Category Archives: Sous Vide

Sous Vide

20 Thursday Sep 2018

Posted by 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.

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!

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.