Smithy

Breakfast this morning: toast with a marvelous Kirkland cheddar cheese that my best friends bought for me at Costco; cherry tomatoes; and the last of leftovers from yesterday's lunch. The "remains of yesterday's lunch" deserves some storytelling. A friend from Phoenix and I went to a Mexican restaurant that the Camp Host had recommended. There aren't any pictures; it was so dark inside that we both needed our call phone flashlights to read the menu! I had a chile relleno and a beef enchilada, accompanied by the standard refried beans and Spanish rice. I forget what he had, 2 burritos maybe, with the same accompaniment. Conversation was the main point of the meal. That's good, because I found my food decent but forgettable. I've had better versions of both the burrito and the chile relleno. Here's a closer look at the today's remains of the chile relleno: The cheese was nice; it had a rather tart flavor that I've never encountered before and would be pleased to try again. The breading was -- well, not much to it, and I'd have expected some sort of sauce with it. There was no sauce. (There was none on the burrito, either; both were simply nestled into the refried beans.) Somehow the whole thing had distinct layers instead of being a happy marriage of ingredients. As I said, getting together was the main point anyway, and we had a good time catching up. From there we went to see the Dwarf Car Museum. It's an amazing place, well worth a visit if you're ever near Maricopa, with amazing mechanical craftsmanship and funny old memorabilia. The only culinary connection is this startling (to me) bit of machinery among the collection of vending machines hanging around the museum: a soup-dispensing machine! I never knew such a thing had existed. It may have been common in some mechanics' garages, to allow workers a choice for lunch.

Breakfast today. Now I'm wishing I'd bought more minneolas in Yuma. These are really good.

Reminds me of when I was in high school in Central California. A new "Mexican" place had just opened not far from school, and our new friend (recently immigrated from Oklahoma) wanted to go check it out. "Let's go to TAYco Bell!" she said, "I've never had a TAYco before." We just about died laughing about her mispronunciation, and teased her about it probably harder than we should have. And yes, I AM old enough to remember a time before Taco Bell.

Finally! We finally cooked with fire! In that lovely pedestal-based grill! I coated chicken thighs with liberal amounts of Berbere spice and coriander. When the time came, I loaded them into our grill basket and parked them on the grill. From there it was just a matter of adjusting the height of the grill grate, and turning the basket occasionally until the thighs were cooked. I tossed cut-up chunks of cauliflower in a mix of tahini sauce, olive oil, paprika (sweet and smoked), cumin, coriander, and a lovely blend my sister gave me called "Five-Alarm Fire Sea Salt". (It's a good thing I tasted the coating before committing the cauliflower to it. That salt blend turned out to be a bit much, so I had to dilute the mix with yet more tahini and olive oil, and maybe the other spices, before coating the cauliflower with it.) Then I parked the florets on a lined baking sheet. When the chicken went onto the fire, the cauliflower went into a 425F oven until the bits were browned and crispy, maybe 40 minutes. Here's the before-and-after shot: This is pretty simple cooking, and it left time for socializing outside while the food was doing its thing with minimal monitoring. The chicken, taken off the grill and out of the grill basket: Dinner was delicious. There are still 3 chicken thighs left. Leftover chicken is never a bad thing.

If you have questions that aren't food-related, feel free to PM me. I'll be glad to answer questions if I can. And when you take to the road, I hope you'll post about it!

These campsites have very nice sun shelters, with concrete pads, sturdy picnic tables, and pedestal grills that pivot for best wind advantage. We swore last night that we'd cook outside, and got the firewood and the campstove out so as to give the cook a choice. Then we waited for the wind to die. And waited. (Our camp host commented that it's been so cool and windy this year that she used her gas grill for the first time this week!) We finally decided to cook inside instead. Superburgers, with vegetables of our choice. The extra rain that this area gets has made for an interesting comparison of plants between where we were staying and where we are now. The plant community is basically the same (creosote, ironwood, palo verde) but the flowers are much more abundant and much, much taller. The orange and purple flowers (apricot mallow and heliotrope phacelia, in case you care) are knee-high here, whereas they rarely got above a foot tall there. There are also new (to us) plants: the yellow fiddlenecks and hedgerocket didn't appear at all down there. We're only 1000' higher, but the mountains do seem to squeeze out extra moisture.

I want to make a pitch for The Rustik Oven's sourdough breads, in case someone else here likes San Francisco-style (really sour) sourdough bread. I discovered The Rustik Oven Bakery last year or the year before when I was looking in vain for San Luis Sourdough bread. (San Luis used to make a wonderful Rosemary Olive Oil Sourdough, but stopped making it for some reason. Their distribution range seems also to not be where we travel these days.) Rustik Oven makes several types of bread: Sourdough, Italian, Cracked Wheat, plain white, and Cracked Wheat Sourdough. I am a sourdough lover, and both of these sourdoughs fit my tastes. They seem to suit a lot of other people's tastes, too: in both Yuma and Duluth, it's been hard to keep the Sourdough on the shelves. I rarely see the Cracked Wheat Sourdough, but took a chance on it this year and discovered that it's also excellent. (The bottom part of that collage is from some oven-toasted bread for a salad, and doesn't show the cracked wheat version. I just finished it.)

Of course we have a topic about this! Peeps: Marshmallowly Goodness

This is a great question for @Dave the Cook.

I'll probably find 5 different brands of rice flour when we get to Texas. And they'll all be cheaper than what I ordered. 🙄

That sounds like a good way to treat globe eggplants. Yes, these had been quite fresh. They were starting to go soft when I finally coooked them, but still plenty good. What do you mean by the green pea ones? I don't think I've ever seen those.

I love eggplant. I especially love it in Middle Eastern dishes such as baba ghanouj and moussaka, and until we broke camp I had several eggplant recipes I wanted to try out of the cookbook Falastin (eG-friendly Amazon.com link). I bought a couple of eggplants, a couple of weeks ago, then got busy. Then I had to return the library book. And there the eggplants sat. (I did not love eggplant when I was a child. My sainted grandmother, whom I adored, would slice it, pepper the bejeezus out of it, and fry it. Whether she also breaded or battered it I don't remember, but all I could taste was the pepper! It was years before my sister and I overcame our dislike of black pepper. We think it's because Nana's pepper was always stale, bless her heart. It was years after I left home before I was willing to try eggplant again.) Our latest mail shipment included the March-April 2023 issue of Milk Street. That magazine has a "No-Fry Neapolitan Eggplant Parmesan" recipe that looked like something I wanted to try. I like eggplant parmesan. It's been ages since I had it. I mean, doesn't this picture make it look delicious? "What's for dinner tonight?" asked my darling. When I said "Eggplant Parmesan" I saw him flinch. "What meat will be in it?" he asked plaintively. Right away I decided to take liberties with the Milk Street recipe. I remembered, once I got going, that the reason I don't do eggplant often -- in fact, it's been a couple of years -- is the issue of getting it cooked properly without its soaking up half a bottle of olive oil. This recipe has you brush a baking pan with oil, lay the thin slices atop it, then brush the tops of the slices with more oil, and roast at high heat. I've seen this trick before. Madhur Jaffrey uses it. Lynne Rossetto Kasper may use it. It's a great trick...but requires very close attention lest the slices burn. Enough slices escaped the carnage that I could still make the dish. I had to take liberties with Milk Street's sauce, too. Because of the meat, I needed more tomato than they'd called for. I didn't have all the cheeses they specified. In fact, as I was putting the layers together I mused that this might be more like my Egyptian Moussaka than Eggplant Parmesan. That isn't necessarily a bad thing. We love moussaka! And it was good. We both liked it. Good thing, too, since there are plenty of leftovers.

Lunch today. I really wanted to use my lemon vinaigrette, but forgot to take it out of the refrigerator before going to town, and it's congealed. Instead I'm using the Double-Sesame Dressing I made back here. It's actually pretty good on this salad, better than I remember it being. I still keep forgetting to put ginger into it. Guess what? The Hispanic grocery store in the nearest town doesn't have rice flour! The clerk thought it was a strange request. I don't expect us to be visiting any larger towns during this stay, although they have larger grocery stores. We did our best to stock up on everything before breaking camp so that we wouldn't have to drive much while we're here. So...good ol' Amazon and their lockers to the rescue! My package of Bob's Red Mill White Rice Flour (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) should arrive Friday.

I look forward to reading your tasting notes!

Yeah, I grew up with wooden spoons. My mother's main use for a wooden spoon was for stirring fudge, so there's a very happy memory there (including the delicious process of cleaning it up!!) But even then, I remember the spoon leaving little trails on the bottom of the pot. Getting all the fudge out of the pot and into the platter was a process. I think Mom used a wooden spoon because it could get into the corners of a pot more easily than a spatula. Then again, she might simply have done it that way because HER mother did it that way.

Ah, Dave, thank you! Those shrimp are things of beauty! I still have to get the rice flour, and may have to get vodka unless we have some on board. I may have vermouth. I have reserved a bottle of our good Scottish-style ale (Kilt Lifter) and can probably get more if the rest of the ingredients come available soon. Then, it's Katie bar the door!

Darn! I gave my electric fondue pot to my great-niece, since fondue had gone away at our house!

Thanks for reviving this topic! I think I missed it the first time around. I find that my taste in wooden spoons has changed. Until recently I used unfinished wooden spoons for, say, mixing dough. I had a beautiful one almost as long as my forearm that I think was made of pine. I say "had" because I recently donated it to a garage sale. I've found that my glossy bamboo spoons, that came with a wok set, work much better and aren't as sticky. I've never tried them in the dishwasher, but it's nice to know that they'll survive it.

Fascinating! At this remove I don't remember what brand of tots we were using at any given time, but I'll look for Taterbites or Tater Bites or even TaterBytes (sounds like a computing unit) next time I want to try them. Or maybe I'll try gfweb's version up topic, here. Regardless of which I try, I'll be sure to use the shallow-fry method you pointed out to me, with reinforcement from Toliver fans, a year ago in the posts you linked.

Thanks for that information! I kinda thought Gebhardt sounded familiar, but couldn't place it. I've probably seen some of their offerings in Texas. For sure, now that I'm aware of it, I'll see it jumping off the shelves at me. (Yes, I was speaking of Gebhardt. Tampico is all over the place where we live and shop.)

A friend of mine in Senegal just posted a photo (on Facebook) of reddish-colored fried insects and labeled it "Snack attack!" I asked him what they were and how they tasted. He said he's pretty sure they're grasshoppers. They're crunchy - fried through and through - and served with a dipping sauce. He also said he had to take off part of the back legs because they stuck in the roof of his mouth. Aside from that difficulty, he liked them. They sound to me like a less-processed version of any of the salty crunchy snacks we keep around here: potato chips/crisps; tortilla crisps/chips; Chex Mix. I'll try them sometime, if/when I get the chance.

We've changed the scenery and the trailer orientation. It's much greener here in western Arizona, a couple thousand feet higher and a couple hundred miles east of where we've spent the last few months. The sunrise has to be viewed out our back windows now. It's strange to see city lights again: still distant, but close enough to be distinct. I was disoriented when I got up last night and looked out my window and saw lights where the railyard some miles away has been for the last few months. "Why all those lights at this hour?" I wondered, "was there a derailment?" Then I remembered that we'd moved. Breaking camp was a bit of an adventure. After staying in one place for so long, we'd forgotten exactly where things go and how to fit them together. An observer would have been amused to see us puzzling over how to fold a camp chair enough to go back into its sleeve: with a Ph.D. and M.S. between us, it still took 15 minutes to get it right! At least we could laugh about it. With all that going on, we didn't take time for the usual breakfast. I made sandwiches for our breakfast and lunch, and we ate as the fit took us. After we got settled into our new digs we walked, visited with the camp host, and struggled to stay up past sunset. Neither of us was interested in elaborate dinner preparations: too tired, and not interested in a fuss or much cleanup. This is where the precooked, frozen dinners we make in batches come into play. "Chili it is!" we said. We had found his last batch lacking something -- exactly what, we weren't sure (I blame the tomatoes) but had decided to buy a bunch of fresh spices during this shopping expedition. Among the spices we purchased were a package of "mild chili powder" and a bottle of Gebhardt chili powder. We'd never heard of that brand before, and had decided to try it out. Both chili powders were good. We thought the Tampico blend might be slightly sweeter; I think it's also saltier but can't read the label well enough to be sure. For me, sour cream was the final touch to bring out the good flavors of the chili and the spices. Lesson learned: get rid of the old chili powders in my cabinet! I know the stuff goes stale; I just don't know how quickly.

That's what Dave said, but since he and JAZ had settled on rice flour I thought I'd try that first if possible.

Thanks for that. As I recall, my Bob's Red Mill rice flour (still at home) is granular, not powdery. Given my current travel circumstances, I'll settle for whatever I can find...and Asian isn't in it around here. I'll have a chance to look around tomorrow, I think, at the local Mexican market.

I've never tried that. Does it change the flavor, from what you have noticed? What does it do to the zest?