Archives for 2011

Nov 20 2011

Cooking up a storm

A benefit of having an Airstream the driveway is the use of a second refrigerator. The extra 10 cubic feet of our Dometic NDR1026 gas refrigerator always come in handy when Eleanor is stocking up on ingredients for a big feast. (By the way, the refrigerator has operated normally ever since we removed and reinstalled it in September at Paul Mayeux’s shop. The theory for its prior poor operation is that it had a small internal obstruction or bubble that was dislodged in the process.)

The flip side of having a second refrigerator is that someone has to go back and forth between the house and the Airstream to deliver and retrieve things from that refrigerator. This is where my talents are usually invested, along with tasks such as dumping the compost, taking out recycling and trash and documenting the cooking process with my camera. If only my college journalism professors could see me now…

In the morning I went out to get Keli the American Duck for her steam bath. Unfortunately, 24 hours in the refrigerator was not enough to fully defrost her. The refrigerator was running exactly 32.0 degrees inside, probably because temperatures have been cool in Tucson lately and because we put two solidly-frozen ducks in it. We reduced the refrigerator’s cooling level, but it was essentially too late. Keli couldn’t be steamed until she was fully defrosted.

We left the duck out on the counter for a while, and then Eleanor had a brainstorm. We’d just done a load of dishes and the dischwascher was still very warm from the drying cycle. Eleanor popped Keli on the lower rack for an hour, closed the door, and managed to get some of the defrosting process completed that way. But it wasn’t until after dinner that Keli was frost-free enough to come out of her plastic bag and get prepped for the pot.

In the meantime we had a technical problem to solve. We didn’t have a steamer large enough for a 5.1 pound duck. The pot needed to be big enough for the duck while sitting on a rack so that an inch or so of water could be brought to a boil beneath. After trying several odd contraptions we finally found a combination that would work, using two aluminum foil pie tins to support a pair of round cooling racks, upon which Keli perched.

The steaming process went well. Once the water was to a boil, Keli began sweating like a nervous Aeroflot passenger. Christopher Kimball and his team of cooking gurus were right: Keli the duck lost a lot of fat in a short period of time. I collected the grease/water combination when she was done, separated the water, and ended up with more than a quart of grease.

The city of Tucson has a program to keep grease out of the public sewage system. They’ll be collecting the grease on the day after Thanksgiving, where it gets turned into biodiesel fuel for cars. If I still had the Mercedes 300D, I would like to think that a bit of Keli-grease would come back to power my car a few miles.

This is not the end of Keli’s cooking process. Her next step, today, will be to visit the “tanning booth” (rotisserie) to brown the skin, with a bit more seasoning.

While Keli worked on her fat-reduction program, Eleanor also worked on the stuffing and the first of the side dishes. As I had feared, Eleanor has gone far off the reservation and so now the side dish list consists of:

boiled potatoes with fresh herbs
roasted potatoes
mixed grains & wild rice with persimmon & figs
pork & apple stuffing
haricot vert with cranberries & walnuts
butternut squash with pear & gorgonzola cheese
cipollini onions and chestnuts
roasted carrots and pearl onions
Romaine with pomegranate

Yeah, we’ll need some help with eating all of this … Carol & Tom, Mike & Becky, Rob & Theresa, Terry & Greg, Judy & Rick, David & Lee & Hannah: feel free to give a call today to schedule dinner with us this week. Please.

And when the actual Thanksgiving Day rolls around Eleanor plans to make pumpkin soup, too. I would try to stop her but (a) it’s all so good; (b) this is what she likes to do. You can’t stop a good chef any more than you can stop a monsoon. Eleanor cooking is like a force of nature. It’s just going to happen, so I’m going to continue playing errand/garbage boy and await the spectacle that is coming later today. Pierre is waiting too, for his moment in the oven with his rich French friends (bacon, butter, and more butter), so it is going to be an interesting day indeed.

Nov 18 2011

Keli, Pierre, and friends

Our menu consists of two ducks. Ha ha ha.

I laugh because my wife is a combination of French chef, Italian lover, and Irish temperament. This means she cooks heartily, is passionate about all things, and will certainly take it personally if I get anything wrong in this blog. It also means that “two ducks” does not make a meal, and there must be plenty of side dishes. In her philosophy, there should be no chance of running out of part of the meal.

So normally Eleanor cooks for a small army regardless of how many people we have coming for dinner. This year, in response to my pleas for a reasonable amount of leftovers, she has promised to keep the portions small. So, without comment, I will now list the ingredients she has accumulated over the past few days, all of which will be in our “small” Thanksgiving dinner:

ducks (2)
mixed gourmet petite potatoes
haricot vert (green beans)
various rice and grains including wild, white, red, barley, pink lentils, Israeli cous-cous
onions: cipolini, pearl, spanish
canned pumpkin
various mushrooms: white, crimini, and dried (porcini, shitaki, morel)
pears (3), pomegranate, green apples, persimmons, carrots, celery, leeks, ginger, lemons, blood oranges
garlic, capers, fresh ginger
herbs: chive, oregano, sage, thyme, mint, basil, cilantro, Italian parsley, rosemary
dried fruit: figs, cranberries, tart cherries, Thompson & Golden raisins
raw nuts: walnuts, almonds, hazelnuts, macadamia, chestnuts
fresh cranberries, sour cherries
ground veal, ground pork
apple smoked bacon (4 strips)
maple syrup, maple sugar, and dark brown sugar
orange juice, pomegranate juice
white wine, red wine, Madeira (medium dry), Cognac, brandy
stocks: chicken, beef, vegetable
white truffle oil
butternut squash
unsalted butter, evaporated milk and cream (light & heavy)
apple cider
French bread
cider vinegar
various spices including Kosher salt, black & white peppercorns
shallots

All of this was impossible to gather at any single store, so Eleanor spent much of the day at Safeway, Albertson’s, Whole Foods, and Trader Joe’s, in addition to raiding the pantries of both the Airstream and the house. Her food gathering instincts have been let loose, and that’s an impressive thing, much like releasing the Kraken. I don’t want to know what all of this is costing. Today at Whole Foods I had to restrain her from buying a $25 jar that contained exactly three truffles. We’ll “make do” with a bottle of white truffle oil instead.

This morning we retrieved the ducks from the Airstream’s freezer (where we have been storing all of the “overflow” ingredients). Defrosting them will take at least a day. Before they went into the house refrigerator, we personalized them, as you can see above. Duck #1 will be the American duck (code-named “Keli”) following the Cook’s Illustrated technique of steaming before roasting to reduce the fat. Duck #2 will be the French duck (code-named “Pierre”), prepared using a modified version of the classic poëlé technique described by Escoffier, et al. The steaming process will happen on Saturday, a full day before the actual roasting.

With 48 hours to mealtime, we are already accumulating a list of people who are interested in sharing the leftovers. Fellow Airstreamer Rob, who lives only a couple of miles away, dropped by and eyed the list of ingredients hungrily. But remember, this could turn into a complete debacle. Sometimes experiments go wrong — just ask Dr. Frankenstein or any Marvel comic book villain. Fortunately, if the ducklings turn into dumplings we won’t starve, thanks to the friends of Keli & Pierre: those extensive side dishes. I’ll have more to write about those as they begin to take shape this weekend.

Nov 17 2011

The RV industry made us do it

As I mentioned yesterday, the duck project was simply the result of wanting to having something a little different for our Thanksgiving meal. The timing is the RV industry’s fault. Really.

See, every year the RV Industry Association holds a trade show and convention in Louisville KY, which I need to attend for business reasons. I can only assume that the organizers chose the date and location specifically to save money, because the convention is held immediately after Thanksgiving. The convention center is probably rock-bottom cheap at that time (who wants to have a trade show then?) Not only are airliners crowded and airfares ridiculous, not only is the weather dismal beyond belief in Louisville that time of year, but most critically this timing means that all the participants have to interrupt a time-honored post-Thanksgiving ritual — namely, making sandwiches with cold turkey breast, mayonnaise, lettuce and bread — in order to drive or fly to Louisville so that they can attend the show starting on Monday.

Either the convention dates were picked by someone who needed an excuse to get away from their in-laws, or they’re getting a smoking deal on the Kentucky Exposition Center. Probably both, now that I think of it. Of course the cost is simply shifted to those of us who must attend, because we pay higher fares on the airlines in order to fly on Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend, not to mention inflated rates at the local hotels.

I think this will be the sixth or seventh time I’ve attended this show. Each year I find myself dejectedly heading for the airport on Sunday when I should by all rights and dyed-in-the-wool American tradition be lounging around the living room with a remote control in one hand and a plate of leftovers in the other. We can’t really dent all the Thanksgiving leftovers before I have to go, and it seems wrong to leave when there’s still a huge pile of yummy chow in the refrigerator. To make things worse this year, E & E are flying to Vermont for a visit in early December, which would leave the entire burden of leftover turkey consumption on me. I like to eat but that’s too much. So part of the motivation to make something other than turkey was to have fewer leftovers, and we’re doing it this weekend so we have plenty of time to eat what we have before I have to go.

And now you know how, last Sunday, we found ourselves driving around Tucson in a rare Fall drizzle, looking for ducks. The frozen kind. (Vegetarians may wish to stop reading here, as the rest of this blog becomes graphically carnivorous.)

We found the duck at Dickman’s Meat, at 5.1 pounder. That was the easy part. Then came the research. Eleanor first handed over her worn old copy of The Escoffier Cookbook and challenged me to choose between one of 29 obscure French preparations for duck, including “Hot Pate of Duckling,” “Nantais Duckling With Sauerkraut,” “Moliere Duckling,” “Rouennais Duckling Wings With Truffles,” and of course the crowd favorite, “Stuffed Balls of Duckling.” I picked out a few recipes from which Eleanor began to select compatible elements to create her own recipe.

Based on the influence of departed French chefs (Auguste, Julia, et al) and her culinary training, Eleanor originally planned to poëlé the duck. This means she would start with a Matignon, which is a fine mince of carrots, onions, and celery hearts, with a bit of lean ham, a sprig of thyme and half a crushed bay leaf. This would be put all over the duck in a thick coating. The enveloped duck would subsequently be richly layered with strips of bacon and buttered paper, and then — in the spirit of old French cooking — basted with the drippings, melted butter, and Madeira wine while roasting in the oven.

The “roasting rack” for the duck would be a large dice of celery, carrots, onion, and fingerling potatoes, to be eaten as a side dish. Eleanor had also conceived a stuffing that would be a mix of veal, pork, and diced apples.

But something didn’t seem right. We both knew (from a painful 1990’s-era duck cooking debacle) that the amount of fat in a duck is critical to the outcome. Also, most of the Escoffier recipes called for undercooking the duck if it was whole, and that made Eleanor dig deeper for a reason why. She consulted all of her best culinary references and kept running into hints that roast duck was tricky because the amount of fat in them varies so widely. Wild ducks are lean and tend to dry out, while market ducks are ridiculously fatty. We finally found a good analysis of the problem in “The New Best Recipe,” published by Cook’s Illustrated, which is sort of the Consumer Reports of food.

The article explained that since Escoffier was published (first edition in 1942), the ducks we can buy at the market have changed. They’re fattier and — to make things even trickier — they tend to be disproportionately fat in the legs and wings, which makes roasting the bird as a whole quite difficult. The solution according to Cook’s Illustrated is to steam the bird before roasting, which greatly reduces the amount of fat, and separate the legs so that subcutaneous fat can be more easily rendered from them.

We also discovered that the duck could be expected to reduce in weight by approximately 50% during cooking (due to the rendering of fat), which means our 5.1 pound duck (technically, a duckling) might yield as little as two or three servings. I don’t want massive leftovers, but I’d like at least some. Off I went to Dickman’s for a second 5.1 pound duck. This experiment was already getting expensive.

The good news about having two ducks was that we can experiment a little. The current plan is to prepare one duck using the poëlé technique, but instead of adding butter for basting, she’ll use only the drippings. It also will not be stuffed. The vegetable “roasting rack” will remain the same, except without the potatoes, as they would absorb oil and get greasy.

Duck No. 2 will follow the Cook’s Illustrated recommendation, first steamed to reduce the fat, then slow-cooked on a rotisserie. Eleanor is thinking of putting the Matignon beneath the skin, but that’s still a work in progress. The next step will be later today: a grocery run for ingredients. The plan is to start cooking in earnest on Saturday.

And all this because the RVIA convention is held at the wrong time of year …

Nov 16 2011

The duck

The blog has been quiet lately because we are in that rather dull period between trips, commonly referred to as “daily life.” It’s something I do my best to avoid but occasionally it does happen. It’s really true as they say that life is what happens while you’re making other plans.

This has been a period mostly for me to simply take care of business. The Winter 2011 of Airstream Life magazine has been printed and was mailed this week, and meanwhile Spring 2012 is well underway with a lot of great articles in development. I’m also working on a busy program of 2012 events, including Alumapalooza (June 2012), Modernism Week (February 2012), and an exciting new event to be held out west next summer. We expect to have an announcement about that in January.

Of course, the Airstreams have not been neglected. Before parking the Caravel in a secure off-site location, Eleanor and I replaced two more of the leaky water hoses and fixed another water leak at the tank fill. It should be ready to go when we are. The Safari remains in the carport, fully hooked up, cleaned up, and stocked with goodies for future “hotel” guests.

The most recent visitors, however, brought their own: Tiffani and Deke of the traveling blog “Weaselmouth.” They were passing through last week, heading for California, and spent a night parked in front of the house. Eleanor and I had met them at Alumapalooza last June, and I saw them again in Texas when I was picking up the Caravel, but they had never met Emma. I’m not sure if my offer of free parking was really what enticed them here, since Tiffani did mention several times that she really wanted to meet Emma… In any case, it was a superb visit and far too short. We may cross paths with them again next year if we get up to Washington state, as I’ve been hoping to do.

Part of being home is a process of recovery. We’ve proved we can live in the Airstream indefinitely but when circumstances place us back in the stationary house, we try to take full advantage of that by catching up on projects, relaxing, and saving up money. The latter goal never works out as well as I’d like. Living in a house is far more expensive than living “on the road” in an RV when you really factor everything in. Being back at the house means activation of expensive projects, repairs, and tempting upgrades.

This time was no different: the house demanded a few things, and the local Tax Collector demanded the real estate taxes, and — whoosh — we were thousands of dollars poorer in an extraordinarily brief amount of time. Worse, there was nothing tangible to show for it. This always seems to be the pattern of home life, so after a few months we usually give up on the idea of “financial recovery” and move back into the Airstream for a reminder taste of the inexpensive alternative lifestyle it affords. Eleanor has often commented that if we hadn’t bought a house in 2007, and had simply remained in the Airstream full-timing, we’d be financially far better off, but you can’t re-make history. And the house is something we all enjoy … in moderation.

In the interest of saving money we have resisted the call of Tucson’s many interesting restaurants, favoring meals at home. This is no particular hardship, as anyone who has eaten Eleanor’s food can attest, and it often results in intriguing culinary experiences resulting from home experiments. For example, last Saturday we really wanted to go out for Dim Sum, but we stayed home, collected the various ingredients we had in the house, and Eleanor whipped up “Dim Something.” It was not what you’d call authentic but it was darned good.

This brings me to the subject of today’s essay. You were probably wondering about the title, “The duck.” Thanksgiving is coming up soon but due to minor obligations on the calendar, we are going to celebrate it this weekend instead. Bored with traditional turkey, after some discussion we opted to try cooking duck instead. Or to be completely accurate, Eleanor will try preparing duck, and I will stand by as Advisor, Dishwasher, and Errand Boy as needed.

Normally I would expect this to be a minor footnote in our lives, but even today, days before the actual cooking event, it has become obvious that The Duck is going to be a formative experience. It turns out that the culinary challenge is significant, even momentous, if you want to get it right. There are tricky carnivorous issues of fat distribution and moisture content to confront. Eleanor has pulled out an arsenal of references from her bookshelf and is sweating the details to the point that you’d think she was expecting the Queen of England to join us. (I’m pretty sure that Thanksgiving is pretty low on the Queen’s list, along with Independence Day, so no danger there.)

Since things are quiet, I’m going to document The Story of The Duck this week, as it happens. The first entry will go up tomorrow. This is risky because we have no idea if the duck will be delicious or Daffy. The gauntlet has been tossed down, and now she (and her two bumbling assistants) are committed to this meal. Will we find sweet success or smoking disaster? You’ll see.

Oct 31 2011

Rich’s Moving Castle

Thanks to Eleanor and Bill for putting an appropriate literary theme on my few days in the Caravel. Like Howl’s Moving Castle, the Caravel never paused for long in this recent chapter of its four-decade adventures.

The saga left off on Friday, when I was making a coffee last for three hours so I could recharge my stuff and get some work done. It was a beautiful sunny day and things were going well. After the work was done, an electronic trail of crumbs (a waypoint stored in the GPS) led me back to the campground, otherwise I might never have found it again. I spent all of 10 minutes installing the new braided-stainless hoses in the Caravel’s bathroom and — ta-da! — no more leaks. Or so I thought.

That afternoon the bulk of the rally participants showed up and things got lively. Among many other people, I ran into Tiffani and Deke of “Weaselmouth,” who I’d last seen at Alumapalooza in May, and we got into an evening-long conversation during the potluck dinner. I went back to the Caravel that night pleased that the rally was turning out well, but a little sorry as well because it would be time to get going homeward soon. The rest of the people were just getting started with their Halloween decorations and friendly yakking. For me, the Moving Castle (aka Caravel) was destined to depart in the morning.

I lingered on Saturday until about 10 a.m. while the gang was cooking up a huge breakfast outside at the pavilion. People kept asking me how far I had to drive to get home, and when I said, “Oh, about 1,000 miles” the second or third time it really hit me: I’ve got to get going. There were about 16-17 hours of driving ahead of me, plus stops, and very little of it would be interesting driving.

Like the little Bubble I pulled from Santa Fe, the Caravel is a joy to tow. There’s no fuss, no bad behavior, no complicated hitching equipment. I try to keep the fresh water tank at least half full to give the trailer better stability, but otherwise I just drop it on the ball and away we go. I don’t trust it as much as I do the big Safari with the Hensley hitch, because I know the Safari absolutely cannot sway with that setup, but the Caravel is marvelously stable at any speed I care to drive. Of course, it is equipped pretty close to the original factory configuration. Often I’ll see small vintage trailers that tow horribly, and inevitably it’s the result of owner modifications (air conditioners, rear-mounted spare tires, altered floorplans or heavy household-style cabinetry) that corrupt the delicate center of gravity. The original designs took care to ensure that when the trailers were loaded with water, food, personal items, etc., the trailer would remain stable.

I made a few stops along the way for errands. The day before the GL320 gave me a warning that it wanted a top-up of “AdBlue” fluid, which is also commonly known as Diesel Exhaust Fluid. These days you can find the stuff in any auto parts store, truck stop, and even some Wal-Marts, and it’s cheap at about $12.99 for 2.5 gallons. I put five gallons in the special tank that holds the AdBlue, which should be good for another 7,000 miles or so. I’ll top it off this week for a full 15,000 mile range. I mention this only because a lot of people are still scared about the stuff, thinking it’s expensive, or complicated, or frequent, and it’s really no much more hassle than filling the window washer fluid. Three-tenths of a cent per mile is a small price to pay for clean diesel emissions, in my opinion.

I’ve wanted to spend a night at Monahans Sandhills State Park (just off I-20 a little west of Odessa TX), but the timing has never worked out before. This time I hit Monahans about a half hour before sunset, which made it a great stopover point. The park has only 26 spaces, which made me think I might get skunked on a spot since it was Saturday night, but it turned out to be only about half full. About half of the spaces are short back-ins that were perfect for the Caravel but wouldn’t have worked for the 30-foot Safari.

I have to take this opportunity to gripe about a small thing. Many state parks use an honor system for late arrivals. You fill out a little envelope and put your nightly camping fee in it. This envelope gets deposited into an “iron ranger” (a metal box) and picked up by the staff daily. You have to indicate your campsite on the envelope, but you haven’t gotten a campsite yet, which means you have to go to the campground, find a site, then come back to the iron ranger.

At Monahans the iron ranger is at the entrance gate, but the campground is about 1.3 miles away. By the time I was parked in the site, it was nearly dark. Being an overnight stop I would have preferred not to unhitch but I also wasn’t psyched to walk 2.6 miles roundtrip in the dark along a narrow, winding, shoulder-less road in the cold. I wanted to make dinner and fire up Calcifer, and I also needed to refill the water tank. To get it all done quickly, the easiest thing was to unhitch and drive back to the entrance gate to deposit my envelope. Other state parks set up two iron rangers, one at the gate and one at the campground for the convenience of their visitors, so there’s my suggestion to the powers-that-be.

This minor quibble aside, I liked the park, which is billed as the “Sahara of the Southwest.” It’s not perfect by any means, but it is very scenic for a place that’s just off a major Interstate. The downsides stem from the fact that this is oil country. I caught an occasional whiff of petroleum in the air, and through the night I could hear the sound of an oil well being drilled somewhere off to the northwest: WHUMP-WHUMP-WHUMP-whumpwhumpwhump…

The morning found me with 555 miles to go. I debated whether to plow ahead or to stop along the way. There were places I would have liked to stop, and friends to visit, but there was also a place I wanted to be more, namely home with E&E. Back in Tucson they were decorating the house for Halloween, and Eleanor was cooking things. On the other hand, in the Caravel I’d discovered yet another leak, this time under the kitchen faucet. I took this as a sign that I needed to get back to home base and have a long chat with the Caravel (wrench in hand) about its incontinence problem.

To be fair, the trailer is doing spectacularly well, especially considering its age. (The leaks are all from the same type of flexible plastic faucet hose, at the compression fittings. I don’t know if they are failing from age, heat, bad design, or over-tightening, but they are all getting replaced this week.) Other than that, the Caravel has performed admirably. We covered 1,000 miles at highway speeds, and encountered some pretty awful back roads too. Not a rivet was disturbed on its tight little structure.

More important, I was entirely comfortable through the entire trip, with my little aluminum soap bubble to house me at night and Calcifer to keep me warm. No matter how much I had to drive, at the end of every day I knew I would be back in my home, with my familiar things and favorite foods waiting. An Airstream really is a moving castle, where you have everything you need with you no matter where in the world you go. This is the magic of trailer travel. Even though I just finished unpacking from this trip, I’m looking forward to the next one already. Most likely it will be in mid-December.