Camping, Princess Style

[lindag]

12 minutes ago, ElsieD said:

14 minutes ago, ElsieD said:

 

Love pork shoulder.  I make one with an apple gravy.

Correction:  my error, the recipe I mentioned is not for the slow cooker in case anyone was looking for it.

[Smithy]

23 hours ago, lindag said:

Please do, I just brought home a pork shoulder that I'm going to make later in the week.  I found a CI recipe for Slow cooker pork roast with mushroom gravy...and it looks great!

 

22 hours ago, ElsieD said:

 

Love pork shoulder.  I make one with an apple gravy.

 

Glad to oblige, although I should perhaps explain that according to my darling there is only One. True. Way. to cook pork shoulder. No experimentation is allowed. I have been known to carve the bone-in section into chunks to be marinated, then skewered, then grilled as souvlaki. I have to do it when he isn't looking. He loves the results, but hates the thought of letting a good pork shoulder be not-roasted! 😄

 

Cut potatoes into more or less a medium dice. The size may be arbitrary, but we find that relatively small chunks cook perfectly in the meat juice. He slices the potatoes into rounds 3/4" or so thick, then runs them through the 1/2" grate of an alligator chopper. How many potatoes you need depends on the size of the pot you'll be using and the size of the roast. There must be enough diced potatoes to cover the bottom of the pot, and of course you'll want enough for leftovers. There should also be enough to prevent the roast from touching the sides of the pot, but the side potatoes should not go much higher than an inch above the bottom layer. Otherwise they're likely to be underdone when the roast is ready.

Cover the bottom of a heavy lidded pot - we use enameled cast-iron - with the potatoes. Rub the roast liberally with Lipton's Onion Soup Mix and generous amounts of freshly ground cumin. (Grind the cumin yourself, or open a fresh package. Ground cumin, convenient though it may be, has a shelf life of about 2 hours. Well, maybe 2 days.) Put the meat atop the potatoes, fat side up. Add any extra potatoes around the edge of the pot so there's no contact between the meat and the pot. If there's any onion soup mix left, pour it over the meat and potatoes. If you have a meat probe, put it into the middle of the roast.

 

Put the lid on, and put the pot into an oven around 325 - 350F. (We're still a bit fuzzy on the numbers. We've learned that if we set the oven as low as it will go - 275F can be achieved here - the potatoes won't get done before doomsday.) Set the meat alarm, if you're using such a thing, for 160F.

 

Go about your business.

 

An hour or two later, the meat temperature will have risen to 160F. Turn off the heat, pull the pot out of the oven, and let the meat rest, covered. It will come up to about 170F. 

 

The pot will have its own juice, the potatoes will be done beautifully, and the pork will be perfectly roasted. Happy eating! 

 

 

But don't even think about treating the roast differently.

 

Mind you, I'm only complaining a little. The result is delicious and marvellously tender, and the leftovers are delicious and tender, and we both love this treatment. I recommend the times, temperatures and general treatment.

 

I just feel slightly straitjacketed.

Edited December 30, 2021 by Smithy
Grammar (log)

[Smithy]

I think @ElsieD asked once about Lipton's Onion Soup mix. Here's what we keep on hand. It's actually marketed under the name Lipton Recipe Secrets these days.

 

 

We like the Golden Onion (and no cumin) on beef chuck roasts, and the regular Onion on pork roasts. The Golden Onion is a smoother mix, without the obvious chunks of onion that the regular mix has.

[heidih]

That stuff, like Lawry's Seasoning Salt was a childhood backbone. The dip of course made us kids more than happy to help with "entertaining". When I married at 21 I could bake like a dream but had done little savory cooking. My first meal was turkey legs sprinkled with the regular onion mix. May have been a little red wine in the roaster. Low and slow for several hours. He raved. I was put in charge of dinner- and I gave his Mastering the Art of French Cooking a good work-out progressing to volume 2 over time. Plus of course everything interesting at the library.  On the meat not touching the pan - reasoning? 

[Smithy]

56 minutes ago, heidih said:

That stuff, like Lawry's Seasoning Salt was a childhood backbone. The dip of course made us kids more than happy to help with "entertaining". When I married at 21 I could bake like a dream but had done little savory cooking. My first meal was turkey legs sprinkled with the regular onion mix. May have been a little red wine in the roaster. Low and slow for several hours. He raved. I was put in charge of dinner- and I gave his Mastering the Art of French Cooking a good work-out progressing to volume 2 over time. Plus of course everything interesting at the library.  On the meat not touching the pan - reasoning? 

 

The business about the meat not touching the pan began with cooking roasts in our crockpots: the meat that touched the crock would overcook and dry out. We've carried it over into oven cookery, and without having done rigorous testing it also seems to matter. Our theory is that the cooking vessel - whether metal or crock - transmits too much heat to the meat with direct contact. The potatoes act as an insulator.

 

I think the very first chip-dip that I liked was a package of Hidden Valley Ranch Dressing (the powder) stirred into a pint of sour cream. That was in college. Shortly thereafter I discovered Lipton's Onion Soup Mix stirred into sour cream. I felt so sophisticated! 😄 I'm impressed that you worked your way all the way through those volumes of Julia's!

[Anna N]

1 hour ago, Smithy said:

It's actually marketed under the name Lipton Recipe Secrets these days.

You should team up with @weinooand his copy of Peg Brackens “I Hate to Cook” book. If memory serves me she had a wonderful recipe for pot roast with onion soup mix. 

[Smithy]

19 minutes ago, Anna N said:

You should team up with @weinooand his copy of Peg Brackens “I Hate to Cook” book. If memory serves me she had a wonderful recipe for pot roast with onion soup mix. 

 

It wouldn't surprise me a bit if that turned out to be true. @weinoo, what do you say?

[MaryIsobel]

1 hour ago, Anna N said:

You should team up with @weinooand his copy of Peg Brackens “I Hate to Cook” book. If memory serves me she had a wonderful recipe for pot roast with onion soup mix. 

This was my mom's go to for pot roast when she wouldn't be around to supervise her pressure cooker version. I made it for my husband when first married and it is his gold standard for pot roast. I tried to up my game in later years with red wine, shallots, mushrooms... anything but onion soup mix but it remains his #1 favourite pot roast. What can I say? He's easy to please.

[chromedome]

4 hours ago, MaryIsobel said:

This was my mom's go to for pot roast when she wouldn't be around to supervise her pressure cooker version. I made it for my husband when first married and it is his gold standard for pot roast. I tried to up my game in later years with red wine, shallots, mushrooms... anything but onion soup mix but it remains his #1 favourite pot roast. What can I say? He's easy to please.

Yup, people like what they like. My sweetie's preferred meatloaf consists of ground beef and onion soup mix. That's it, other than the obligatory ketchup glaze.

[Smithy]

I've been delinquent in this blog, partly because of many (mostly good) non-food events in our lives and partly because I've posted elsewhere about triumphs like my first pecan pies, my first cinnamon rolls, my first chicken wings. (If you haven't checked out eG Cook-Off #88: Wings, please do so!) Still, those of you who are stuck in the cold and/or snow might enjoy a glimpse of life here in the desert. This is today's sunrise. At the Solstice, the sun cleared the mountains on the right side of that big notch. The days are getting noticeably longer.

 

 

I have in mind several shopping trips to show you what's happening in Yuma grocery stores, but they will likely come piecemeal as so many of my posts do these days. We're starting to see gaps in the grocery store shelves. Whether that's due to the increasing supply chain difficulty or staffing difficulty or simply our bad timing, I don't know. It's startling, nonetheless. We're hardly in danger of starving, but haven't always been able to get what we want.

 

 

The amazing and rising cost of beef took us aback yesterday. It's a good thing he prefers pork. There isn't likely to be a corned beef brisket this March!

 

 

A favorite restaurant that had closed last year has reopened, and a favorite taco stand I discovered last year has disappeared. The pandemic continues to affect us all. I may be able to write about the restaurant later. 

 

Next up: convenience foods, and flexibility.

 

[Smithy]

It will be clear to any readers of this blog that my darling favors simplicity in cooking. Since we more or less take turns cooking, we've been eating a lot of hash, Superburgers and tube steaks. Most of it has been cooked inside for the last few weeks, due to cool outdoor temperatures, but recently we had a campfire again.

 

 

I'd forgotten all about the Kiolbassa brand Polish sausage! Those sausages are far better than any others I've tasted. I hope I'll be able to find them again when we start heading east. The vegetables were the remnants of a curried vegetable dish I made sometime last week: well worth repeating, if I can remember what I did. 

 

In the name of simplicity he's been campaigning for us to keep frozen breaded fish on hand that can be put under the broiler and cooked quickly. I've resisted the idea, partly because I'm a scratch cook and partly because we still have a LOT of fish in the freezer. But I acquiesced, and went looking on one of my solo shopping trips. I'm out at the east end of Yuma at least once a week these days, and the Fry's grocery store at that end of town is quite upscale. I looked, and found a wide variety of frozen seafood, some looking quite tempting...

 

 

...but no frozen ocean perch. At last I found, and purchased, this:

 

 

Not ocean perch, but flat and thin, breaded. Convenience food. We put it in the freezer when I got home.

 

Now, in the immortal words of Arlo Guthrie, I told you that story so I could tell you this one.  

 

Yesterday I surprised him by announcing that I was cooking even though it wasn't my turn. We have chorizo. We have stale bread in the freezer from our stay in Texas(!) last November. We have shredded cheese, and eggs. I wanted a frittata.

 

What we didn't have was milk, unless I was ready to settle for canned condensed milk. We could have done that, but I was also out of half-and-half for my coffee and I didn't want to settle. We left for town in the afternooon, with a list of errands: buy groceries, post mail, return a DVD to the library, drop off recycling. Get haircuts if we could. It's a 70-mile round trip at minimum, and we should have left earlier than we did.

 

Can you see where this is going? It got late. We managed to get all the errands run (including haircuts, the most difficult part of the trip) but I was tired. I announced somewhere along the way that it was going to be tuna noodle hot dish, never mind the frittata. He was amused.

 

We got home, did our late afternoon chores, unpacked everything. I was VERY tired. It seemed a good time to try the fish filets. He was VERY amused at the way my plans and ambition degenerated as the day wore on! 😄

 

 

("Hurry," he said when I was snapping this photo, "I can't keep my gut sucked in forever!")

 

The verdict: as a matter of fact, these were quite good, dead easy, and delicious. They were even easier than his hash and quicker than his tube steaks or burgers, and (don't tell him I said this) a refreshing change from any of them. We'll be keeping these around!

 

But he was still tweaking me this morning for my elastic ambition! 😄

 

 

[heidih]

I am not familiar with the term "tube steaks".  Can you elaborate on your version?

[Kim Shook]

1 minute ago, heidih said:

I am not familiar with the term "tube steaks".  Can you elaborate on your version?

Not @Smithy, but I'm pretty sure it refers to hot dogs and such things.  At least that's what I mean when I use the term.

 

[heidih]

1 minute ago, Kim Shook said:

Not @Smithy, but I'm pretty sure it refers to hot dogs and such things.  At least that's what I mean when I use the term.

 

I did not google and your reply was not what I could have concocted in my overactive mind

[Smithy]

10 minutes ago, heidih said:

I am not familiar with the term "tube steaks".  Can you elaborate on your version?

 

8 minutes ago, Kim Shook said:

Not @Smithy, but I'm pretty sure it refers to hot dogs and such things.  At least that's what I mean when I use the term.

 

 

5 minutes ago, heidih said:

I did not google and your reply was not what I could have concocted in my overactive mind

 

Thanks, Kim! Yes, I just meant any sort of meat stuffed into sausage shapes. Hot dogs, Polish sausage, brats, and their ilk. 

[Shelby]

1 hour ago, Smithy said:

It will be clear to any readers of this blog that my darling favors simplicity in cooking. Since we more or less take turns cooking, we've been eating a lot of hash, Superburgers and tube steaks. Most of it has been cooked inside for the last few weeks, due to cool outdoor temperatures, but recently we had a campfire again.

 

 

I'd forgotten all about the Kiolbassa brand Polish sausage! Those sausages are far better than any others I've tasted. I hope I'll be able to find them again when we start heading east. The vegetables were the remnants of a curried vegetable dish I made sometime last week: well worth repeating, if I can remember what I did. 

 

In the name of simplicity he's been campaigning for us to keep frozen breaded fish on hand that can be put under the broiler and cooked quickly. I've resisted the idea, partly because I'm a scratch cook and partly because we still have a LOT of fish in the freezer. But I acquiesced, and went looking on one of my solo shopping trips. I'm out at the east end of Yuma at least once a week these days, and the Fry's grocery store at that end of town is quite upscale. I looked, and found a wide variety of frozen seafood, some looking quite tempting...

 

 

...but no frozen ocean perch. At last I found, and purchased, this:

 

 

Not ocean perch, but flat and thin, breaded. Convenience food. We put it in the freezer when I got home.

 

Now, in the immortal words of Arlo Guthrie, I told you that story so I could tell you this one.  

 

Yesterday I surprised him by announcing that I was cooking even though it wasn't my turn. We have chorizo. We have stale bread in the freezer from our stay in Texas(!) last November. We have shredded cheese, and eggs. I wanted a frittata.

 

What we didn't have was milk, unless I was ready to settle for canned condensed milk. We could have done that, but I was also out of half-and-half for my coffee and I didn't want to settle. We left for town in the afternooon, with a list of errands: buy groceries, post mail, return a DVD to the library, drop off recycling. Get haircuts if we could. It's a 70-mile round trip at minimum, and we should have left earlier than we did.

 

Can you see where this is going? It got late. We managed to get all the errands run (including haircuts, the most difficult part of the trip) but I was tired. I announced somewhere along the way that it was going to be tuna noodle hot dish, never mind the frittata. He was amused.

 

We got home, did our late afternoon chores, unpacked everything. I was VERY tired. It seemed a good time to try the fish filets. He was VERY amused at the way my plans and ambition degenerated as the day wore on! 😄

 

 

("Hurry," he said when I was snapping this photo, "I can't keep my gut sucked in forever!")

 

The verdict: as a matter of fact, these were quite good, dead easy, and delicious. They were even easier than his hash and quicker than his tube steaks or burgers, and (don't tell him I said this) a refreshing change from any of them. We'll be keeping these around!

 

But he was still tweaking me this morning for my elastic ambition! 😄

 

 

Super glad for the update.  I think of you guys quite often and wonder what you're up to   .

 

I have "elastic ambition" (I'm stealing this phrase--I love it) on days when I'm doing a whole lot of nothing, so I think you're allowed after that big of a day to change your mind!  No hair cut for me since March of 2020.  I wind it up on my head and look like hell, but I don't care lol.  Glad you guys were able to feel comfortable and get in to see someone.  Ronnie has been cutting his own hair and he does really well at it.  I REALLY need mine done, but I'm just not ready to do so yet.  Covid is just rampant here.

 

I love the breaded fish idea.  I like stuff like that and it's easy AND no frying.  We have too much in the freezer for me to even fit something like that in lol.

 

Ugh, the shortages are not good.  Wow and that corned beef price.  I'll have to have Ronnie sit down before I share that with him.    I don't know if you have or could find a cheaper roast, but you could start early and brine your own corned beef--if you had a place to store it, that is.  Maybe you could find a tiny roast and do it in a ziplock, rotating it occasionally....

 

 

[Dave the Cook]

1 hour ago, Smithy said:

I'd forgotten all about the Kiolbassa brand Polish sausage! Those sausages are far better than any others I've tasted.

 

Kiolbasa is one of our favorite smoked sausages, too, even at their relatively high prices. Among store brands of bacon, we also far prefer Kiobasa, which unlike most widely-distributed bacon, is dry-cured -- and also rather expensive. Bacon, however, is no place to skimp.

[Smithy]

8 minutes ago, Dave the Cook said:

 

Kiolbasa is one of our favorite smoked sausages, too, even at their relatively high prices. Among store brands of bacon, we also far prefer Kiobasa, which unlike most widely-distributed bacon, is dry-cured -- and also rather expensive. Bacon, however, is no place to skimp.

 

I agree about bacon. Kiolbassa must have a broader distribution than I thought. Thanks for the good news; I'll keep an eye out for them! 

[kayb]

Pre-breaded fish fillets are also a quick and easy start to fish tacos.

 

[Porthos]

19 hours ago, Smithy said:

Thanks, Kim! Yes, I just meant any sort of meat stuffed into sausage shapes. Hot dogs, Polish sausage, brats, and their ilk. 

For my Sweetie and I tube steaks only mean hot dogs. I consider hot dogs snacks food; Polish, bratwurst, etc. are meal foods. Typing this has inspired me to make brats and potato pancakes for dinner tonight.

 

The one exception to hot dogs for meals is beanie-wienee, cooked to have with our grandchildren, 3 and 7. It's cut up hot dogs in Ranch Style brand beans, with shredded sharp cheddar and sour cream as optional toppings.

[gfweb]

48 minutes ago, Porthos said:

For my Sweetie and I tube steaks only mean hot dogs. I consider hot dogs snacks food; Polish, bratwurst, etc. are meal foods. Typing this has inspired me to make brats and potato pancakes for dinner tonight.

 

The one exception to hot dogs for meals is beanie-wienee, cooked to have with our grandchildren, 3 and 7. It's cut up hot dogs in Ranch Style brand beans, with shredded sharp cheddar and sour cream as optional toppings.

We do brats, potato pancake and apple-braised red cabbage frequently.

[FauxPas]

1 hour ago, kayb said:

Pre-breaded fish fillets are also a quick and easy start to fish tacos.

 

 

Yes! I really liked the Trader Joe's halibut fillets for this. Used to keep some in the freezer pretty much all the time. A little pricier than some other fish perhaps, but we liked them a lot. 

 

[Anna N]

22 hours ago, Smithy said:

 

I agree about bacon. Kiolbassa must have a broader distribution than I thought. Thanks for the good news; I'll keep an eye out for them! 

Sometimes I practically live on kielbasa. I slice it and fry it. I cube it and make a hash with it. It often works as a protein in a large salad. I can make a sandwich with it. I love to have a chub in my fridge. 

[Porthos]

6 hours ago, gfweb said:

...  and apple-braised red cabbage frequently.

For us this is a holiday/special dinner dish.  It graced our Christmas dinner table.

Edited January 18, 2022 by Porthos
Random unwanted word. (log)

[Smithy]

The northward march of the sunrise is accelerating. I didn't get a picture, but this morning the sun came up at the tippy-top of that leftward peak. This is yesterday's sunrise. For those of you in the far cold north, take heart! The days are getting longer!

 

 

I wrote about the oven-baked breaded fish success a few posts ago. On the one hand they were quite the hit with both of us; on the other hand he kept wishing I could find ocean perch - which is even thinner, he said, and which came out crispier. I wondered whether he actually wanted to taste any fish between the breading, but I went looking during my last trip to town. I couldn't find although I'd gone to the local Walmart. (Incidentally, they also had large gaps in their stock.) I came away with what I thought was a different Gorton's coating on the pollock. It, er, turned out to be more of the same as I'd bought before. No matter! We both like it, we'll get through it...

 

 

...except this time, I wasn't as crazy about it. I can't imagine what might have been different. Maybe last time around I just had lower expectations! The hash browns were good, though, and got a package of shredded potatoes (from last October!) out of the freezer finally.

 

The wind is howling today, and we'll either hunker down in the trailer or go on a road trip. Whatever we cook will be inside tonight. Last night was calm, clear and beautiful, and I finally got my strata! I cooked the chorizo and onions on the camp stove outside, then assembled and baked everything inside in the oven.

 

 

 

It seems I forgot to take a money shot. Trust me, it was good. The leftovers will be good too.