Cooking on vacation

Back from a week at the beach and a week cooking in someone else's home--always an adventure. When you rent a home for the week, you're never really sure what you're going to be faced with in the kitchen. I've had exquisite cookware and horrid stuff you wouldn't even find in a decent thrift store! Will there be a spatula? A corkscrew? Decent knives? I suppose I could pack up everything important, but the car is typically stuffed just bringing the "essentials" since we're required to bring our own linens and towels. And with two kids at the beach and a hot tub at the house you can imagine how many towels we need!

This most recent house was actually quite nice, except the pans were mostly warped so you couldn't get the whole bottom on the burner at the same time. It was also an electric very-slow-to-heat stove and I'm spoiled by my gas now, which I just got a couple of years ago. Still, we managed to have some great memorable meals and only one dog, the night I tried to cook some red snapper and really didn't know what I was doing.

The best meal was some fresh salmon steaks. Since I didn't bring my herb garden with me either, I tried a jar of spice mixture my youngest spied at the fish counter, Chef Paul's Magic Seasonings, this one specifically for salmon. I wouldn't normally buy this at home, preferring to mix up my own blends usually. But this was really quite good. I sprinkled it on both sides of the salmon and grilled them over the coals, flipping them once.

I also cooked up some green beans and red potatoes and had some sliced tomatoes from the garden. The tomatoes were about the only food I brought with me. I always manage to go on vacation right when the garden is in full swing, so we picked the plants bare the morning we left and had enough to last the week.