A plan fulfilled

18 Monday Mar 2019

Posted by wyndes in Adventures, Food, Personal

“Why drive two hours to go to a campground by the beach when we could drive ten minutes to the beach, then come home and cook something scrumptious in the kitchen?”

Two plates of food. — The scrumptious dinner. Roasted brussels sprouts, sweet potatoes with rosemary, steak (cooked sous vide), and mixed greens with pea pods and a little grated cheese.

Yesterday was the first test of all three dogs in the van. We loaded them up and took them north on 101 to a rest stop. An exciting adventure! (Not really.) But the rest stop had an RV dump station, so I dumped the tanks while S and the dogs wandered in the redwoods. It was a pretty nice rest stop in general, and dogs — or at least my dog — loves a good rest stop. So many smells! And the dogs did okay. Z shared the dog bed between the seats with Riley without complaint, and Buddy took the bed in the back almost the moment he entered the van. Riley was the only one who seemed at all anxious about the whole thing, but even he relaxed after a while. He can rest his head on my leg while I drive, though, so I can rub his ears while I drive — very convenient.

On the way back to Arcata, we stopped in Trinidad. We got coffee at a cafe and drank it on their patio, dogs in attendance, while an early morning (-ish, it was around 10) musician set up and started to play. The fog began to burn off and the sun came out. It felt like spring and smelled like ocean and redwood forest and plants.

When I woke up this morning, I asked Alexa for a weather report. She used the phrase, “lots of sun.” I like that phrase so much! In Florida, it’s hard not to start taking the sun for granted. Arcata is teaching me appreciation.

Leftover soup

08 Friday Mar 2019

Posted by wyndes in Food, Soup

≈ 7 Comments

One of my standard strategies for using leftovers is to toss them into some chicken broth and call it soup. This is a fine strategy and results in some pretty decent soup, usually. But yesterday’s soup… well, I was in the stirring and tasting and making thoughtful “hmmm,”s stage, when S’s stepson said, “What do you think? Does it need something?”

I replied, “This soup is kickass. I’m pretty sure it’s perfect as is.” After eating a bowl and serving it to other people, my conclusion remains solid. We discussed over the soup what it might have wanted — a squeeze of lemon? A swirl of Greek yogurt? A sprinkle of herbs or green onion? And the group consensus was that it needed nothing and it was time for another bowl.

So, for my own future reference, perfect leftover soup for a cold day (mildly spicy, thick and solid):

In a little butter, sauté an onion in the bottom of the instapot until it is golden brown. Then, because you’re tired of standing around the kitchen, add a tsp or so of Ras El Hanout, even though it’s too early. Mix it in with the onion impatiently, instead of letting it bloom,* and wait another minute. Drain and rinse two cans of chickpeas, and add them, then cover them with chicken broth. The quantity of chicken broth should be enough to cover the chick peas, but not much more than that. Close the instapot and turn on the Soup setting. When it beeps (or sometime later), open it and use an immersion blender to lightly blend the soup until it’s creamy but still chunky. Some of the onion and chickpeas get blended but not all of them.

Then add leftovers. In this case, the leftovers were a chopped-up chicken breast and some roasted carrots and sweet potatoes, so perhaps they were the perfect additions to the chickpea-onion-Ras El Hanout base, but some rice, some pasta, some sausage, some greens would all have been good, too. Let the soup simmer on the Keep Warm setting of the instapot while you wait impatiently for your dinner companions to get home from work. Eat. Say yum!

*The link takes you to an earlier soup recipe where I explain blooming spices in more detail.

Warm huckleberry muffins

04 Monday Mar 2019

Posted by wyndes in Food, Personal, Randomness

≈ 9 Comments

Last night, I was cozy in the van, snuggled up under the covers, when S texted me, “Warm muffins and ice cream…?”

Um, that would be a yes.

I slipped on my sandals and maybe grabbed a hoodie and hurried into the house where I ate a gluten-free huckleberry muffin fresh out of the oven with some Haagen Daz vanilla bean ice cream. Yum, yum, and more yum. I am not going to start counting calories any day soon, but I’m definitely growing wary of the dessert potential of Arcata. Well, wary and appreciative, simultaneously. These were homemade muffins, but the local farmer’s market has a gluten-free baked goods stall, and the closest grocery store — two blocks away, so a quick walk — always has gluten-free options. And not the usual run of frozen Udi’s products, which are easy to avoid because I don’t like them.

Over our warm muffins and ice cream, S & I talked about plans. One of the reasons I’m ostensibly here is to help with the post-bereavement cleaning out and organizing. It’s a big job. But I think the more important reason I’m here, at least for this moment, is to be an escape companion. S wants to go places. She’s working full-time, so we’re mostly talking about quick adventures up in Oregon — Ashland, Medford, Gold Beach. I’m hoping the weather becomes reasonable, because traveling with three dogs is sufficient challenge for me without them being three wet, muddy dogs. But I’m already plotting out what should move from the van into the house for maximum space optimization for group travel, and it’s going to be fun to see more of Oregon.

Meanwhile, writing proceeds mediocrely. I am falling farther and farther behind my word count goals, not helped by deleting everything I struggled with last week. But I think the struggle was necessary to clarify some of my ideas about character and direction, so I’m trying not to regret that too much. And I do feel like I’ve resolved some problems, so maybe I can get back to the entertaining portion of the writing agenda.

Yesterday, I went to a meeting of the Humboldt County Writer’s Group, hoping to find some local writing buddies. A fun group, but I felt very old, not just in years, although those, too. But there was one other newcomer there, who I promptly invited out for coffee. She’s currently planning an intensive novel-writing April, so maybe we can join forces for some real-life writing sprints. Until then, I should get back to persevering on my own. Fingers crossed for a better word week this week!

a rainy bridge — My scenic shots are tending to be very gray. The writing group promised it would stop raining someday soon, though!

Best of January 2019

02 Saturday Feb 2019

Posted by wyndes in Best of, Food

≈ 2 Comments

Eons ago, I went to a zoo in Scotland with a fellow traveler from Israel. Her favorite animals were the squirrels; she thought they were enchanting and was amazed that they were running around loose. Whenever I remember that, I’m reminded to appreciate the ordinary.

Three driveways and one familiar state park, with a total travel radius of maybe 40 or 50 miles at best. Not exactly the most adventurous month of my journey. And, in fact, a lot of the month was taken up with the mundane: doctor, dentist, vet, van maintenance, taxes, paperwork… the usual minutiae of life, packed into a hectic few weeks.

But the highlights included games with C and company; Animal Kingdom with my aunt and uncle; multiple meals with relatives; and most especially, the book party celebrating Cici.

Also, some incredibly good meals. It’s a good thing my New Year’s resolutions had nothing to do with losing weight, because January would have been deadly. Grilled pork chops; baked salmon; chicken with a coffee rub; shrimp skewers; chicken with chick peas and orange zest; home-made spaghetti sauce on gluten-free pasta; fantastic chili… plus, of course, all my usual quinoa bowls topped with sous vide protein and Greek yogurt salad dressings. I know I’m not even remembering some of the meals that were delicious in their moments.

The win for the best meal of the month goes to the double pork carnitas tacos, though. Actually, no, I’m going to give the win to breakfast the morning after the double pork carnitas tacos, which was corn tortillas topped with carnitas, a fried egg and a tomatillo salsa. I so wish I could be eating it again. Right now in fact, because at the moment, I’m sitting in a parking lot, in the dark, somewhere near Mobile, Alabama, thinking about my month, and it’s that meal that makes me wistful as I say good-bye to January 2019 and Florida. Time to go find some dinner!

Sous Vide

20 Thursday Sep 2018

Posted by wyndes in Campground, Food, Sous Vide

≈ 7 Comments

My sous vide cooker broke yesterday.

In the process of figuring out what happened to it, I realized that I should have been dismantling it and cleaning it on a regular basis. It sits in clean water, so it didn’t even occur to me to take it apart, but over the course of the time that I’d owned it, enough hair and dog fur had gotten caught in the fan blades that they jammed and then, I think, effectively burned out the motor. I was very sad, but thought positively, “Oh, well, this will give me a chance to break out of my cooking rut and make some different meals.”

That lasted exactly eighteen hours. While I was walking the dog this morning, on an absolutely beautiful gray gloomy beach, I was considering my food options and choices, and when I came back to the van, I went straight to Amazon, and bought myself a new sous vide device, specifically this one: Malaha Sous Vide. It was reasonably cheap at $77, with Prime shipping and a number of nice reviews with verified purchase tags that read like they were written by real people. I haven’t tried it yet, obviously, so I can’t say that it’s as good as the Anova, but I liked the price and the reviews.

Here’s the thing about sous vide cooking: it’s easy, it’s extremely low-mess, you can prep food for several meals in one batch of cooking, it’s cost-efficient, and it’s delicious. I can’t imagine cooking chicken breast or steak any other way now, and it lets me do things like buy a bundle of asparagus and actually stretch out the eating of the asparagus over ten days to two weeks, instead of needing to eat it all within a couple days. I divide the asparagus — or whatever vegetable — into smaller quantities, vacuum pack them, and then take my time about eating them. It’s possible to wait too long — specifically, I’ve ruined asparagus by cooking it and then not opening it for a week. That was a bad ida. But generally, I’m throwing away less produce that I didn’t manage to eat before it wilted. Also, my chicken is always delicious with so little effort from me. It’s the laziest method of cooking ever. And because when I’m cooking for myself I don’t worry about browning my meat, the clean-up is basically pouring some clean water down the drain. Usually, I use the warm water to wash my bowl and plate and silverware and cutting board first, but there’s no messy frying pans involved.

So, yeah, I thought, “Oh, I will break the quinoa bowl/sous vide habit,” and then I actually considered that more seriously, and thought, “Nope, absolutely not.” I’m going to have to live without my sous vide cooker until I get back to my brother’s house, but frankly, this is going to make me hurry to my brother’s house, because it’s not a thing I want to live without. I don’t use it daily or anywhere close, but I use it weekly and eat the food that I’ve cooked with it pretty much every day.

So my two pieces of advice to you this morning are: 1) if you own a sous vide device, make sure you’re cleaning it! And 2) if you don’t own a sous vide device, but you cook meals, seriously consider getting one. It’s not the kind of cooking tool where you come home from a long day of work and think, “Oh, I’m going to pull out the sous vide tonight,” but it is very much the kind of cooking tool where you can take a Sunday afternoon and prep food for healthy interesting lunches all week long.

Moving on… tomorrow I will literally move on from what I think is my favorite campsite ever. If I didn’t have reservations in Acadia this weekend and plans with friends and a need for a sous vide cooker, I’d probably stay until the weather drove me away or the campground closed for the winter.

Serenity with an ocean view as a backdrop

Can’t beat the view

I’m trying to remind myself that the campground in Prince Edward Island was my previous favorite ever and the only way to find my next favorite ever is to keep moving. But this place is seriously lovely and it will be hard to say good-bye.

Glooscap Campground, Parrsboro, Nova Scotia

17 Monday Sep 2018

Posted by wyndes in Campground, Food, Photography, Reviews, Travel

≈ 11 Comments

I have a zillion pictures of this campground. And I would google zillion right now, to see just how hyperbolic I’m being (pretty darn hyperbolic, I have to admit) but my internet is down to super-slow speeds so I’m not going to. I think Verizon might be hinting that it’s time to stop using the Canadian cell towers, sigh. My super-slow internet also means that I’m not going to post my zillion pictures. Instead, I’m going to have to decide on one or maybe two that I will watch upload in painfully slow motion. It’s not an easy decision, made more difficult by the fact that none of them are good enough.

None of them capture the sound of the water. It changes, and I’m not sure I’ve ever actually spent enough time sitting by a beach to realize how much the sound of the waves varies over the course of the day. Or maybe it’s just this beach. The tide goes way, way out — in the middle of the day, there’s half a desert between me and the water, but in the morning, it’s more of a wide rocky strip. Sometimes the water is very quiet, gently brushing against the shore, so still that even listening hard I can barely hear it, and then sometimes it’s lapping at the shore so loudly that I’m reminded that yes, I am sitting next to the ocean. (Sort of the ocean, anyway. I’m on the shores of the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia.)

And no photo can capture the feel of the air. The weather has been lovely — sometimes sunny enough that it actually does feel hot, although I doubt the temperature has broken 75, and sometimes foggy enough that it definitely feels chilly, but mostly hovering in the mid-60s. But it’s just not the temperature — it’s the perfect level of humidity. It feels like there’s always just a light breeze, carrying a little bit of moisture.

And for some reason, none of my photos are getting the colors right. There’s an incredible number of wildflowers blooming right now. I’m looking outside the van window as I write at an expanse of yellow-gold and green, but the pictures capture the blue of the ocean behind the gold and turn the gold into a dull yellow that doesn’t come anywhere close to looking right.

Not the right gold at all, but this is the view from Serenity’s door. The flowers are so much brighter than they look here.

And, of course, it’s impossible to take a photo of the moon and the stars, but I’ve watching them every night from my window as I go to sleep. Here’s a thing that made me feel stupid: over two years of living in the van, and I never realized that the tinted windows were distorting the brightness level of the stars. I’ve been sleeping with the window open and they’re so much more beautiful that way.

It would be nice to see the stars without the screens, too, but that’s never going to happen because the one thing about Nova Scotia that is really not working for me are the voracious mosquitoes. They’re not as bad as they were at the farm on Prince Edward Island, but I keep needing to tell myself that to tolerate them. Almost every walk on the beach ends when the mosquitoes find me and I wind up needing to escape from the ones that are dive-bombing my face. Still, they’re not constant — they’re worst at dusk and dawn, and in the middle of the day, I’ve been sitting outside perfectly happily. So excuse the whining!

I do really love this campground, love that is definitely helped by the fact that I have a perfect site. I started out last week at a pull-through spot, sort of in the middle of the campground, and it was still nice. I had a good view of the ocean, although a better view of my neighbors’ campers, and the beach was still a very easy walk away. The campground’s not too big, with both seasonal and tent spots, and it’s not too busy either, this time of year. They have a “stay three, get one free” deal, so I was going to stay four nights.

But after two nights, a spot opened up right next to the cliff that overlooks that water and I thought, “hmm…” so I wandered back up to the office and asked if I could have it. Yep. I paid for another three (four) nights after that, so when I leave here on Wednesday, I will have been here for eight nights! Eight! It’s close to my longest stay at any campground, and if I didn’t have reservations and plans for later in the month, I think I’d probably be aiming to stay even longer.

Another view from the door.

Yesterday, I ate blueberry pancakes with tiny wild Canadian blueberries and Vermont maple syrup, plus Berkshire bacon from the organic farm, while sitting at a picnic table watching horseback riders on the beach. I wondered whose life was more perfect at that moment, the horseback riders splashing through the water or me, and concluded that I won because my pancakes were crazily delicious (gluten-free) and they were probably surrounded by mosquitoes. But it did feel unreal in a most lovely sort of way.

Cabot Beach Provincial Park

08 Saturday Sep 2018

Posted by wyndes in Boring, Campground, Food, Randomness

≈ 9 Comments

The walk to the beach at Cabot Beach Provincial Park, PEI.

I’ve had three days of enormous efficiency and I’m exhausted. Although I think the exhaustion is because for the very first time, I’ve got awful neighbors. Oh, wait, I just remembered some bad neighbors in New York a couple of years ago. But those neighbors were bad because I had to eavesdrop on their complaining; these neighbors are bad because I had to eavesdrop on their late-night fun.

And by late night, I mean that sometime close to 3AM, security showed up and yelled at them, saying that he could hear them all the way down by the security gate, half a mile away. Given that my van is parked about three feet away from their RV… yeah, I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night.

I did entertain myself thinking of polite revenge fantasies. My favorite was to set off my smoke alarm at 7AM. I could even do it legitimately — it goes off pretty much every time I use the stove, so I wouldn’t have to burn anything. And I could be very slow to make it stop. And then maybe I could cook something else half an hour later and do it again. I did wind up washing all the dishes at 1:30 AM, because hey, I was awake, why not be productive? so it would have been easy to cook something first thing in the morning. Didn’t do it, however, because I am not really a revenge person. However, if they keep me up all night again — and their music is already playing — all bets are off.

So yesterday’s efficiency was all van related: oil changed, tires rotated, brake fluid topped up. I was finished at the service place around 3, so I looked around for a nearby campground and decided Cabot Beach Provincial Park sounded worth a try. Its selling point was that there was a seafood market/restaurant within easy walking distance.

It’s an interesting place — big green empty fields, sprinkled with pine trees. Apparently there are 163 sites. I’m guessing in summer, it’s bouncing with people. At the moment, there are a half dozen of us in one row near some cliffs overlooking the water and probably another twenty or thirty campers in the section that has full hook-ups. But we’re lined up like parking lots, no separation between sites at all, and that is very much not my favorite type of campground. And the mosquitoes are fierce enough that I’m avoiding the outside and that’s also not my favorite. Not the campground’s fault, of course, but not conducive to feelings of delighted enchantment.

Zelda and I have had several nice walks, though. It’s a reasonably short hike to a nice beach, and there’s also a great walk through fields of wildflowers along the cliffs by the ocean. The walk to the fish market is less appealing — it’s along a road and through a parking lot. And sadly, the market’s on winter hours (4PM – 9PM), so it was closed when we went there at lunch time.

Walking the dog through a field with an ocean view.

I thought about going back when it opened in the afternoon, but after a long beach walk in the morning, Z seemed to be limping before we reached the market. Not a ton, just sometimes skipping a step or two. I don’t want to make her do a third long walk in one day, so I’d have to pack up the van and drive to go to the market. And before I do that, I’d have to clean up from today’s cooking projects.

And today was a day of many cooking projects. This morning I made oatmeal for breakfast, and ate it topped it with yogurt and honey. And then I baked some granola. And then I made some quinoa. And then I decided that there was no possible way I’d be able to eat all the potatoes I had before they went bad, so I should probably vacuum seal and sous vide cook them. Seven packages of potatoes later, I realized I should do the same thing with the corn and the beans. So basically I’ve been cooking vegetables all day long. I’ve realized that I can’t make the squash soup I wanted to make — there’s absolutely no room in my fridge to store home-made soup. But I definitely have enough vegetables prepped for a whole lot of meals.

Tonight’s quinoa bowl was not as interesting as whatever fresh seafood I might have gotten, but it was tomatoes, fresh corn, spicy garlic wax beans, avocado, cilantro, turkey, a Greek yogurt-lime-garlic dressing, plus mixed greens and quinoa, and it was quite delicious. I ate it outside until I’d decided I’d donated enough blood to the mosquitoes and then I came inside, looked at all the clean-up I should do, and decided writing a blog post would feel productive without requiring me to keep standing over the kitchen sink.

Tomorrow, I’m moving on. I generally like to stay a minimum of three nights at campgrounds, but when I got here and saw the rows of campers, I decided two nights sounded fine. And that does feel like it was the right decision. Good walks do not make up for bad neighbors. But I’m not sure where I’m headed tomorrow, whether it’s back to Campbell’s Cove, which I liked so much, or whether I’m leaving the island. Decisions, decisions. One way or another, though, I’ll need to have the van cleaned up. I guess I should have done that instead of writing this post!

Harvest Hosts

07 Friday Sep 2018

Posted by wyndes in Food, Travel, Writing

≈ 1 Comment

barn picture

I heard roosters crowing when I took Zelda for her morning walk, and saw cows in a distant field, plus lots of forest, and a beautiful red dirt road. Also a patch of sunflowers and a lovely expanse of Queen Anne’s lace, which I am sadly quite allergic to. I’ve retreated inside the van with my congestion and itchy eyes, but it’s another beautiful day on Prince Edward Island. Tons of mosquitoes, though — I hope my immunity to them kicks in again soon, because they’re ferocious here.

Yesterday I took the van to an RV service place in Charlottetown and got the leaking toilet fixed. Yay! The guy doing the job grumbled about the last repair — I think the guy in Montana didn’t fix the leak, just put a clamp over it — but my plastic parts have now been replaced with brass parts and so that should hold me for a while. I hope, anyway. Today I’m headed off to get the oil changed, the brake fluid levels checked (the light has flickered on a couple of times), and the tires rotated. Yes, dealing with the practicalities of van life!

The farm — and I can’t remember whether we’re allowed to be specific when it’s a Harvest Hosts spot, but if you’re a Harvest Hosts member, you’ll know which farm it is, because it’s the only one on Prince Edward Island — doesn’t have a store, so I handed S., the farmer, some money and said, “Feed me.” LOL. More or less, anyway. He gave me bacon, eggs, potatoes, tomatoes, beans, and a zucchini and I really feel like I should pull out the frying pan and do a giant UK-style fry-up. (Harvest Hosts, for those who don’t know it, is an annual membership service that connects users with farms, wineries, museums, and an assortment of other places where you can park for free for the night. The expectation is that you pay by shopping in their stores.)

We had a great conversation about cooking, too. S teaches cooking classes, specifically (today at least) slow cooker classes where you prep the food ahead of time for a week’s worth of meals. It made me want to cook some complicated things in my slow-cooker, instead of just a week’s worth of quinoa. But the weather is supposed to be colder for the next couple of days, so I’m hoping to grab the opportunity to use my oven a few times: roasted vegetables, granola, etc.

Hmm, this is turning out to be a food-driven post, which is probably because I haven’t eaten breakfast yet. I should get on that! I was going to write about writing — or not writing, as the case has been for a couple of days — but I’ll hold that thought until later.

But in a comment on another blog, I described myself as “flailing.” I worked on Grace for such a long time that I sort of feel like Sisyphus, having reached the top of the hill and having the boulder NOT roll back down again. I’ve been appreciating life without the boulder, but every time I start writing, I start to fall into the trap of treating the words like a boulder instead of the beach ball they ought to be. And that’s a metaphor that might not make sense to anyone but me, but I’m leaving it because it’s a perfect reminder to me of what I’m striving for. Words like beach balls, light and bouncy and playful!

Trois-Rivieres, Quebec

27 Monday Aug 2018

Posted by wyndes in Food, R, Randomness, Travel

≈ 8 Comments

I am sitting in a gray Walmart parking lot, as the sky slowly gets darker and darker. I count at least a dozen other campers and trailers here, so probably this town is a good place to be a tourist. It was certainly beautiful when driving around, despite the gray. I crossed a fantastic bridge, over a huge river that looked green in the foggy light. Then I crossed another bridge. Then another, then another.

Somewhere along the way, I thought, “Wow, how many rivers are there?”

And then I thought, “Duh, I need R in the van, so that I could have said that thought aloud to him for whatever his deadpan response would have been.” Pretty sure the name indicates that there might be three of them. Me driving over what felt like four was probably me getting lost.

I was headed to a beautiful church, one that I believe allows overnight camping in a parking lot behind it, but there was a No Dog sign on the parking lot. Alas. I might have been able to park on the curb of the very pretty river — it really didn’t feel like the kind of place where the police come and tell you to move on — but did I mention the gray? The fog was spooky. Yes, I literally had a lovely parking place on the side of a river that might have been a perfectly good place to spend the night, but I wimped out because the fog made everything just that slight bit surreal that makes you think about monsters rising out of the river. Sometimes my imagination is just too good for me. Or maybe that’s not good for me, I’m not sure which.

Either way, I retreated to Walmart. I was putting together a list of things I need — I know that there are several random things that I’ve been meaning to get, like another coat hook because one of mine broke — when I realized that the Walmart looked closed. Yes! It closed at 5PM. I was once again reminded that I am not in my own country, ha. I know that some Walmarts are not 24-hour, but 5PM? And actually, the reminder should have come from me needing to translate 17:00 back to 5:00. Or maybe from not being able to read any of the words on the sign.

So I have a random story from a while ago that I keep remembering, and I’m going to write it down because ten years from now it will make me smile should I stumble across this blog post. R and I ate well, of course, during the week that he camped with me, because I do eat well. We ate out a few times, too, because that’s definitely one of the pleasures of traveling with company, but I cooked most meals. We didn’t eat anything special, particularly — sausages on the grill with salads, risotto with asparagus, sautéed salmon, eggs and potatoes and blueberry pancakes… just food.

And he complimented it, but he grew up while I was learning to cook. He is the person who got to eat every failed experiment, every lesson learned the hard way, every “oops, maybe not like that,” and so he approaches my food with a little more wariness than the average person I feed. But on one of our last nights together, he said to me, “You really are an incredible cook.”

And I was sooo pleased. So delighted. So just a-glow with pleasure that my hard-earned skill was being acknowledged by my toughest audience.

And then I looked at what we were eating and laughed, and said, “Seriously? We’re having quinoa bowls. Not rocket science. Are you complimenting my vegetable-chopping skills?”

Because I make quinoa bowls ALL the time. It’s practically the TV dinner of my life. Put some salad greens in a bowl, add a couple big spoonfuls of quinoa, top with vegetables of some sort and protein of some sort and a dressing, probably based on Greek yogurt, but varying depending on what’s in the bowl. Sometimes even bottled salad dressing! I love the Simply Lemon vinaigrette. It is not a meal that requires any kind of cooking expertise at all. It’s just tossing a bunch of stuff together. Although I actually don’t even really toss it – I like having the ingredients be more layered.

But he said, “I’m serious. This is the best quinoa I’ve ever tasted.”

And so I went back to being pleased. But I also told him, as I will tell you, that the secret to good quinoa is to toast the grains before cooking them, which in my case means sautéing them in the base of the Instant Pot, with no oil or liquid. He asked how long to saute them and that’s a question to which there is no real answer, because it depends on quantity and the heat of the pan, but the effective answer is “until they smell toasted and nutty and delicious.” He has since made his own first quinoa bowl — he went with olives, feta, and a vinaigrette, and reports success, which adds to my pleasure. The only thing better than being a good cook is teaching someone else to be a good cook, too.

I could have been parked next to this beautiful river for the night. I wonder if it was the graffiti on the rocks, unnoticed at the time, that made me feel unsure? Or maybe it was jut parking right next to a river when it was clearly going to rain? But no, I really just think I was worrying about the Loch Ness monster or some Canadian variant.

Grand Isle State Park, Grand Isle, Vermont

13 Monday Aug 2018

Posted by wyndes in Campground, Food, R, Zelda

≈ 8 Comments

a beautiful Jack Russell terrier next to a tent

Zelda is healing well — eager to go for walks again and happy to greet the dogs we encounter on the way. Still limping a little, but not yelping when she jumps any more.

I made my reservations for Grand Isle State Park in Vermont several weeks ago. It’s the most popular state park in Vermont, on an island in Lake Champlain, and in my imaginary visit, there was much kayaking, some swimming, some hiking — several days of actual nature adventure. Real camping, not just living in a van.

My imagination did not include a limping dog.

Nor did it include human companions, in the form of my delightful son and my favorite cousin.

So things sort of balanced out, some bad, some good. I’m sorry to say that my kayak never touched the water, and neither did Zelda or I. R walked down to the beach and went swimming but it was too long a walk for Zelda.

We did, however, have a campfire one night and cook sausages over the fire, which was fun, and we went to a farmer’s market where I bought maple syrup, which felt very Vermont.

And the campground was as beautiful as I’d expected it to be. Vermont is gorgeous. This was my second visit, not nearly long enough, and it’s so green and hilly. I suspect that I wouldn’t like it nearly as much in winter, when I would be admiring the hills and wishing to be somewhere warmer, but in August, it’s lovely.

The campground was great, too. I wasn’t in love with our site (#96, for future reference) which was packed dirt, but it was huge and felt quite secluded, because it was surrounded and sheltered by trees. Total shade, with only tiny patches of sunlight. Z wandered from one sunlit patch to another as the day wore on. Some of the other sites are grassy and sunnier, so if I ever go back, I’ll aim for one of those (on the outside, for my own future reference).

The only real negative for me was the showers: coin-operated, no control over water pressure or temperature. Not my favorite and on our last day, the shower stole R’s coins and neglected to give him any water. He was not a happy camper.

Despite being less energetic than I’d planned, we had a very pleasant three days there. No electricity, so lots of reading and relaxing, and for me, lots of cooking fun food. We ate blueberry pancakes and bacon for breakfast one morning, scrambled eggs with avocado and cilantro and sausage another. I braved the fish smells and did sockeye salmon for dinner one night, with salads of mixed greens, avocado, pea pods, radishes, sunflower seeds, and lemon vinaigrette.

On one of the other days, I ate a nameless food — ground beef and rice cooked with turmeric, cinnamon, parsley, garlic, cilantro, chili sauce, and fresh cherry tomatoes. My description of it to R was so poor that he passed and ate leftover salmon, but he did take a bite after I’d cooked it and agreed that it was better than he’d been imagining. It actually was pretty delicious, although it felt like an ideal mid-winter food, rather than a deep summer food — rich and spicy and satisfying.

After five days, R is now my longest van companion. He says that he’s tired of hitting his head, which I sympathize with. I don’t know that he would ever want to drive around exploring the country anyway, but I am pretty sure if he did, he would like a taller vehicle. And I just asked him and he agrees, he would rather not spend a lot of time in this vehicle this size. The perils of being 6’4”!

But we’ve done pretty well together, I think — I was worried that after a few days of tripping over each other, I’d be getting cranky about having extra stuff in the way and he’d be getting cranky about me being cranky, but so far, so good. A second (and, briefly, third) person does mean a lot more dishes to wash, though, and that’s meant some minor tragedies. Yesterday I broke two of my favorite bowls, because I didn’t stow them properly when we were on the road, and I’ve been surprisingly sad about that. When you own almost nothing, the things that you own that you love become much more important, I guess. But I’m trying to remind myself that the universe has plenty of bowls, and maybe I’ll find some new ones that I love just as much.

Tomorrow is the release day for A Gift of Grace, and I’ve been meaning to write about that — some more about the book itself, maybe some about the things I learned writing it, some self-publishing thoughts about how the release has gone and what I’ve done, that kind of thing. But I spent a solid twenty minutes staring at a blank document and writing and re-writing some words and then decided that maybe that wasn’t going to happen. At least not yet. I’m doing a pretty good job of letting go of the anxiety and stress and tension that comes with releasing a creative baby into the world and I think I’d like to keep it that way. So instead, R and I are going to go do laundry. Exciting days!

Wynded Words

~ Home of author Sarah Wynde

Category Archives: Food