Kitchen Rabbit Hole Adventures in Gainesville
(Please make sure not to my my little epilogue at the end of today's post.)
OK, so you know how I did a post about all the things you absolutely HAVE to HAVE in your kitchen? Well this is a story about how I survived, AND COOKED, for nearly a month without pretty much everything I told you you’d need.
My husband John needed to be in Gainesville FL for essentially a month for a work project and I decided that I would go along figuring I can work and cook from anywhere. We found a lovely 2 BR / 2 Bath condo in town with according to Booking,com, ‘a fully equipped kitchen’ where Airbnb meets 5 star hotel. I guess everyone’s definition of a fully equipped kitchen is different. Don’t get me wrong, the place was clean and lovely, the linens high end, and the decor very tasteful. The kitchen had good appliances and finishes, just very little to actually cook with.
Although this is posting in mid-November, it is actually a journal of our stay and my adventures in the Gainesville kitchen rabbit hole….. I warn you, it’s a bit long but hopefully entertaining.
Day One: We arrived at the condo at around 8 PM-- safely ahead of a hurricane. Many places had closed early, but we managed to find a convenience store where we could buy milk (not Half & Half) for the morning’s coffee that I ground and packed from home just in case…… The condo had a Keurig coffee maker and thankfully there were a couple of pods kicking around, clearly my advance planning of the ground coffee was for naught. Reusable pods got quickly put on the Instacart shopping list for the next morning. Between the emergency grocery order in the morning and a trip to Publix after John returned from work, we had the barest essentials on hand. Of course, I did buy actual food, chicken breasts, pork loin, an eye round to roast and a selection of fresh and some frozen vegetables.
Day Two: My plan for dinner was a simple one, pasta vodka because I needed photos for an upcoming post. I threw the sauce together in a barely medium sized sauce pan and set the largest pan to boil to cook the pasta. It was soon after that I discovered no strainer and no lid to fit the pasta pot. Thankfully with a slotted silicone spoon and some patience (in spite of being a bit hangry), I managed to transfer the pasta into one of the 2 stainless steel bowls and toss it with the sauce and cheese.
Day Three: The hurricane is heading out to the Atlantic and thankfully has left the Gainesville area nothing more than wet and windy. My breakfast was a pan toasted (no toaster or toaster oven here) mini bagel with a sausage patty and an egg.
Tonight, I’m cooking those chicken breasts with some fried potatoes and peas. I can assure you it looks better than it tasted with the limited seasonings here.
Day Four: By now, we ate a green salad with the leftover chicken in it and I served the leftover potatoes and peas beside a cheese omelet for breakfast, and honestly, everything was tasting like bland hospital food and I bit the bullet with a trip to Publix the next morning to stock up on some additional supplies. Some soy sauce, a tube of tomato paste, basil and cilantro concentrate in squeeze tubes, some foil containers for roasting and food storage for things like pasta and chicken salad were top on the list – along with fresh veggies, fruit, and some canned goods.
Day Five: The roasted pork loin with the leftover spruced up pasta vodka and some string beans sautéed with fresh garlic in olive oil was much closer to the kind of flavors I’m used to. I was so excited about food that looked and smelled good, I forgot to take a photo. Picture medallions of pork tenderloin coated in basil, garlic powder, salt and pepper with perfect crisp-tender string beans…… There were 2 loins in the package so I cooked both and froze the second one for a future meal.
Day Six: Thanks to the foil containers, I was able to make and store that egg salad I mentioned along with some macaroni salad to accompany hot dogs and a green salad later this week.
Day Seven: Tonight, it’s an eye round roast with macaroni and cheese and salad. I split a pound elbows in half yesterday to make some salad and some baked with cheese.
Day Eight: There’s a community gas grill that had been empty out by the pool and the gas was replaced today, so hot dogs were on the menu.
I’m not sure when it was, but I was trying to cut something without drawing my own blood and was musing about some kind of chef’s Leatherman tool for the kitchen and how we should invent one that’s easy to travel with. John suggested that such a thing might actually exist, and as usual, he was right! More importantly, Amazon could get it to me by day 10!
Day Eleven: It was fettuccine Alfredo with spinach – mainly because I could actually grate some real parmesan cheese and I need a photo for the recipe that I will post soon.
You may notice specific days missing and that’s because we ate leftovers with no fanfare.
Day Thirteen: It’s Sunday and the day I planned for the leftover roast beef. I also had some chicken thighs that I wanted to marinate and cook for future use. And thanks to my NYT Cooking (food crack) emails, I saw a recipe for a portabella patty-melt that called for grilled portabellas. John set to the grill to take care of that plus some seasoned and foil-wrapped broccoli to roast.
I set out to trim and cut the roast into strips with the very dull knife. I took two sub rolls and removed most of the bread inside the crust, then I loaded them with the meat, some caramelized onions and mushrooms, and a heap of sliced Swiss before placing under the broiler for a few minutes. (not being intimate with the oven here I started with 5 minutes at 500 degrees and it was perfect.
In the meantime, I threw all the meat trimmings into a sauce pan on low to render the fat in the hope of making some gravy. Once I saw that the fat had rendered, I covered the meat with water and some red wine that we had not finished and let it simmer.
Since I don’t have any flour or other thickener here, I figured I’d have an au jus, but then I remembered a sauerbraten recipe that calls for crumbled gingersnaps to thicken the gravy and it inspired me to try and use the bread I had removed from the rolls…..
I crumpled the bread as best I could, then added some mustard, soy sauce, and a dab of catsup and stirred and mashed until it was all smooth and completely blended similar to a slurry you’d make with flour or corn starch. I strained the solids out of the broth, brought it back to a simmer and whisked in the mixture that I created from the bread. With constant whisking for 10 minutes or so, it worked with minimal lumps!
Day Fifteen: and I'm starting to think about winding down as I try to use up anything fresh that can’t be shipped home.
I should explain that in spite of John w giving me a hard time about buying things like spices or other items that we’d likely not finish before leaving, I went for round II of staples to cook with, I decided that rather than leave anything behind, I would pack it up and ship from a UPS store, so that’s the plan for anything suited to shipping before we head home next week.
Those of you who know us personally will get the irony in this little side story.....
So, on a Sunday we did some errands including a stop at the job-site that brought us here in the first place. When we’re heading out, a spray bottle of window cleaner appears in John’s hand and he’s cleaning the windshield of our rental car. I look at him and ask if the rental place actually gave that to us with the car, or if he borrowed it from the job-site. The answer? None of the above. He bought it!!! I guess I’ll be packing that with the spices to ship home…..
But I digress…. Today I’ll be using up the rice we bought to make Spanish rice to go with the chicken thighs and I’ll also make some chicken salad for lunches or whatever.
I know I’ve been skipping ahead a bit and not providing the day to day, but I’m actually in a groove and have figured out things like the one knife that’s least likely to cause me injury, how to make decent toast in a non-stick frying pan, and where the safe spots are in the fridge (there are cold spots that make things freeze and I can’t seem to adjust the thing to stop them).
On our last weekend here, we ended up eating out on both Friday and Saturday. Friday was a casual at Ford’s Garage which is apparently a chain with 31 locations in 8 states. The first of its 10 locations in Florida was Fort Myers which was near the winter home of Henry Ford, thus inspiring the name.
Being such a huge college town, most places in Gainesville are geared to the massive student population, this was a nice mix of young and not-so-young. As you might expect, Ford’s was heavy on the auto theme including servers wearing replica gas station attendant shirts with their names on a patch. One thing I need to tell you about -- and some of you may come to experience in my dining room one day -- were the cloth napkins and rings. The napkins were those blue cotton shop towels you can buy by the bag at auto parts stores and the rings were hose clamps. Really clever and something I’ll definitely do at some point.
On Saturday we went to a cool place called Mildred’s Big City Food that was absolutely amazing with a casual comfortable gown-up vibe and a unique and creative selection for each course. They served the best escargot I think I’ve ever tasted.
On Sunday, we’re at day 19 with 5 to go so I began the wind down to using up everything that we can’t pack and ship in a box. Burgers on the grill and pasta salad was on tap for Sunday and on Monday I stir fried every remaining fresh vegetable in the place (except one onion and some garlic) and served it with some rice and the extra pork loin that was in the freezer.
I didn’t want to overheat (and over cook) the pork so I took the pork out of the fridge and let it get to room temp and then I made a sauce to pour over it to just warm it.
The sauce was one of those experiments that went well:
I took a half stick of butter, ¼ cup each of soy and red wine and heated them in a frying pan.
I added a lot of ground ginger and garlic powder along with sugar, honey a dollop of mustard and a little squeeze of catsup.
I whisked and simmered until it thickened and, honestly, it was as close to Korean BBQ sauce as it gets when you’re condiment-challenged.
It’s day 21 and there are 3 nights including tonight. I had a ½ pound of bacon in the freezer, one onion and a clove of elephant garlic to use, so I cut the bacon into bite-sized pieces, cut the onion and garlic the best I could with the one knife that almost cuts, and sautéed all until the bacon was cooked completely. I added a couple of tablespoons of tomato paste and basil from the tubes I bought when we first arrived and ¼ cup red wine, once it was simmering nicely, I added a 28 oz. can of crushed tomatoes and simmered it for a couple of hours. Dinner was Farfalle and good parmesan thanks to my new handy grater tool.
It's day 24 and we fly home tomorrow. The food inventory consists of a couple of eggs and cheese for breakfast, the leftover pasta from the other day, an a bit of the second pork loin and accompaniments – all of which will be eaten before we head out in the morning.
As far as stuff to bring home, it’s very little, a couple of canned items and spices.
In case you’re wondering, I did actually leave the condo every day after working until mid-late afternoon. There was a lovely pool and I particularly enjoyed watching this little guy.
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