Monthly Archives: October 2017

Lamb stew

07 Saturday Oct 2017

Posted by in Food, Stew

≈ 4 Comments

Lamb stew

I saw lamb, pre-chopped, in the grocery store on my way out of Albuquerque and thought, hmm, I wonder what I could do with that? Ans: stew. Ridiculously delicious stew that I want to remember how I made.

So:

Chop up an onion and sauté it in the Instant Pot. After a couple minutes, when the onion is pretty translucent, add a couple pinches of some dried herbs: rosemary, oregano, basil. Let them sauté with the onions. Slice up two cloves of garlic and toss them in. After a couple more minutes, when the onions are getting a little bit brown but not too brown, add the lamb. Let it cook for a couple minutes, then stir it around and let it cook for a couple minutes more. Mix about a tablespoon of balsamic vinegar with a cup of water and add it to the pot, scraping up any bits that are stuck to the bottom and changing the setting from sauté to Stew. Add two chopped up red potatoes* and a large handful of baby carrots. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Close up the pot, let it cook. When the timer goes off, let the pressure release naturally for about twenty minutes.

It was seriously perfect stew. I think it was the insta-pot, not anything in particular I did, but the carrots still tasted like carrot, just flavored and soft, and the potato still tasted like potato and the broth was amazing. I used less than a pound of lamb, but figured I’d have enough for two days, but no, I ate it for lunch and had seconds, and then did the same thing again for dinner, perfectly happy to eat the same food two meals in a row. And if I had more, I probably would have eaten more. So yum.

Yesterday was pretty close to a perfect day. I cooked, I wrote, I walked the dogs. The food was delicious, the words were mostly satisfying, and it rained, so the dogs and I got wet, but it was warm, so we weren’t cold. Serenity was a cozy little happy house. And I am very much liking Kansas.

*Potatoes are a nightshade and I don’t usually eat them, but the store didn’t have white sweet potatoes and orange sweet potatoes just weren’t what I had in mind. I bet they would have been fine, though.

Prairie Dog State Park, Norton, Kansas

06 Friday Oct 2017

Posted by in Campground, Grace, Personal, Zelda

≈ 5 Comments

I have not yet seen a prairie dog.

I did see some wild turkeys this morning, plus a cute bunny, and a great many birds. I guess turkeys count as birds, too, but yesterday I drove by an enormous flock of blackbirds, at least some of them red wing blackbirds, and that experience was very different from spotting some wandering turkeys. Very, very cool, however. I wish I could have taken pictures or, better yet, videos. Seeing hundreds of blackbirds all lift off the ground in unison, some of them flashing their red wing tips, then come back to land is pretty spectacular.

Yesterday was not my favorite day ever, though. I left Trinidad Lake and drove to Colorado Springs, where I did laundry, and then I just drove and drove and drove. Ever since the Grand Canyon, I’ve felt super wary about exercising too much at altitude. I had a lovely one mile hike at Trinidad Lake — seriously beautiful and it felt great to be outside and doing — but then my stomach started getting unsure of itself again. Grr… Since I’m headed east anyway, I decided that rather than spending a few more days at altitude, I would just find myself some lower ground. But I really did not enjoy my long driving day with an uneasy stomach.

Fortunately, I like Prairie Dog State Park quite a lot. It’s close to empty and beautifully peaceful. The day is gray and rainy, but reasonably warm, in the 60s, so I am making lamb stew in my instant pot, watching the lake, and considering cups of tea. It’s that kind of day, that kind of place. Cozy and peaceful. Pretty, with trees and plains and fields, but not in a dramatic way at all. Even the trees are very gently changing color — the leaves are yellowing, but not dramatically.

view from the van window with Zelda curled up underneath

Lake view on a gray day, with a dog quite happy to curl up and nap.

My big ambition for the day, now that I have written a blog post and made stew, is to get through my current chapter of Grace.

Favorite line of the day (so far): Grace set the pen down and gave him a Look. Her brothers and sister would have winced and apologized immediately, but her father didn’t even have the decency to look abashed.

Votes on keeping the capital L in Look? Editor-me hates it, but writer-me thinks it is essential as is.

Trinidad Lake State Park, Colorado

04 Wednesday Oct 2017

Posted by in Campground, Food, Randomness, Sous Vide

≈ 6 Comments

lake view

The view from Serenity’s window and the reason why this small site was the best site available. Unfortunately, it’s reserved as of tomorrow, so I can’t stay, even if I wanted to pay $31/night.

After I left Cochita Lake, instead of driving north, I went south, and spent a single night in Albuquerque. I can’t believe I didn’t take any pictures, because it was my first internet-friend driveway, and I mostly braved the uncertainty to see her baby. Her adorable, adorable baby. He’s two months old, just thinking about smiling and only occasionally finding his thumb to chew on. His hands were still clenched into fists a lot of the time. So cute!

When I emailed her about coming to stay in her driveway, I wrote a whole paragraph about food and then edited it down to something like, “May I cook you dinner?” She said yes, so we ate spicy chicken breast, corn-on-the-cob, and salad of mixed greens, avocado, pea pods, goat cheese, beets, and toasted hazelnuts, with a balsamic vinaigrette made from my “trying to save the frozen herbs” chimichurri sauce.

Two thoughts on that: one, I’m never going to want to cook corn-on-the-cob any other way than sous vide. It’s delicious, even when the corn is questionable. Two, chopping up herbs and covering them with olive oil is an excellent way to keep fresh herbs useful long past the time when you would have thrown the leftovers away. I used my (modified) chimichurri sauce for basically everything for ten days — salad dressing, flavoring quinoa, topping on fish & steak, marinade… The herbs wouldn’t have lasted that long, even if they hadn’t been accidentally frozen, but they still tasted like fresh herbs down to the very last bit used on yesterday’s salmon. And it was so efficient to just whisk a teaspoon of them into some olive oil and vinegar, or add a tablespoon to some meat. I would obviously not call myself a lazy cook — I’m willing to do some work in the kitchen. But the simplicity of an multi-herbed vinaigrette in a minute definitely appeals.

When I left Albuquerque, I headed north. I was torn about whether or not I wanted to make my drive scenic and whether I wanted to spend more time in New Mexico. I loved New Mexico, it was beautiful, the sky is stunning… but I also really just want to find a place to sit and write for a while. Moving all the time takes a lot of energy and my head is in Grace, not in the real world right now. Which is nice, except that I keep being pulled back to the real world by things like needing to find a place to spend the night, needing to find electricity to run my computer, needing to do laundry, needing to buy dog food.

Not to mention how much real reality is just horrifying. I’m trying to avoid the news, because I cannot do anything about all the pain that is out there in the universe right now, but I did donate $50 to Worldbuilders for Puerto Rico yesterday when I was making sure that the dogs were getting clean water and feeling so sad for the parents in Puerto Rico struggling to do the same thing for their kids. I trust Patrick Rothfuss (the founder of Worldbuilders) to have put thought into the appropriate charity and so it felt like a right thing to do, even though it also feels like nothing. In the grand scheme of things, does my $50 do any more than make me feel better? But if everyone who could donate $50 did, things might be a lot better, so it felt worth doing.

At any rate, I did not take the most scenic route north, but stuck to a fairly direct route, which was still pretty scenic. I was surprised to get to this park and find it reasonably crowded, though. And reasonably expensive, too, at $31/night. Why are people camping in Colorado in October? But I found a spot, one small enough that I actually had a terrible time backing in. I was laughing at myself after my third or fourth try when fortunately my nice neighbors came over and helped me out. In my defense, B was whimpering because he wanted to go out and I was backing straight into the sun so the rear view camera was useless, and also the site is pretty small… but mostly it was just klutzy. Somehow once I screw it up once, though (in this case, by getting too close to a tree and scraping the branches), it gets harder and harder to get it right. Hmm, that feels like a metaphor for Grace, but I’m not going to let it be.

I wasn’t sure I’d stay longer than one night — it’s the kind of campground where I am literally listening to my neighbors’ conversations at the moment and this blog post has taken me about two hours to write, rather than the kind where I settle in and get lots of work done. But I really didn’t feel like driving this morning, so I’ll be here for another night. And then tomorrow… I don’t know. More time in Colorado? Moving on to Kansas? I am seriously tempted to go for a fast drive across the country and get back to PA, so I can sit still and write for a while. On the other hand, the month that I spent in PA this summer where I was determined to finish Grace actually ended with me starting over yet again, so I don’t think PA gets credit for being a good writing destination.

But it’s noon already and I have yet to even make the bed, so I think I’ll at least stop writing this and see if I can accomplish anything today. At the very least, I need to take my electricity opportunity to try to bake some more granola.

Best of September 2017

01 Sunday Oct 2017

Posted by in Best of

≈ 4 Comments

September only has 30 days. I bet you knew that already. Yep, I forgot or I would have written this post yesterday. Oops.

So September for me included one Oregon rest stop, one stay in a friend’s driveway, five California parks (including Fossil Falls, my first Bureau of Land Management park), a drive through Nevada, a Utah state park, the Grand Canyon, an Arizona state park, and two New Mexico parks. Twelve different places, six different states.

You’d think picking the best of the month would be difficult. It’s not.

Oh, if I had to pick the best night sky it might be a challenge. I think I’d pick the one I saw two mornings ago, but that’s partially because of the soundtrack. Z wanted to go out at about 5, so I bundled up, put her on her leash, and took her out for a walk. It was still totally dark and the sky, for once, almost clear, so I could see thousands of stars against a pure black. But then, in the distance, I heard a crowd. Like at a football game or something, booing the ref. I listened, listened harder, and eventually my sleepy brain translated the noise: not an audience yelling, but coyotes, howling. Lots of them. Talk about a surreal sound. It was very nice to snuggle back down in my bed in the cozy van after that, but it was an experience I’d like to remember.

And if I had to pick the best meal, I’d have a really hard time. I should write a post about cooking, because I’ve been having thoughts about it, specifically about what it means to be a good cook. The short version is that I think my cooking skill has leveled up again and it has nothing to do with my ability, just with the tools I’m using. I bought the Anova Sous Vide Precision Cooker this summer and it is amazing. Not right for everything — I tried eye of round in it twice, and I preferred my former recipe. And the pork chop I tried was good, but not as good as my grilled pork chops usually are. But for steak, chicken breast, root vegetables, and OMG, corn-on-the-cob, it’s amazing. The corn was absolutely the best corn I have ever tasted — I can’t imagine how good it would be with early-in-the-season white corn. Well, yes, I can, and my mouth is watering at the thought. But yeah, best meal would be difficult to choose, because I have eaten and cooked some delicious food this month.

Still, best place, best moment — well, the hard part would be to pick which day, which beach. But the very easy winner is Arcata, spending time with friends and our pack of dogs.

four dogs, all sleeping

The post-beach pack. Top right, almost hidden in the dog bed, Riley. Top left, Bartleby. Center, Buddy. And on the couch, completely unwilling to accept that dogs stay on the floor in this house, Zelda.