes more cumbersome. Perhaps by the time a good electric motorhome is available, we'll be ready to downsize. Thanks for that article!

Trust me, @rotuts: 107F, even as a dry heat, is too hot. I get very cranky and/or tired if I have to do ANYTHING in that temperature range, even though I grew up with it in Central California. My heat tolerance is long gone. But maybe I'm kidding myself about being able any more to cope with Minnesota's winter; I've missed out on it for quite a few years. So, since this all began with a discussion about the meat-smoking experiment, I'll jump out of the blog time sequence and tell about it. I'm a regular reader of and dreamer over Hank Shaw's website, Hunter-Angler-Gardener-Cook. I get his newsletter. I read it, and bookmark recipes, and sometimes (rarely) get around to cooking them. This one caught me eye a while ago: Smoked Venison Backstrap. Look at the cover photo for that recipe! Source: Hank Shaw's recipe for Smoked Venison Backstrap, linked above and again here. The backstory: My daughter-in-law bestowed a backstrap and some other deer meat on us...well, this is embarrassing but it was fall of 2020! It sat in our deep freeze. It made the round trip with us last year. It sat in our deep freeze again this summer, then came along with us on the road. This is no way to treat good meat no matter how rare or common. Indeed it's a way to turn good meat into bad. The difficulty is that my darling looks askance at ANY deer meat, and I have to find the right treatment for it. Given his penchant for pork, sausage and burgers, and my penchant to be very busy much of the summer, I never got around to using it. Guilt, guilt, guilt trip. This fall I packed it along again in the Princessmobile's freezer, and promised myself to do something with it. I decided that the salt cure in this smoked venison recipe might be just the ticket. I thawed it at our last stop, checked for freezer burn (none), measured the salt and rubbed it in. Then I wrapped it again and let it cure in the refrigerator. "What is that meat?" he kept asking. "Backstrap," I'd say. We had that conversation many times, each time with him looking skeptical. Finally, the day of the cook, I told him the source of the meat. He's good about eating whatever I cook, but I saw him flinch. Next up was working out a smoker. I've never tried smoking over an open fire pit (more on our firepit later) and didn't particularly want to smoke inside the Princessmobile. I set up our little portable barbecue grill, got the coals going, soaked some mesquite chips and added them, then spent the next few hours trying to regulate the temperature. The best method seemed to be the old indirect method: coals and wood ships on one side, meat in a foil pie pan on the other. There wasn't much clearnace, given that the whole grill is maybe 18" across. But I persevered. It was either that or smoke up my wok on the campstove outside. While it was smoking, I worked on the necessaries for tacos. Chopping up tomatoes and lettuce is no big deal, but I also needed to deal with some roasted chiles I'd bought at our last stop. I also wanted to make the quick-pickled red onions to which @liuzhou introduced us some time ago, and that meant breaking out the mandoline. And finding the right vinegar. (The sugar was in another cabinet like this one, and the onion in a basket atop the cabinets. The mixing bowl was also high up, as was a pickling container. I did a lot of step-ladder work for this meal!) There were also the tasks of shredding cheese, and later on warming the tortillas and digging out some of our salsa. It was all worth it. I thought the salsa overkill, but he liked it. And now you know how 107F was not intolerably hot around here!

Those birds are things of beauty. Did you oil the teal before seasoning? It doesn't look like a very fatty skin, but I've never handled teal and may be off base. Remind me please about the doves. Do you just use the breast meat for those bacon-wrapped goodies? If so, have you ever made stock from the remainder?

That was the internal meat temperature on my makeshift smoker! 😄 Believe me, I wouldn't be staying here if it was that hot outside!

I did the salt cure. It was salty, but not too much so, and the salt/smoke combination is nice. Since he doesn't much care for venison, this treatment allowed it to go nicely into tacos one night, and maybe a dinner salad soon. Speaking of salads: yours looks sooo good! What are the little green things? Capers? They look too small to be olives. Your cheese board looks very artful. I love seeing things like that. I'm usually too lazy to put such effort into arrangement of the plate...then again, we haven't had company for a long time!

The size difference is striking, but I doubt it's relevant to your question. Since nobody else has hazarded a guess, I'll stick my neck out. From left to right: Fresh, Salted, Century. Now, what's the answer? Can you tell from looking at the shell?

SNZZKTKKkk ** oh sorry, someone talking to me? Let me wake up! All well here, thanks for asking. There's been a lot going on, including a couple of great food blogs here and here. But we're well, and since you ask I'll throw in a couple of teasers. There are miles and weeks to go before I arrive here, though. 🙂 Thanks again for asking! I'll start catching up.

I hope your guys have managed some luck despite the weather. One of Dad's most gratifying moments was when he managed to sneak up on a doe in wind like you're describing. She didn't know he was there until he slapped her on the rump with his hat and yelled! 😄 Yesterday I smoked a venison backstrap using this recipe from Hunter, Angler, Gardener, Cook. I was quite pleased with the result. I rarely get access to backstrap and was afraid I'd wreck such a delicacy, but we both liked it. This was especially gratifying because my darling purports not to like venison in any form. My questions to you are: what do you do with the backstrap? have you ever tried the recipe by Hank Shaw's that I linked above?

I laughed to myself about the burrito warming method, but I couldn't "laugh" at that entire delicious-looking post! Every time I think of some appetizer or treat to take to the next party, you come up with something else I want to try! So, questions about that cheese ball: do you use the full content of both those jars of dried beef? I don't think I've ever seen that in a grocery store, but I've probably never looked. You seem to be a fish frying master. Do you have any special techniques for keeping the spatter to a minimum, or do you just do a massive cleanup later? (I assume you didn't air-fry those crappie.) I am really, REALLY glad I didn't follow you down the Murray's Cheese sale path when the sale was on, but I look forward to virtually enjoying your treats!

Tell us something about yourself, @Safira. What do you like to cook, what do you like to eat?

Do they reheat the breakfast burritos, or eat them cold? (I'd vote for reheating, myself.) If they do reheat them, how and where do they do it?

That's absolutely a question to ask Ann! But I think she mostly does sourdough - that is, her own strains of wild yeast.

This is such a handy chart for folks flummoxed by calculations! I've pinned a link to this post at the top of this forum.

Please say a little more about this. Do you have an idea about how much lemon juice to add? Does the lemon juice affect the flavor? I've gone off the whole sourdough business (for about the fifth time) because my results are never as satisfying as what I can get in many grocery stores these days. The bread isn't sour enough to suit me, AND the texture isn't as nice as yours.