Smithy

I began using Stellarium on my (Android) phone a couple of days ago. Still hasn't helped me see the comet, though. 🙂

Fun with Salmon I love salmon. It may be my favorite fish, except for almost any fish that was in the water only an hour or two ago and is now Shore Lunch. But we're far from fishing grounds and shore lunches, and we're still carrying some of the shipment from Wild Alaskan that arrived just before we left for the winter. Although salmon is one of my favorite fish varieties, it's one of my darling's least favorites. Too dry, he says, or too fishy. He almost visibly flinches when I announce salmon for dinner. I keep trying to find recipes using salmon that we'll both like. So far, with years of trying, about the only success has been pecan-crusted salmon with browned butter or, better still, sorrel sauce. Still, I persist...at least until I work my way through our present stock. Then, I think I'll stick to smoked salmon when I can find it; we both love that. A recipe from our Duluth newspaper crossed my newsfeed a few days ago, and I've had it up on a browser tab ever since: Sicilian Baked Salmon. It ticked a lot of boxes for me: easy (ha) with strong flavors that I thought might augment the salmon or, better still in his eyes, mask it. You cook a sauce of finely chopped onions, garlic, an anchovy/caper paste, tomatoes, broth, crushed red pepper, oregano and basil. Pour it over skinless salmon -- her recipe was for one large filet; I used two small -- and bake at 400F until done, 15 - 20 minutes. She says it's easy. Don't they always say it's easy? It would have been easier if I'd made the sauce in advance, as the recipe says can be done. I didn't, and evenings are often times of great distraction. And I have very little counter space, and had a lot of elements to pull together: mash the capers and anchovies together, mince the garlic and onion, and so on. He demanded that I take a picture of the Workspace In Progress; this collage shows it as he saw it from his desk, and again closer up. I was partway through assembling the sauce when I recognized it for puttanesca sauce. That's one of my favorites, and these proportions are pretty darned good. I'll keep the sauce recipe. Here was the sauce, the fish before and after, and dinner. We had leftover rice from a few nights ago, and the fish and sauce went over that. Yep. This was just what I needed. The sauce had a nice heat from the red pepper, and good salty tartness from the other ingredients. The salmon stood up to it reasonably well, but in truth the sauce would work well with chicken, lamb, a good sausage, or no meat at all. "What do you think?" I asked him. He thought the salmon was wasted because he couldn't taste it! 🤣

Are those the dumplings in the bottom photos? What are they filled with? What sauce would be used with them? I love the costumes! You did a great job of capturing the energy of the dancers.

The wind finally quit, and the skies finally cleared, and the weather finally warmed. I think this was the first campfire of our trip. Certainly it was the first time we cooked over a campfire this season. It was dead easy: tube steaks cooked over the fire. We had a combination of Farmer John's Louisiana Style Hot Sausage, Kiolbasa Polish Sausage and Kiolbasa Beef Sausage. Kiolbasa is a Texas company, and I have @Dave the Cook to thank for bringing their other sausages to my attention. I was delighted to find them out here in Yuma, since I hadn't been able to find them anywhere other than Texas before now. We included leftover vegetables in our dinners, but you can't tell it from the photo. While we were waiting for the fire to die down enough for cooking, we marveled at the night sky. Most people don't manage to see much of it: because they're inside, because they're surrounded by city lights, because they're surrounded by trees. Out here the view is unobstructed except by cloud or moonlight. Tonight was a beautiful illustration of The Plane of the Ecliptic: Venus, Jupiter, the Moon, and Mars (just out of view) all in a perfect line. The photo is cattywampus because I wanted to include our neighbors' light (bottom left) to show how far away they are.

Well. i'd never heard of Cooking Molasses or Fancy Molasses before this discussion, and I'm intrigued. My mother kept Brer Rabbit Molasses (blackstrap?) around for the occasional pie, and that's as much as I knew about it. This should tell you how often she used it: I suspect she had the same bottle of the stuff for all my growing-up years. I have several recipes for barbecue sauce (and appreciate the pointers to more recipes, @FauxPas), but so far I haven't tried making them. I should. I came to our marriage convinced that all barbecue sauce is a sweet gloppy concoction designed to ruin the flavor of good meat, whereas his assumption is that all barbecue sauces range from great to merely acceptable. I began learning about the variety in such sauces thanks to eGullet; I began experiencing them and finding some to be good as we started traveling. Hmm. I think I'll take a look at some of those recipes and see how I can use one or two to tweak that Jack Daniels stuff.

Sounds like I'll have to try it!

Ah, I noted that the comments were from 2021, but not that the original review was so old and full of misinformation. Thanks for the correction. Which leads me to wonder again whether our tastes have simply changed. But that too is another story.

Amen to that last. The explosion over the compost heap and yourself is easier to clean up! Sorry to hear about the canned goods, though. I once narrowly averted an explosion of a supposedly shelf-stable Tetrapacked feta cheese. I spotted one box expanded almost to the bursting point before it actually burst. I shudder to think of the odor and the damage to its surroundings if it had gone off before I found it!

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.