Our RV Adventures

First off, Jan wants to thank everyone for their many get well soon’s and feel better soon’s that came in from everyone. She was feeling a lot better today, and hopefully will be back to normal and back to walking tomorrow.

We saw on Facebook this afternoon that one of our favorite restaurants is opening down in The Woodlands. Brandi and Lowell first took us to the Torchy’s Tacos down in Katy last February, and it quickly become one of our favorite places.

Torchy’s is not your run-of-the-mill taco place. I guess the best description would be gourmet tacos, with just about any ingredients you can think of.

My favorites are the two below. On the left is a grilled jalapeno sausage, split lengthwise, topped with shredded cheese and pico de gallo, and on the right, slow-roasted pork carnitas, topped with green chiles, queso fresco, cilantro, and grilled onions.

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Jan’s favorite is the Jamaican Jerked Chicken Taco, with grilled jalapenos, mango chunks, sour cream, and cilantro. And the Chicken Fajita Taco, with grilled chicken breast, grilled onions and peppers, shredded cheese, and pico de gallo.

According to their website, the new Woodland’s Torchy’s will open right after we come back to Conroe again on February 14th.

Really looking forward to it.

On the subject of restaurants, a while back we were all at a local place and ordered a bottle of Moscato, a somewhat sweet, dessert wine. And it turned out to be a bottle of Beringer’s, one that we’d never tried before.

I’ve always heard those wine snob phrases, like ‘just a hint of smoky oak’ or ‘earthy, full-bodied and bright’, and ‘with a smooth buttery aftertaste’, but it’s the first time I really knew what they meant. When you take a sip of the Beringer’s Moscato, you definitely get a ‘smooth buttery aftertaste’, so I guess the wine snobs aren’t making ALL up. It was really good, but at $22 a bottle on the bill, kind of rich for our taste.

But as we were leaving the Conroe Wal-Mart last week, I saw a Beringer’s display and decided to see if they had the Moscato. And boy, did they!

The $22 bottle at the restaurant was $4.47 at Wal-Mart.

WOW! Now that’s a markup.

Now that I can afford.

“I cook with wine; sometimes I even add it to the food.” — W. C. Fields

Thought for the Day:

For some reason this one hit pretty close to home.

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Although it didn’t rain last night, or this morning either, as I suspected we still didn’t walk this morning. Seems like Jan’s under the weather feeling yesterday was the beginning of a mini-migraine that was still lingering this morning. Luckily it hasn’t progressed into a full-blown one. So far.

Tomorrow’s supposed to be nice, so we’ll see how Jan feels then.

Neither of us did much today, just played around and goofed off, which was nice. But it did allow me to finish up our friend Nick Russell’s latest blockbuster, Black Friday.

Here’s the review I posted this afternoon on Amazon.

Nick’s Done It Again!,

Nick Russell has another great book under his belt with a real roller coaster ride of a story.

Will Raymond figure out what’s going on before everything closes in on him?

If you haven’t gotten your copy yet, buy it today. You won’t be disappointed.

Black Friday

Things seem to go in cycles on Facebook, and the latest to circle back around is the copycat recipes for ‘authentic’ Kentucky Fried Chicken. I’ve seen 3 or 4 versions in the last few weeks, and although they all profess to be the ‘real’ thing, they’re all a little different.

But the thing none of them get right is the way it’s fried. Despite the name, Kentucky Fried Chicken is not just fried, it’s pressure-fried in large industrial pressure cookers. The cookers held three chickens, cut into nine pieces each, and took about 10 minutes for each batch.

Back in the mid-60’s I worked for one of the first KFC’s that opened in the north Alabama, and even got to meet the Colonel who was still coming around to every new store that opened, even though he had already sold the chain.

Strangely enough, the thing he was most concerned with was the quality of the gravy. Made to go on the Mashed Potatoes, and for dipping your rolls in, we made it from scratch using the pan drippings found on the bottom of the chicken storage trays. And if you didn’t get the recipe right, you ended up with the dreaded ‘library paste’.

And Colonel Sanders hated ‘library paste’, and was known to literally pitch a fit, throwing pans around the kitchen. He also wanted the gravy made fresh every day, and not stored in the fridge overnight.

Luckily, the day he visited, unannounced, I had made the gravy fresh that morning, and had done a good job, at least according to him. He dipped a roll in the gravy pan, stuffed it in his mouth, chewed for a moment, then smacked his lips and gave me a big smile.

Whew!

As far as the ‘11 Different Herbs and Spices’, I don’t know if they are still using them, I’ve heard they’re not, but we certainly used them then.

We started out with a 50# bag of flour, a couple of pounds of salt, and a couple of cups of black pepper. This was all mixed up in a large plastic garbage can with a wooden boat paddle. Then we tore open an aluminum foil packet that came directly from KFC. When we dumped it in the flour mixture and stirred it up, it smelled like a spice shop had exploded, scenting up the entire kitchen.

Wrapping up, here’s a little known KFC fact. Dave Thomas was one of the first six KFC franchisees in 1956. He developed the large rotating red bucket sign, and helped set up the take-out concept that dominated the KFC store concept for a couple of decades.

Then in 1968, he sold out all his KFC stores, and the next year founded Wendy’s Hamburgers.

An oldie, but goodie.

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded, here and there, now and then, are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as “bad luck”

Robert Heinlein

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