Smithy

Definitely not enough!! 🤣

Goshalmighty, it's cold here. Not that it's cold by our standards at home, or most of the rest of the country, but it's been blowing hard and getting down toward freezing. Two nights ago (Valentine's Day) we closed the tailgate to keep the wind out and the heat in. The next morning, we saw that it had rained...and then frozen. That's ice on the side deck rail and chair cushions. When we looked out the other window, we saw that the nearest tree, with our hummingbird feeder, had lost a couple of huge branches. There's more destruction up and down the wash from us. Valentine's Day dinner was not at all the fancy affair I'd intended, between needing to batten down the hatches and both of us being sick. We had plenty of good leftovers. But last night! Last night, I got to play with fire! I've had a bee in my bonnet about flaming things over the stove since a New York Times article came out about it, with recipes for Steak Diane, Cherries Jubilee, and one other recipe. I thought this Melissa Clark recipe for Creamy Pan-Roasted Scallops with Fresh Tomatoes was one of the recipes in question. It wasn't. That's all right, though: I had everything I needed, except the scallops, and had decided to substitute shrimp. This is a great recipe. Start with thinly sliced shallots and chopped tomatoes. Season with salt, pepper and celery seeds, and cook in butter until the shallots are translucent and the tomatoes are cooking down to a jammy consistency. She gives several options for liquid to add here: broth, wine, vermouth. I added VSOP brandy instead, then said "flame on!" That is So. Much. Fun! Add heavy cream and Worcestershire sauce. Cook it down until it thickens properly, then add the scallops (or, in this case, shrimp that I'd cut into 2 or 3 pieces each). Cook until the seafood is done. This step doesn't take long, so now is the time to put down the toast and do whatever else needs doing to have the table ready. Garnish with parsley or chives. I had neither; I used tarragon. Perfect! There's a bit of rice under the concoction. It was a nice complement; you need something to soak up that sauce. Toast worked for him, of course. By golly, I've found another do-it-again-and-again recipe!

Seen on the highway yesterday:

Requiem for a whisk(e)y glass My darling loves a drink of scotch or bourbon, usually just before going to bed. He has very specific standards as to size: it must be of a certain narrowness so that when he puts in ONE ice cube, then pours just enough of the amber liquid to barely float that ice cube, he has the right amount of drink. I don't know what that quantity is. I don't think he does either. But it's his ritual, and then the objective is to drink at just the right pace so that the ice and the drink finish together. One year we forgot to pack his preferred glass, so I had excuse reason to ramble the stores of Llano on our first stop that fall. I wrote about it here. I found a very nice set of 5 glasses that were just the right size for him. (The "Big Shot" glass I bought at Charley's Hardware and Gifts, for considerably more money, is cute...but too big.) I took this picture when the 5th glass was already in his hand. Well, it turns out they're pretty fragile. By this fall we were down to a single glass. I've been watching a crack propagate along it. "It's still fine!" he said. "I'll be careful!" So he's continued to use it. A day or two ago, it finally succumbed. Alas, poor glass, we loved you well. Fortunately, we came prepared with an alternate from home. Whether he'll decide it's Just the Right Size, or give me another excuse to go bargain hunting, remains to be seen.

FWIW, I didn't find it very hot. I'll do a more thorough test and description, if you'd like. (i can even do it with and without meat. We acquired Yet More Pork Ribs today. 🙄 )

I enjoy the cheekiness of the book, but I can understand how it might rub someone else the wrong way. For example, the subtitle of the recipe I just cooked is "Scandal: Stew ingredients escape pot, flee for ripple of heat under broiler". I don't have the book any more (my library loan expired) but there were some others that made me laugh aloud.

Dinner last night was from Ali Slagle's I Dream of Dinner (so you don't have to) (eG-friendly Amazon.com link). That really is a lovely book. I commented here that it's a charming book with both advantages and drawbacks. I love its creative approach, except when I'm looking for a specific recipe using a specific ingredient...which, unfortunately, is the way I normally use cookbooks. The recipe for Crispy Grains with Kielbasa & Cabbage looked like a good way to use up a lot of my red cabbage. Among the variations was substituting beans for grains; this looked like a good reason to cook up a bunch of brown tepary beans from my stash way in the back of the cabinet. (I shot this picture after pulling out the front 2 rows of canisters, along with whatever was atop the bean canister.) Tepary beans are native to the Desert Southwest, and I've picked them up in past years when we visited near the Tohono O'odham lands. There more information about them here. They cook quickly -- at least, they usually do, but these are several years old and took a while. That's all right, though; it was cool and I didn't mind having a couple of burners helping to heat the trailer. (The second burner was cooking chickpeas, but I've spared the chickpea-haters here any photos of it. 😉 ) So, back to Ali Slagle's recipe: it's a single sheet-pan dinner, although things get done in stages. Toss the beans with olive oil; broil until they're starting to brown and crackle; set aside. Toss thinly-sliced red cabbage and coarsely chopped kielbasa with yet more olive oil, and salt and pepper, then broil until theyre beginning to brown. Return the beans to the mix, broil enough to rewarm if necessary; toss with vinegar. Serve with sour cream that's had horseradish added to it. I tell you, this one's a winner! Even my darling, who generally prefers his meat to be obviously identifiable, thought it was good. I may have to buy that darned book! In other news: we desperately need rain. It rained yesterday in Yuma, and about 5 miles south of us, but nothing fell here. There's another chance today. Despite the dryness, if you look carefully during walks there's color to be seen. We also occasionally manage to find more color for our campfire ring. Maybe someday we'll feel like using it again.

@rotuts I applaud your protesting the clamshells, and @blue_dolphin it's nice to see more environmentally friendly packaging at your store! As for the question of cutting the wraps, I suspect there are two reasons: first, you can actually see how much of what is inside (because the ends usually tell nothing; second, some customers -- me, for instance -- might want half for now and half later, or might want to split a wrap with someone else.

Thanks for that information sheet, @chromedome! That fish is more speckled than the ones I'm used to seeing, but I'm no fish expert. I like to eat 'em. Sometimes I like to catch 'em, but my ignorance of proper fishing technique has led more than once to someone's asking me, incredulously, "You caught it with THAT?" 😆 I went down a rabbit hole looking for a good answer to @Kim Shook's question before chromedome's answer popped up, and found a bit more information about that regional colloquialism. It appears that what's referred to as Lake Trout in the DelMarVa region is actually Whiting...which isn't really a fish species, but (at least there) is another name for Silver Hake. Here are a couple of good articles: Maryland Food Handler's blog post: I stand corrected...well, sort of New York Times: A Fried Favorite in Baltimore

I'm sure the Big Easy will give wonderful flavor, but don't ignored your oven! Putting potatoes beneath oven-roasted chicken (or beef, or pork) is also a wonderful way to cook them.

I broke down yesterday and bought a package of Campari tomatoes. These weren't as good as I'd hoped -- neither as juicy nor deeply flavored as I'd expected -- but they'll do. Fair in today's lunch salad. Later this week, if I have energy to cook and he has energy to eat, there will be some pan-roasted tomatoes in play. (We've been ill. 'Nuff said.) We found Yet More Pork -- some unlabeled mystery cut -- in the freezer, so on a slow day last week we tested another of the barbecue sauces that we'd bought, rather than messing with the Jack Daniels barbecue sauce. Sure, I'll be able to play with the JD and see about adjusting it, but this one starts out with a more promising ingredient list. I also unearthed a packaged marinade that's been in my spice cabinet for...years? I'm not even sure where it came from. Probably my DIL, back when they had a seasonal cabin and cleared everything out of the kitchen for the winter. This bit of pork came from a larger piece that we tentatively identified as including the skirt. I have no idea where or when we bought it, but we treated the skirt (if that's what it was) like some oversized pork steak and were reasonably happy with the result. That was a few weeks ago, when we were feeling inventive and adventuresome. This end of the pork clearly had ribs in it, all splayed like a Bear Claw pastry. I marinated it, slow-cooked it in the oven like any other ribs, and gave it a coating of the Kinder's sauce while still in the oven. It was good. The photo makes those ribs look skinny and dry, but that's the fault of the photographer (me) and not the cook (still me). We'll keep using this sauce. In other news: it's still dry as dust here, and it's raining again over on the coast!

@kayb, all of those recipes look like winners. Many thanks!

...and the black vinegar? Would, say, date vinegar work for that? (I'm getting visions of the folks who do endless substitutions, then give a poor review for a recipe. 😆)

@rotuts -- I remember those microfilm systems! Mighty useful. I wondered whether any Craig Clayborne crab cake recipes could be found in the NYTimes Cooking files, now that they've gone digital. Lo and behold, this one came up as being from around 1983. Any chance it's the right one? (It should be visible to anyone despite the paywall, since I'm a subscriber and can "give" up to 10 articles a month.) The Coach House's Deviled-Crab Cakes

Well, I'd love to be back in northern Ontario, but we're far from there, far from the Northern Lights ... although we can see Canopus, and that isn't possible from home. I try to look on the bright side. I've given up on seeing The Comet clearly, although I've spotted a greenish fuzzball a couple of nights that is probably it. Canopus, the second brightest star in the Earth's night sky, stands out clearly above the southern horizon in our evenings. I wish I could be as cheerful about cauliflower as I am about stars! So many food writers make cauliflower sound delicious! A few nights ago I fell for another recipe: Ali Slagle's Roasted Cauliflower with Crispy Parmesan, from the New York Times. (The link should allow me to share the recipe, as a gift.) It's another of those dead-easy recipes: slice the cauliflower from the root toward the crown (tear the last bits); toss with oil; season with salt and pepper; after one side is browning, flip it and sprinkle with shredded parmesan. The parmesan melts and turns crisp. Sounds good, no? My first problem was one of logistics: the Princessmobile oven has only one rack, and I wanted chicken to go with the cauliflower, which occupied an entire sheet pan. I solved the problem when I realized that one baking sheet could act as its own rack in a separate sets of slots. It was a shaky arrangement, and I wouldn't have tried it with something very messy, but it worked for this. There was a certain amount of fussing with the rack position. There was even more fussing with the chicken seasonings. I couldn't find my turmeric! I couldn't find the Berbere spice blend packages I bought last month in San Diego! So the the chicken was seasoned with cumin, salt, coriander and salty language. I have some quibbles with Slagle's recipe. If you look at the photo in the Times article, those bits of cauliflower don't look like they were sliced from the root downward, then torn at the last. I think the photo looks like florets only, and the food stylists were having their way with the recipe. The recipe was, well, okay. My darling thought it was delicious, and that's high praise from him regarding cauliflower. I thought it couldn't hold a candle to Melissa Clarks Cauliflower Shawarma that I tried last April. What we both liked about this recipe was the crispy parmesan and the browned-almost-burnt bits of cauliflower edges. I don't think this treatment will go into our regular rotation, although I'll probably apply some of its techniques. I am pleased, however, that I worked out a way to cook on two levels in the oven at once!

That's an amazing extraction method! I didn't know that was possible; I thought somehow they were anchored in the way, say, a turtle is anchored to its shell. Was that extraction method incompatible with using the flesh for ceviche? or do you just mean that you hadn't asked for the meat so they kept it for themselves?

If it's crisp enough, I can like it too. This was stiff but not crisp, if that makes any sense. Pretty tough.

Sorry! I don't mean sweetened condensed milk, but evaporated. Funny, I could have sworn the can said "condensed" but I don't have it now. It definitely wasn't the sweetened stuff.

It was cooked both skin side up and skin side down (up first, I think, so the flesh could be cooked with that crunchy cover). The skin stayed with the fish, unfortunately. If we hadn't both been sick and literally tired I'd have tried to peel the skin off, but that was a bridge too far that night. I was surprised at how good the simple orange juice marinade was, and how it complimented that particular fish. Your creamy spinach mixture sounds like a nice touch. I wish I had access to a really good fish market, but we're way too far from the ocean and from urban centers to make that feasible.

So, the bread. I couldn't get a good texture for this stuff on Sunday. As I noted before, I've made this particular recipe many times. This time it didn't want to cooperate. Maybe the flour was too dry and I needed to add more liquid. Maybe the canned condensed milk really should have been diluted. (Carnation claims that it's a straight-up substitute. I don't remember whether I believed them in the past.) Maybe the yeast was too old. I think that package is about a year old now. At any rate, it went together... ...but it did not want to loosen up enough for any stretching and folding. I tried. And I waited. And I gave it time. And my "stretching" amounted to aggressive pulling, just to get it to stretch out enough to fold over. After several hours -- it was a busy day and I was running out of energy -- I rolled it into the best ball I could. I put it into an oiled plastic bowl, covered it lightly, and left it to rise. It didn't rise much that day. I put it out on the deck to stay cool, and decided this would be a "retarded" fermentation. On Monday morning, it hadn't changed much. Maybe a little? I brought it inside but went away for the entire day on planned outings. On Monday night, it might have risen a little but was nowhere near double the size. I put it back outside. On Tuesday, we spent the day away on unplanned outings. On Wednesday, it might have had a bit of life but we were gone all day, on outings delayed by Tuesday's excursions. So every night it sat outside and every day it sat inside, in the shade. Today, Thursday, I had time to deal with it. It might have doubled in size by this morning. It was certainly firm: not overproofed, but with a pleasant "give". I had intended to cut it in two and make bread rolls with one half and sweet rolls with the other. My first sweet roll batch convinced me that i needed more practice, so I made two batches of sweet rolls: melted butter, sugar, cinnamon, chopped pecans and slightly rehydrated craisins as the filling. Lots of melted butter drizzled over the top, and in the second case more sugar and cinnamon as well. This is the second batch before baking: And the finished product. Surprise! They're good! There are way too many for us to eat at once. I hope they freeze well.

He's a beauty, Elsie! What fun!!

Yes. I've said that salmon is my favorite fish except for the shore-lunch catch. When I've had lake trout made into shore lunch -- oh, those were the days, at my friends' place up near Dryden, ON! -- that's been the best of all.

Today we're in the midst of a wind- and dust-storm, and the mountains are disappearing. Fortunately we don't have to go anywhere. We've had nonstop action for the past several days, so this is a welcome break. Sunday was our most recent stay-at-home day. My aforementioned cold was beginning to abate, I thought, although it was developing for him. ("Don't bring home any more 'presents' for me!" he begged.) In no particular order, I began a loaf of bread, cleaned out and defrosted the freezer, and did some other stuff that I've forgotten. Paid bills. Napped. Here's the before-and-after freezer: No visible gain in room, but the burger and hot dog buns that had been sitting outside in a cooler now fit. A beautiful lake trout filet resurfaced after being buried in the freezer far too long. It's been vacuum-packed and kept frozen, but it was a special treasure from friends who spend a lot of time in northern Ontario. I haven't been able to visit them there for some years, so they gave me this treat. It deserved special treatment. But what? Back when we traveled a lot more in the Princessmobile than we do now, I picked up this lovely cookbook in the gift shop of some National Park. Don't ask me which one any more, but it's traveled with us while I fantasized about reproducing some special dish from the Ahwanee in Yosemite, or the fancier lodges in Death Valley, or...well, there are a lot of great-looking recipes and photos. I haven't tried many of them. Aha! I've had this book's recipe for Orange Pecan Trout flagged for a long time. I have pecans I bought in Llano last November. The recipe is really quite easy, and begins with marinating the filet in orange juice. (Isn't lake trout gorgeous?) While it was marinating, I struggled to get my bread dough through stretches and folds so it would turn into some semblance of bread. This is an easy recipe for soft bread rolls from Peter Reinhart, and I've made it many times. You couldn't tell it by the way the dough behaved. I'll tell more about it in another post, so consider this a teaser: Back to the fish recipe: after it's done marinating, you dip it in a mixture of chopped pecans and panko crumbs. (This might have been the most difficult part: they didn't say anything about how to make that coating stick. I think I dipped the fish quickly into the heating butter, then really mashed the fish in the coating, then piled more on top.) Saute the fish filets, flip partway through, serve. I will say that the crunchy panko and pecans, browned in butter, really made this dish. They also made a beautiful topper for the pilaf I made, and the asparagus spears I'd roasted in butter in the baking dish I'd used for the marinade. Two burners and the oven were going for this, and we both were really too tired to enjoy the result, but we both agreed it was good and well worth doing again. While all this was going on, the sun set and the full moon rose at just. the. right. spot. to come up behind our neighbor's motor home. It looked for all the world as though his rig had blown a big bubble!

Lovely code! 😄

If anyone's in the market for this lovely set, I recommend you click on the link and put it on your watchlist! I did yesterday, and after a few hours I got a 20% discount offer from the seller. In other words, the seller is motivated. (And yes, I want that set and no, I have no room or use for it. I already have lovely silverware. Two sets. My family would not thank me for acquiring a third!)