Category Archives: Food

Cozy days

26 Monday Mar 2018

Posted by in Campground, Chicken, Food, Soup, Sous Vide, Travel

≈ 6 Comments

I woke up yesterday to a gray, rainy, chilly day and thought, “I have got to get out of here.”

I woke up today to a gray, rainy, mildly chilly day and thought, “Oh, what a good day to snuggle down into my cozy nest and write a lot.”

I’m really not sure what the difference is. I had a nice lake view yesterday and you’d think that would have satisfied me. I’m speculating, though, that green is the color that matters. Yesterday’s campground was gravel and dirt, gray tree trunks, dead brown leaves, slate water, overcast sky. Today’s campground is some of the above (although not the water), but also spring green grass and forest green pine trees. Plenty of brown in view, too, but it doesn’t feel Gothic.

Another difference might be technological. I had no Internet connection and no cell service at yesterday’s campground. I’ve actually quite enjoyed being without internet at points in my travels — it pushes me to be present, to appreciate where I am, instead of mindlessly browsing FB or reading news stories that I instantly forget. But only, I suppose, in places where I feel safe. In general, I like knowing that if I need help, it’s a phone call away.

So, yes, today’s cozy nest includes internet browsing and probably some texting with friends. It also includes some cooking. I picked up chicken breast on sale at the grocery store yesterday, and I’ve already got my sous vide churning away. Two experiments: one with lime juice, yogurt, and mint, and the other with parsley, cilantro, garlic and olive oil. The danger with sous vide chicken is having the flavors be too strong, so I’m a little worried about the garlic version, but if I hate it, Zelda will be very happy to have my leftovers.

As soon as I finish cooking the chicken, I’ve got some corn-on-the-cob ready to go in. I’m quite excited to try it. I thought the sous vide corn I cooked last summer was close to the best corn I’d ever eaten, and it was late summer corn. This is, I hope, very early summer corn, nice and fresh, so it ought to be even better. I’ll see, I guess!

I’m also debating a scallop soup. I’ve got bay scallops in the freezer that need to be used up, but so far I can’t decide between a spicy ginger-lime scallop soup — maybe with rice noodles? — or a chowder-style soup with coconut milk and maybe some curry. But I bought a mix of gluten-free cheese biscuits at Aldi a few weeks back and I think the soup winner might be whatever would go best with the biscuits. The nicest part of mildly chilly days is that using the oven doesn’t cook us, too.

So, yep, cozy day in Mississippi ahead of me. And with some good words on Grace to go, too!

Rainbow of honey

26 Tuesday Dec 2017

Posted by in Food, Randomness

≈ 5 Comments

I bought myself a present at Trader Joe’s on the day before Christmas Eve: a rainbow of honey. Six kinds, ranging from light to dark, from different parts of the world and from different bees that collected their pollen from different plants. At the time, I thought I was being ridiculous — seriously, a person who lives in a van does not need six different types of honey. And the tops on the bottles were corks, which meant chances of spilling and sticky mess were probably pretty high.

But I couldn’t resist. I’ve never thought much about honey before the last year. Yellow stuff, from bees. I would buy your typical generic honey-bear plastic container and it would last me months or even years, because I would only ever use it for occasional tea, usually when I was sick.

But then I started using it when I made granola and then, instead of buying pre-sweetened yogurt, I started using plain Greek yogurt and adding my own sweetener. Way better idea! Not only do you get to control the level of sweet, each bite can taste slightly different depending on how much honey it gets. It turns same-old, same-old yogurt into something new with every bite.

And then — the real key — my friend P, in Seattle, gave me some of her home-gathered honey. (Total struggle with the words there, ha. She raised bees, but obviously she didn’t grow the honey or make the honey, so not home-grown or home-made. Home collected?) It was the best honey I’d ever tasted. It was a qualitatively different thing than honey I’d had before. It was almost spicy and rich, heavy and dense. Delicious. Really, seriously, incredibly delicious.

I didn’t use it as the sweetener for my home-made granola because I didn’t want to waste it, but even only using it on my morning yogurt, I used up the jar she’d given me in August by the end of November. I replaced it with some farmer’s market raw honey infused with cinnamon that was… okay. Nice enough. Not something that would inspire me to fall in love with honey, but fine.

Today I tried my first new honey from the rainbow: the clover honey from the USA. It was light and sweet and lovely. I ate my yogurt and then before I was done, when I only had a bite of yogurt left, I added another little bit of honey, just because it was so yummy. Not like Pam’s honey but way better than typical honey.

So I’m really pleased with my present to myself, despite how silly it seemed. Yep, I live in a van with incredibly limited space, but room for seven different types of honey. But there’s something so wonderful about discovering that a thing I never really thought about, just took for granted, has such variety and possibility within it. It reminds me of when the sweet olive tree outside my bedroom window flowered and became incredibly fragrant. For a moment in time, my familiar backyard became a different world — exotic and tropical, almost magical.

Hmm, and now I’m reminded of a Robin McKinley book in which the heroine is a beekeeper, Chalice. Her different types of honey have different magical attributes. I just never realized that the honey was real, even if the magic was maybe not.

Food52 Genius Recipes Cookbook

17 Sunday Dec 2017

Posted by in Books, Food, Reviews

≈ 2 Comments

I bought this cookbook last week and I’m loving it. I’ve only read as far as the salad section, but I’ve already marked a few recipes to try and also picked up a few techniques to improve my salad dressings. And I tried the fried eggs with vinegar which sounds, let’s face it, disgusting, but was actually quite delicious.

Anyway, just posting this because the Kindle version is currently on sale for $2.99 (which is the version I bought) and is well worth the price if you are interested in cooking and like reading cookbooks. (The image is an Amazon Associates link, so you can click on it to see the book on Amazon.)

Oatmeal in Missouri

19 Thursday Oct 2017

Posted by in Campground, Food, Personal, Randomness, Writing

≈ 6 Comments

Babler Memorial State Park trail view

I made oatmeal yesterday morning in the Instant Pot. I was out of granola, didn’t feel like eggs, the morning was chilly… it seemed like a worthy experiment. It was. Oh, it was! Three minutes on high pressure (but the IP takes a while to heat up, of course, so it’s actually longer than that) and the oatmeal was… I want to say fluffy, but that sounds wrong. Not fluffy like pancakes can be fluffy, but somehow light. And yet oatmeal, so still entirely filling. I guess I can’t explain it, but it reminded me of oatmeal that I ate in England, decades ago, that no other oatmeal has ever quite matched. It might have been helped by the fact that I couldn’t find coconut milk so bought half-and-half, and I put some of that in the oatmeal. Maybe that was the secret, not the IP. Or maybe it was the combination. Either way, oatmeal, delicious.

And I needed a delicious breakfast. I’ve had a weird few days. Two weeks ago, I wrote about avoiding the news because what’s going on out in the world is so horrifying. Who would have thought it could get worse? I should figure out some way to break myself of the news habit. On the other hand… well, psychobabble ahead: the Harvey Weinstein story and the #metoo movement has been incredibly triggering to me. I think it’s possible, though, that the processing I’ve been doing is (or in the long run, will be) healthy. At the moment, however, I am filled with rage and anger and hatred. And grief, too, I think. And I really don’t like those feelings. They are not pleasant to try to sit with.

And that appears to be all I want to say about that, so moving on: I’m at Babler Memorial State Park in Missouri. I haven’t been doing a very good job of appreciating it, even though the weather is lovely. Two nights ago I got my grill out and proceeded to almost ruin my dinner. So annoying! Every once in a while, I still do something while cooking that I can look back on and say, duh, that was obviously wrong, and that was one of those moments. But the dogs appreciated the burned sweet potatoes and the steak was delicious despite not looking very appealing.

But I mention it because this is the kind of park that inspires grilling. Lots of lawn, but nothing except lawn to separate the sites, so it feels sort of like a small suburban neighborhood rather than a state park. Picnic tables and fire pits and lots of neighbors with dogs. Combined with sunshine and 70 degree weather, it just feels like the right moment to grill.

I’ve also been working on Grace, of course. I wish I could say I was making progress, but somehow I seem to be back in Chapter Two again. I also wish I could say I was making it better, but I suspect I’m just spinning my wheels. I think I probably need to find myself a couple readers who are willing to look at one chapter at a time, and tell me whether individual chapters work. But I suspect that criticism would stall me completely and lack of criticism would feel unfulfilling, so I’m not actually sure that would help.

NaNoWriMo is coming up, and I’m definitely feeling the temptation to just dump Grace for a month and try to actually commit to a NaNo project. I started Grace four years ago, during NaNo. Four years! I can pretty much guarantee that it’s never going to be worth the amount of effort I’ve put into it. But I should get back to it. Today is going to be a laundry day and a movement day and a grocery day, and I would like to get at least a few words of writing done before I get on the road.

The Anova Sous Vide Cooker

11 Wednesday Oct 2017

Posted by in Food, Reviews

≈ 6 Comments

I promise I am not turning my blog into a sales blog! But I started a conversation in Facebook comments that required a little more space, so I’m moving it here so that I can rave about my love of the Anova Sous Vide Precision Cooker. (And yes, that’s an affiliate link, but feel free to use Amazon Smile or some other affiliate site instead — or, you know, if you feel strongly that Amazon should get all the profits of its sales, use Amazon directly. Or buy somewhere else entirely. :))

Ahem, onward.

I bought my Anova Sous Vide Precision Cooker during Amazon Prime Day this summer because I thought it would be a convenient way to cook fish in the van without making the van smell like fish. I used to eat a lot of fish, but when I moved into Serenity, I stopped, because when your kitchen and bedroom are basically the same place, you wake up to leftover food smells and fish… eh. Not the nicest leftover food smell. Granola is much more pleasant.

cod and green beans

My very first sous-vide meal: cod, that totally fell apart. It tasted great, but was obviously going to need some practice.

A sous vide cooker works by heating up water to a precise temperature. The one I use, the Anova, is a wand-style immersion circulator. You attach it to the side of a container — I’ve been using the Instant Pot insert, but would like to get a plastic container eventually as they’re supposed to be more efficient. But it circulates the water and heats it up to whatever temperature you’ve set. You vacuum seal your food in plastic, either using the water displacement method or with a vacuum sealer, then put the food in the water, and let it cook slowly for a long period of time. It’s incredibly forgiving. Seriously, the cooking ranges offered on recipes are often things like “1-4 hours.”

The combination of the slow cooking and the vacuum sealing makes your food both tender and infused with flavor. One of the Serious Eats recipes describes itself as the most carrot-y carrots ever. Yep. Cook corn-on-the-cob with a little butter and it will be the most corn-on-the-cobby corn ever — every bite juicy and sweet and buttery.

And vacuum packing is a terrific way to make food last. I buy root vegetables (sweet potatoes, parsnips, carrots), chop them up, individually vacuum pack them in appropriately-sized serving amounts. Then I pre-cook them using the Anova at 183 for an hour or longer. When I want to eat them, I open the bag, dump the contents into a frying pan (or the sauté setting on the Instant Pot or a baking dish in the oven), and cook them for a few minutes longer. Since they’re pre-cooked, it only takes 5-10 minutes more to have hot, delicious, fully-cooked, soft root vegetables. And if I put herbs or spices into the bag before sealing, they’re also richly flavored with whatever I’ve used.

Meat is the most well-known use for a sous vide cooker. Most of the raves about sous video cooking are about how well they cook steak and they’re true. But chicken breast also comes out delicious every time — moist and juicy and so intensely chicken-flavored. I’ve never been a huge fan of cooking chicken breast, because it’s just too easy to get wrong. By the time the middle is cooked, the outside can be dry and tough. Not with sous vide. When you cook sous vide, every bite is exactly the same amount of cooked. I assume you could overcook chicken and make every bite dry, but so far, not in my experience. I think you’d probably have to cook it for hours and hours.

One day recently, I ate white sweet potatoes sous-vide cooked with a spicy herb mix then finished in a frying pan; corn-on-the-cob sous-vide cooked with butter; and steak sous-vide cooked. When I finished, I looked at my empty plate and thought, “That wasn’t just one of the best meals I’ve ever cooked, it was one of the best meals I’ve ever eaten.” For some perspective on that, in a previous life, I worked at a magazine in San Francisco and ate meals in San Francisco restaurants on a business expense account. I’ve eaten at some incredible restaurants in my life. And the food I cooked in my van was absolutely competitive with the food that I paid serious money for which was cooked by professional chefs.

I actually felt sort of annoyed. Yes, it was delicious, but I’ve spent years teaching myself to cook and the best meal I’ve ever made for myself had nothing to do with my skills. It wasn’t even complicated! It was just a product of having purchased the right device and spent the time learning to use it. But there are some foods — steak, chicken breast — that I can’t imagine ever cooking another way again. I might have to, of course, if I’m camping in a place where I don’t have electricity, but I’m more likely to pre-cook my food while I have electricity and then finish it off on the grill or propane stove when I’m disconnected.

And there’s an interesting effect that I’ve noticed, too — I think that I eat less with sous vide cooked food. Doesn’t that sound weird? But every bite is perfect, so 1/3 of a steak feels like sufficient food. It’s as if with normal steak, I keep eating, wanting to have the perfect bite, and with sous vide steak, I have a perfect bite again and again and again and then… I’m willing to save the rest for later.

It does take some time and practice to figure out how to use it, though. Getting the food properly vacuum-sealed makes a big difference and I struggled with the water displacement method before buying a vacuum sealer that I’ve also struggled with. There’s a definite learning curve! It’s also important to get the food fully immersed in water and that’s sometimes been hard to figure out, too. Sometimes the bags float and setting a cup of water on top of the bag does not always work. Serious Eats suggests using a binder clip and a spoon, which I need to try once I have a binder clip available.

And, as always, the ingredients that you start with matter. Sirloin tips needed another hour or two, I think; the eye of round roast I made needed several more hours. Tougher cuts of meat are slower to get tender. Fresh fish is always going to be better than fish that’s been sitting in the freezer for a few weeks. And the corn has been delicious but I really can’t wait to try fresh new corn, the first of the season, because I think it’s likely to be mind-blowing. Plus, figuring out the right proportions of herbs and salt and oil to cook with the food is definitely a process — flavors are stronger than with standard cooking, so it’s easy to go overboard.

All that said, if I had to choose between my Instant Pot and my Anova, it wouldn’t even be hard. I’d keep the Anova. And if I had to choose between my immersion blender and my Anova… yeah, I’d go with the Anova. Ha, and if I had to choose between my micro-grater or my garlic press or both and the Anova, again, no contest. The only kitchen items I would keep over my Anova are my knives, because it’s impossible to cook without good knives.

So, yes, Instant Pot, lovely and useful and I’m glad I own it for things like making quick soup and stew. But the Sous Vide cooker is for food that makes you think, “Wow, I can’t believe I cooked this.”

Acorn Squash Soup

10 Tuesday Oct 2017

Posted by in Food, Recipes, Self-publishing, Soup

≈ 6 Comments

acorn squash soup

Acorn Squash Soup

I have wandered around the country hand-selling Instant Pots to people by cooking for them, but I never remember to tell them to use my affiliate link, drat it. I’m so bad at trying to make money from my blog. I did make $12 in August somehow, though. I think it was from people clicking the link to 36 Questionsand then buying other things. I say that because the affiliate link fee for a .99 ebook is .04, and I didn’t sell anywhere near 300 copies of 36 Questions, from links or otherwise.

Let’s see… yeah, total copies sold, 92. So that’s not how I earned my $12. Hmm, I’m not sure I should have looked that up, because it makes me a little sad. Zero copies sold this month. I’m guess I’m not surprised, really. I wouldn’t buy it now, either — a bunch of reviews that say it’s too short doesn’t exactly constitute the kind of social proof that sells. But hey, $12 is $12, so I should not complain. And this is not a soup recipe, so let me get back to what I meant to write…

I’ve owned two Instant Pots. I’m using affiliate links so if you use them to buy, I’ll get 4% of the purchase price. Feel free to not use them, of course, but if you do decide to buy an Instant Pot from Amazon, please consider at least using AmazonSmile so that a tiny percentage of your purchase price — .5% — will go to a charity of your choice. And yes, a blog gets $4 out of a basic $100 purchase, a charity gets .50. Not exactly fair. Hmm, this blog post keeps getting off-track. Back to the point!

Anyway, the first one IP I owned was the 6Qt and I was perfectly happy with it, except that it was impossible to store in the van. It didn’t fit anywhere. In August, I traded it to my friend P for a Instant Pot Mini 3Qtwhich is less usable for some purposes, but fits in one of the overhead storage cupboards. If I lived in a real house and I cooked for other people, I would definitely want the bigger one, but the small one works fine for my purposes.

And yesterday’s purpose was squash soup! I debated buying pre-chopped squash at the store and if you’re not on a budget, you can save time by doing so. But it averaged out to be about twice as much, so I saved my $3 and bought a whole squash. I cut it in half, and pre-cooked it in the IP on high pressure for 12-15 minutes with a cup of water. (Because I have the small IP, I had to cook the two halves separately — I did the first one on 15 minutes and it was falling apart, so I did the second one on 12. I bet I could have gotten away with 10 for both of them — basically, this is just pre-cooking it enough to make it easy to scoop the meat out of the skin.)

I poured the water from the IP into a cup to save it for the soup, then turned the IP onto sauté, added a little olive oil and half a white onion, chopped. When the onion was lightly browned, I added about a tsp each of turmeric, cinnamon, and ginger, plus half a tsp of paprika, to the onions and swirled it around briskly. This is called blooming the spices and it goes terribly wrong if they burn, so you might need to add some more oil first or a little of the reserved water. I didn’t add oil, but did add some water when they looked dry. I gave them a minute, then scraped the squash out of its skin into the IP, added a chopped apple (not peeled), and the reserved water, plus a cup of chicken broth, then closed the pot. I think I set it to 12 minutes on high pressure.

I then had a lovely conversation with my son, so when the IP dinged, I ignored it and let it go to its Keep Warm function. One of the great things about the IP is that you really don’t have to pay attention to it. None of the water is escaping, so your food is not going to burn or dry out. You can let it stand for hours and when you finally look at it, it’ll be warm and still tasty. But eventually, I got off the phone and opened the IP. I would usually add coconut milk, but I bought some sour cream a while ago and have been trying to use it up, so instead I added about a cup of sour cream. I squeezed in some honey, probably equivalent to a couple of tablespoons, and then sprinkled the top with salt. And then I used the immersion blender until it was a level of creaminess that I liked. If it had been too thick, I would have added more sour cream or maybe some more chicken broth. If it had been too thin, I would have been sad and probably added some stuff to it, i.e. leftover rice or quinoa.

I then sprinkled some parsley on the top so it would look pretty when I took a picture, but honestly, the parsley was my least favorite part. It was too bitter to go well with the sweet creaminess of the soup. Cilantro might have worked and mint or rosemary might have been nice, but a little swirl of greek yogurt and a sprinkle of cinnamon would have been terrific. Short version, don’t do the parsley, it’s not a net good.

So, could I make this soup without the IP? Sure. I could roast the squash in the oven, cook the soup on the stove. It would take forever — the oven roasting would probably be an hour at least, and I’d have to wait for the squash to cool before I could scrape it into the soup pot. I’d have to pay careful attention to the soup while it was on the stove so that it stayed at a low simmer and never boiled. And the van would get crazily hot from the heat of the oven and the stove. It would be a project. With the IP, soup’s not a project — it’s the kind of thing you can cook after a long day of driving, when you’re feeling lazy and tired.

Brrr…

10 Tuesday Oct 2017

Posted by in Boring, Campground, Food, Soup, Vanlife

≈ 2 Comments

Zelda and I had the shortest morning walk we’ve had on this trip (except maybe for times when I’ve been sick), because it was seriously cold. The degrees didn’t look bad — 46, I think — but the wind had a chill to it that cut straight through my coat and my scarf. And it was a moving day, so I had to disconnect the water. The hose was stiff and unyielding, and the metal of the connector was so cold that it felt like it was burning my hand when I was unscrewing it. It was nowhere close to freezing, but felt like a definite warning/reminder that my van life is not compatible with a northern winter.

I’ve sort of been figuring that out anyway. It’s been a while since I whined about dirt here, but it’s still my least favorite part of van life. And the combination of cold weather, limited water, and abysmal campground showers means that I’ve spent a lot of time recently feeling Not Clean. I used to fantasize about baths, but now the combination of a hot shower and clean sheets has almost as much appeal. I’m again thinking seriously about joining Planet Fitness and planning my travels around their locations, at least once a week or so. Real showers, plenty of hot water, and (at least sometimes) the ability to overnight park in their lot is probably worth $22/month. Plus exercise! That would be nice, too.

Meanwhile, though, I’m in Nebraska, at Blue Valley Camping Area. It’s basically a parking lot with electric hookups. When I drove in, along a curving dirt road, I thought I might be the only person here, but actually there are three other campers in a fifteen or sixteen site lot. The campground is truly a parking lot — one site lined up next to the next, minimal space between them — but there appears to be a pretty nice park around it. I’ve been sitting in the van, watching the leaves fall from the trees, and considering exploring, but… well, brr… I know it’s cold out there and I’m finding the cold very un-motivating.

Plus, it was one of those long days, in the way that travel days can be. I didn’t make it very far, but I wanted to find a Target, because Target reliably has gluten-free shampoo and I a) left my shampoo behind somewhere, probably Albuquerque and b) had to buy non gluten-free shampoo the last time I bought shampoo, which is generally not the best option for me. So! Target. As best I could tell, the closet Target to my Kansas location was about two hours away, in Kearney, Nebraska. Nebraska hadn’t been on my travel plans, but why not, right?

Then I needed gas. Then the dogs needed to be walked. Then I needed some minimal groceries — fresh salad greens and fruit, basically. Then I needed to find a place to camp. And suddenly, the day is essentially over and I’ve really only traveled a couple hundred miles away from my starting place. It doesn’t feel like an impressive set of achievements.

On the other hand, I’ve got an acorn squash in the instant pot, which I’m planning to turn into soup before the end of the day. I ate scrambled eggs with sautéed mushrooms, green onions, sweet potato and avocado for breakfast. I’ve washed all the dishes, the van is mostly clean, I tweaked a few lines from a previous chapter of Grace this morning, I wrote morning words, and here I am, writing a blog post.

camper van under a tree

My campsite

And while I dread the moment the dogs need to go out again — it’s cold and dark out there! — my campsite is really quite pretty. It’ll be a nice place to try to write tomorrow.

PS Made the soup, ate the soup, shared the soup with the dogs. And somehow it pleased me greatly that Zelda chose to first lick up all the squash soup before eating the bites of chicken I’d dropped in her bowl. It’s always nice when the audience is appreciative! I liked it, too — for future reference for myself, I used turmeric, ginger, cinnamon and paprika, plus onion, acorn squash, and an apple; chicken broth and the water from pre-cooking the squash; finishing it off with sour cream, honey, and a sprinkle of salt.

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.

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.

Grace Lake

23 Wednesday Aug 2017

Posted by in Bartleby, Food, Randomness, Travel, Vanlife, Zelda

≈ 1 Comment

So we were walking along, climbing a hill, on our way to a trail that would lead us to a place called Grace Lake, which I wanted to go to purely because it was going to amuse me to write about visiting Grace Lake instead of writing Grace. I was planning the blog post in my head, about how even though I’m being a terrible writer, I’m having lots of fun experiences.

We’d just seen the eclipse and even though we weren’t in totality, it was pretty damn cool. It hadn’t gotten dark, but the light had definitely changed and there’d been a noticeable drop in temperature. But it was warming up already and the sun was beautifully golden. Nothing like an eclipse for making one appreciate sunshine. There was no real path to where we were going, so we were making our way along rocky ground, through scrubby bushes.

Blueberry bushes, in fact.

I’d gotten out in front with the dogs (three of them, all off-leash), probably because they didn’t care about blueberries and I, having spent hours already this summer picking blueberries, wasn’t all that excited about discovering the random leftover ripe berry on bushes that were mostly over for the season.

I turned and looked back. It was so incredibly beautiful — the mountains, the clear sky, the pine trees — that I pulled out my phone and took the above picture.

And then Reino (in the red shirt in said photo) straightened up. In an absolutely casual voice, he said, “Bear.”

I waited for him to continue the sentence. Bare what?

And then I followed his gaze, out across the hill in the other direction.

Oh. Right. Bear.

No, no, I mean, BEAR!

I did not take a picture. It didn’t even occur to me until later, actually.

Instead, I dropped to a crouch and put a hand on Zelda’s collar. She, of course, was right next to me. I held out a hand for Bartleby, who, upon the indication that a treat might be in store, promptly joined me. He wasn’t overly put-out by the fact that instead of giving him a treat, I grabbed his collar, too.

And then I realized that I didn’t have their leashes. I’d been carrying B up the hill before I set him down to take a picture, so P had my bag with their leashes inside.

So I waited. It felt like a very long time before P made it up the hill to me, but I’m sure it was about a minute. I think we were all torn between wanting to watch the bear and wanting to get the hell out of its way. If it had been going in another direction, we probably would have stood there and admired it, just like we’d been admiring the eclipse. An incredible feat of nature, right? But since it was trundling toward us, or rather toward the blueberry bushes that we were standing among, getting out of its way seemed like a very good idea.

It wasn’t until we were moving away that I realized I was maybe a little scared. I didn’t feel scared, but I know you’re supposed to make noise when you’re around a bear — they don’t want to run into us anymore than we want to run into them. And with three people and three dogs, there was no way a bear would approach us if it realized we were there. All we needed to do was make sure it was as aware of us as we were of it and our encounter would get no closer.

In other words, we needed to sing.

But I could not think of a single song lyric. Seriously, not a one. No Christmas melodies, no hymns, no pop ear worms, nothing. I had nothing. Total adrenaline brain fog.

Fortunately, my singing was not required. But we never did make it to Grace Lake.

Other things I want to remember:

Last Saturday, I met up with some internet friends and played games. (Betrayal At House On The Hill and Fluxx, specifically). It was very fun. I had the occasional moment of thinking that I really didn’t know the people I was with, but actually it felt like I’d known them forever, that I was a casual friend who lived around the corner and dropped in for games all the time, instead of being a real-life stranger.

On Sunday, we drove up to Stevens Pass. P is volunteering at Stevens Lodge this week, basically a hostel-like place for Pacific Crest Trail hikers to stay. It’s the first time it’s been open in the summer — usually it’s a ski lodge — so she didn’t really expect anyone to show up. Reino and I came up to keep her company and watch the eclipse. But some hikers did show up, so we got to meet some people hiking the trail, which was cool. I don’t really understand the desire, personally. But it’s always fun to talk to people who are in the midst of an adventure.

Before the hikers showed up, I was wondering if I could make eggs Benedict in the hostel-style kitchen. Many, many years ago, it was the thing that I wanted to make — the reason I wanted to learn to cook. I spent several months trying, with some moderate successes, but eventually decided it was just too much of a pain. Hollandaise sauce is hard to get right, and poaching eggs is a pain, and the timing of getting a warm toasted English muffin, plus the sauce, plus Canadian bacon, plus the egg, all right at the same time — it was just too challenging. But I’d brought some gluten-free English muffins at a store in Seattle and I was… well, just wondering whether I could get it right now.

Answer: eh, not exactly. My Hollandaise was a little thick, because I didn’t have enough butter, and my eggs kept rolling off the muffins, which I think means they were not quite done enough. And I didn’t have Canadian bacon, so I used prosciutto. Also the gluten-free English muffins were terrible, so bad that I threw away the leftovers. And I dropped one egg on the floor (literally) and destroyed another one, so that it was more like an egg drop soup egg instead of a poached egg.

But! If you want an appreciative audience for non-successful cooking experiments, you should definitely find some PCT hikers. One was a vegetarian so he got spinach with his muffin and egg and hollandaise, and another was gluten-free and very tolerant about the horribleness of the English muffins. Both were perfectly happy with my rather messy Eggs Benedict.

And it was close enough to good that I’m definitely going to keep trying. The Hollandaise is a bit of a problem — how often do I really want to make something that requires an entire stick of butter? It’s not like I want to use eight tablespoons of sauce. But maybe I can figure out how to make it and freeze it.

And this has turned into a very random blog post, downright disjointed, but I am posting it anyway and then getting on with my day. I feel like I have much to do and not nearly enough hours in the day. Today’s plan includes another sous vide experiment, some room organizing, an attempt at a new screen door — possibly very simplified, because my complicated screen door plans have not been working at all, and yes, some time on Grace. Oh, and also publishing a short story. I made a cover for it yesterday and I’m posting it to Amazon today. Hmm, that’s what they call burying the lede. But yeah, I’ll write more about that when it’s actually available. 🙂

How did it get to be Wednesday already?