Camping, Princess Style

[Thanks for the Crepes]

Smithy,

 

This is so great, please keep sharing!

 

I have to say though, that I bought a ten pound bag of mesquite wood chunks years ago, used a few of them once, and they now languish in the pantry. I prefer hickory by a lot. Mesquite is quite flavorful, but sharp and adulterating to me, or maybe I just did it wrong. 

 

Your LVFD guys seem to use all mesquite, while I used water soaked mesquite wood chunks with regular charcoal.

 

I would never make it in Texas!  

 

Although I remember a foray into West Texas to pick a load of peaches in Grandpa's pickup truck we brought back to Louisiana to sell from under the 100 year-old oak in the front yard. He made money on it, and for the only time in my life, I was allowed to eat as many tree-ripened peaches as I pleased. By some miracle, I did not get sick. They were so perfumey good!

[Smithy]

Thanks, I discussed wood types with quite a few brisketeers in Llano, and they all used mesquite - only mesquite. They also said they all use it because that's what they have. (Mesquite is ubiquitous in that part of Texas). It burns long and steadily, and according to them is an ideal wood. "What about oak?" I asked. They didn't know, but they guessed it would burn too hot or too quickly. (Oak? Hmm.) The next day I noticed some camping neighbors with a portable smoker for a family reunion, so I asked them. They're from farther east, and they use what they are used to: oak!

I like the flavor of hickory-smoked meats too, but have never noticed a sharp unpleasant flavor from mesquite. The charcoal briquettes that I picked up once with mesquite sawdust included in the mix were another matter, however. I won't do that again.

[Smithy]

Our last brisket adventure was at Laird's Bar-B-Q & Catering. Where Cooper's is large and 7-days-a-week, Laird's is a small operation, closed on Mondays (and Tuesdays? I don't remember).  Ken and Esther Laird started this business around 40 years ago, and have built quite a name for themselves.  There's a Certificate of Appreciation from the Governor; there are newspaper articles framed.  Most of the wall art is Esther's work.  She's quite a good painter.

 

 

Ken is a lean man, and when you consider his work schedule you can see why.  He logs the mesquite, cuts and stacks it,

 

 

burns it to charcoal,

 

 

operates the pit and cooks the meat in his outdoor kitchen.  

 

His wife Esther handles the indoor jobs, with help from at least one server.

 

 

 

Ken was happy to chat with me and answer questions.  No, he doesn't use a thermometer, either for the wood or the pit or the meat. "After all these years, you can tell when it's right," he said.  He told me about a health inspector who came through once and took him to task for not knowing whether the meat was sufficiently cooked.  

 

"He was a young feller, all full of himself and wanting to make a name.  He told me, "How do you know your meat is hot enough without a thermometer?" I told him, "Give me your hand." "What?" "Give me your hand.  You want to see how hot that meat is, I'll put some in your bare hand." He decided my meat must be hot enough after all."

 

I went inside to order before food shut down for the night.  I wanted brisket, of course.  I forgot to ask Esther not to slice it, their usual way of serving, and came away with a combination of sliced and slab meat.  While Esther was preparing my order and her helper (whose name I did not get) prepared my bill, Ken came in and pointed to one of the paintings. 

 

"Nancy, did you know that Esther tells people that's a picture of me?" It was a donkey's head, next to a ristra of chili peppers.

"Well, Ken - be glad that's the end she painted!"  He laughed with delight.

 

I brought the brisket home, and we feasted again.

 

 

 

 

[Thanks for the Crepes]

Smithy,

 

That was the perfect repartee in reply to Ken's comment about the donkey painting. 

 

I also just loved the story about the "young feller, full-of-himself, health inspector".

 

Ken is one hard-working, and seemingly very personable guy.

 

You know, maybe soaking mesquite, and using it for smoking like I did is the wrong approach. I still have at least nine pounds of man-sized fist chunks, so I think I'll give it another try and burn them down to embers and try grilling maybe chicken. Perhaps there are some acrid compounds that will be burned off this way. 27 million Texans can't all be wrong about this. As I said, I probably did it wrong the first time. This wood is at least 10 years old, so that may help too.

 

I just took a whole chicken out of the freezer, so if the weather cooperates, and the crick don't rise, I'll let you know how it went, perhaps in the Dinner thread. It's been very rainy all week, so we'll see.

[Smithy]

I'll be interested to hear how it turns out, Crepes.  We went shopping today and I considered buying a bag of mesquite charcoal chunks, but decided to wait; we should have other chances at it.

 

We've moved on from brisket country, and not a moment too soon - or perhaps a few moments too late - for our waistlines! We used up our leftovers on the day we moved.  This was in part because I wanted something fairly easy, but also to remove the temptation.  

 

On Sunday evenings the only brisket place still open is Cooper's, and that's no hardship.  I also bought sausage, having discovered that they had supplied the sausage served at the LVFD fundraising feast.  

 

 

The brisket was gone by the time we moved on, but I'd kept that luscious smoked sausage in reserve.  I also had bread left over from a baking course I'm taking online.  

 

 

The mise:

 

 

The stovetop view:

 

 

Dinner:

 

I had bruschetta on the brain.

 

 

 

We'll be eating more lightly for a while now. 

 

 

 

 

 

[Smithy]

It's seafood time now!

 

 

One of our home dishes:

 

 

A local restaurant's fare...

 

All You Can Eat Fish

 

and

All You Can Eat Oysters

 

and one of their wall decorations (made from beer bottle caps - and the entire mosaic encased in, we think, acrylic):

 

 

[JohnT]

Smithy, a large cup of those oysters and you can make the most diliscious oyster pâté to go with that supurb looking bread you made - a five minute job!

[rotuts]

Soooooo

 

where is that seaFood place  ?

 

All you can eat is my kind of place.  too bad they didn't have oysters on the 1/2 shell   Im pretty sure I can  eat those faster than most can shuck them

 

and those are the largest  Shrimp or Prawns ive ever seen !

 

on a historical note, I have that exact same colander, unless you snuck into My Place and stoled it

 

it was my mothers and is older than I am !

 

[Smithy]

Smithy, a large cup of those oysters and you can make the most diliscious oyster pâté to go with that supurb looking bread you made - a five minute job!

JohnT, please tell me more! I'd love to have a good oyster pâté recipe.

[Smithy]

rotuts, we're near Rockport, Texas on the Gulf Coast. It was almost All We Could Eat to get through that food, although we managed to share a bit more of his fish. I'm with you about oysters on the half shell! It's a while since I had the opportunity. My own oyster dishes are so hit-and-miss that I rarely buy them when we're here. I'm hoping JohnT will help rectify that. :-)

Believe it or not, those weren't the largest shrimp in the market where we shopped yesterday. This place is our favorite, but they wouldn't allow photos. Too bad. The grouper filet was huge and looked fresh; they had other good-looking fish but no triple-tail, so I stuck to local shrimp. These were white Bay shrimp, caught the night before not far away. It defeats the purpose to buy a lot of very fresh shrimp and then not cook it all at once, but I did anyway, so we'll be having more shrimp for dinner tonight.

That colander was once *my* mother's!

[ElsieD]

Sure wish we could get shrimp like that. And brisket. And sausage. It's 8:54 AM and I'm sitting here drooling.

[Shelby]

Me too.  I have some decent shrimp frozen.  What sauce did you put on yours, Smithy?  It looks like a bit of asparagus was in there too?  

[JohnT]

JohnT, please tell me more! I'd love to have a good oyster pâté recipe.

This is the easiest and quickest pâté recipe you will find. I make it quite often when doing seafood platters. Mostly I use canned oysters but have resorted to steamed ones when canned are not available. It gets many compliments and requests for the recipe.

OYSTER PÂTÉ

Ingredients:

1 x 225 g can oysters in salt water, drained or 1 large cup steamed oysters

5 ml lemon juice

1 slice of onion, chopped

a little freshly ground pepper

100 ml melted butter

Method:

Put all ingredients into blender and buzz just once or twice, to chop coarsely, then pot and chill about 4 hours.

Serve with unbuttered whole wheat bread or hot toast.

Alternative:

You can also do this recipe with 1 x 290 g can shelled baby clams instead of the oysters. You'll agree that it should then be called Clam Pâté.

Enjoy!

[Smithy]

Thanks, JohnT. I expect another chance at oysters in a couple of days, and look forward to trying this.

Shelby, the shrimp was my first attempt at Caramel Shrimp from the book Dining with Headhunters: Jungle Feasts & Other Culinary Adventures, by Richard Sterling. The recipe is a Vietnamese treatment that looked complicated but turned out to be very easy, even the first time through, despite some surprises at step 1 below:

1. Make caramelized sugar water by cooking a 1:1 sugar/water mixture until the sugar caramelizes, then dilute with twice the original amount of water and a touch of lemon;

2. Make a stir-fry sauce by mixing some of that caramel water with fish sauce and more sugar;

3. Stir-fry a little garlic, add the shrimp, toss with the sauce, and cook until the shrimp are glazed.

He doesn't say what the shrimp should be served with; that's probably one of those things that any fool familiar with Southeast Asian food would just know. In the absence of many small dishes I opted for rice, and during the last few minutes of the rice cooking I set the asparagus atop the rice to steam gently. That trick worked out well, and I'll do it again.

By the way, I love this book. It's full of fun stories as well as interesting recipes, and it's one of the few cookbooks I've read straight through - laughing aloud in some parts, and crying in others. This is the first recipe I've tried from the book that wasn't brilliant the first time through. Somehow the sauce didn't seem very balanced to me - the fish sauce came through too strongly. Despite all the sugar it isn't a sweet dish. I think that with a little adjustment - maybe just better fish sauce on my part - I think it will be outstanding.

[Thanks for the Crepes]

Hey Smithy,

 

Do you recall the name of the all-you-can-eat seafood restaurant where you ate in/near Rockport, TX? I went on yelp and Google to search, and too much stuff came up to even make a guess, and I cannot seem to get this out of my mind.

 

My first husband and I used to enjoy AYCE seafood dinners at the Hungry Fisherman (Shoney's subsidiary, now defunct) when we lived in Memphis, TN. We had to go over the state line into Mississippi IIRC to get it. I'm certain that at my age I probably couldn't get my money's worth with AYCE anything like I did when I was in my early twenties, but the idea and the memories it evokes are really grabbing a hold of me. 

 

One of the best parts of the Hungry Fisherman experience to me was going out on the huge back deck over their small lake and feeding the geese, ducks, koi and monster catfish our leftover hushpuppies and fries. They had lights rigged so you could see the beautiful color patterns of the koi and the giant catfish breaking the water to get their treats

 

The Hungry Fisherman of old is also the place I had my own very first Maine lobster. I did not appreciate it when the waitress clipped a bib around my neck, but when I started digging in, I definitely understood. 

[Smithy]

Thanks for the Crepes, the name of the place in Rockport was Pop's Place.  They don't have anything like a deck, but it seems to be sort of a neighborhood hangout.

 

I remember my first few experiences with lobsta in New England - bib and all, and I too could see why!  It's messy but good.  It's been a while since I had lobsta, though: 7 years, perhaps, since I was in the right location? 

[Smithy]

We left Rockport with the intention of staying on Galveston Island for a couple of days, only to find the park full.  Fortunately, Allex's Seafood Market was open when we passed through on the way farther north.  They don't mind photos.  

 

 

This place is smaller than the Rockport market but is very nice, with friendly people.  It smells clean, unlike many fish markets that we've wandered into and promptly left.  These photos are unfortunately not very informative because everything is so nicely covered.  On the fish counter side they had drum, redfish, flounder, Scottish salmon, farmed tilapia and one or two others I've forgotten. I'd been hoping for grouper, which they didn't have that day (they usually do).  I chose to ignore the fish this time around.  It looked good, but didn't fit my agenda.

 

 

On the shellfish side they had 3 sizes of Gulf brown shrimp, freshly shucked Galveston Bay oysters, crab meat (both lump and claw).  I looked hard at the crab meat, but since I still had some from the last stop I just stuck to the oysters. 

 

 

In the freezer section they carry a tantalizing selection of Cajun foods from some clever company not far away in Louisiana.

 

 

I really, really wanted to buy one of these chickens, boned (except for the wings) and stuffed with dirty rice, or jambalaya (your choice):

 

 

It took all my won't power to resist.  We have no room for it.  Maybe this summer I'll try making it myself, or maybe we'll manage this another time.

 

I got more shrimp - a last hurrah -

 

 

and freshly-shucked oysters to make JohnT's oyster pâté.

 

[Smithy]

One of the ways off Galveston Island is to take the ferry to the Bolivar Peninsula, a sand spit that almost - but not quite - connects Texas to Louisiana.  The ferry ride is a very entertaining 20 minute chance to watch dolphins, pelicans, gulls, ships and enthusiastic tourists.  Once across, you find yourself on low land that was scrubbed almost clean by Hurricane Ike a few years ago.  Communities are rebuilding, but there's also open beach where you can just camp, for a $10 annual permit.  This is a typical view out the window:

 

 

We had shrimp from Allex's and I had plans for it, but while I was shelling the shrimp the skies to the north turned darker and a light show began. Judging by the radar, people directly under that series of storms probably didn't appreciate them as much as we did.  I refrigerated the shrimp, left the roasting brussels sprouts to their own devices, and went outside to enjoy the show.  Lightning backlit clouds, or occasionally zapped into view; sometimes the entire sky to the north was backlit at once.  I couldn't get a photo.  When we finally came in, we were glad of leftover lentil stew that I made some time ago and didn't write about.  It's easy and delicious, and one recipe makes a lot.

 

 

 

The sprouts were good, too. I think Franci was the person to put me onto roasting sprouts, but I can't swear to the source.

 

 

 

 

 

[Smithy]

So much fresh seafood, so little time!  I used a day when we didn't need to move to mess around in the kitchen, while the surf roared and we enjoyed the view.  The previous night's storm had brought the trawlers closer to shore than usual.

 

 

We've had calm weather here, but only rarely: just enough to lure us back most years for another try.  This time, we got our exercise simply opening the door enough to go through.

 

Over on the "Dinner 2015 (Part 2)" topic, liamsaunt was gracious enough to share her recipe for creamy avocado dressing.  I had the ingredients and the time.  This is a keeper!

 

 

 

The shrimp I'd peeled the night before, then not cooked, needed treatment.  It became ceviche.

 

 

I steamed oysters (except for a couple I snitched raw) then mixed up JohnT's oyster pâté for another night.

 

 

Finally, I mixed up crab cakes for dinner.

 

 

Crab cakes, ceviche and bread were seafood overkill, but that's why we come to the Gulf!

 

[Shelby]

Oh YUM.  I love ceviche.  And oysters.  And crab cakes.  It's hard living in the middle of Kansas.  Sigh.

[Smithy]

Shelby, judging by your posts, you do very well in the middle of Kansas!  But I know what you mean about seafood.  I always have mixed feelings about leaving the area.

 

We aren't finished with seafood, but we've left the Gulf Coast with its stilted houses

 

 

and its waterborne sunrises.

 

 

Dinner the night of our departure was fresh bread,

 

 

JohnT's excellent oyster pâté

 

and leftover ceviche.

 

 

JohnT, thank you for your recipe!

[Smithy]

On the way off the peninsula, we stopped at a produce stand.  This was the haul:

 

 

[ElsieD]

I want some of those tomatoes! They look amazing.

[Smithy]

ElsieD, they're pretty good tasting, too.  I've been eating them for breakfast and incorporating them into dinner or salads.

 

 

Sometimes the best plans don't work out.  We don't like making reservations for campgrounds and usually don't have to.  This time there was no room in a National Forest campground a short drive from the Gulf, and we had a longer drive than planned.  We lit for the night in northern Texas.  It rained. This was dinner:

 

 

and this was the view in the morning: 

 

Our next proposed stop was also wet; it rained and stormed much of the night.  This campground has a number of sites marked with caution signs that they're prone to flash flooding, and we were glad to have chosen one on higher ground.

 

 

Still, all that water coming out of the sky has its benefits:

 

Dinner used more of those tomatoes, a mystery sausage and smashed potatoes:

 

Edited to remove duplicate photo

 

[Smithy]

I don't know whether we'll get to this before we arrive home, but I'm looking for ideas.  This bag of shelled king crab legs is one of our few remaining purchases from the Gulf.  What's the best thing to do with them?  

 

 

I think they must already be cooked, since the shells are off.  If I'm correct, that means (a) a gentle warming, with (b) some good sauce.  I'm thinking along the lines of garlic/butter lemon for some and ginger/soy for more.  What else should I consider?