Day 40, April 9th 2011, Saturday – Chuck Wagon Report #5

Well another Rest Day, another Chuck Wagon report.

While we were staying at the Blanco State Park I picked up a copy of “Texas Chuckwagon Cuisine – Real Cowboy Cooking”, by Evan Moore, at the Park Office/Gift Shop.  Mr. Moore is an old ranch hand and experienced Chuck Wagon cooking by some of the best cooks, that carried their recipes in their head and measured ingredients by the pound and handful.  In the Introduction he mentions that the Chuck Wagon’s originated in 1866, on one of the first cattle drives, lead by Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving (founders of the Goodnight/Loving Trail).  The first Chuck Wagon was a Civil War U.S. Army surplus Studebaker wagon.  No mention of who the first cook was.  I plan to try more recipes in the coming weeks.



Good Old Chuckwagon Cuisine - Hash



This week I made one of the recipes, “Hash”.  It turned out very good, Jo Ann almost ate a whole pan of it.  We wound up with two frying pans of it because the Cook Kit’s frying pan is not very big to begin with, and the recipes give no indication of the number of servings each makes.  And it is no surprise that Chuck Wagon recipes would feed a passel of hungry Cowboys.

We did have one misadventure with the Chuck Wagon this week.  Thursday it began balking when starting out from a dead stop, and that afternoon the ‘Check Horses’ light came on.  So Thursday evening when we rolled into Del Rio I had the local AutoZone read the codes, which indicated one of the ‘horses’ was missing.  We immediately rounded up a posse to go looking for horse thieves.  Actually, since I replaced the plugs before we left home, I just reseated wires and cleared the codes hoping it was something that simple.  But it never is.  Sure enough, Friday morning it was still doing it.  Since it was over 90 degrees and I had to shuttle Jo Ann 20 miles out of town in the morning, then pick her up 30 miles on the other side of town that afternoon, the engine never had a chance to cool down enough to work on.  But when the AutoZone opened this morning I was the first customer in the door and picked up a set of Spark Plug Wires.  After installing them in the parking lot, in the relative cool of 73 degrees, the horses seemed pleased with their new harnesses and behaved themselves.  What travel blog would be complete without a tale of mechanical woe?

It reminds me of the family reunion where we sat around reminiscing about past vacations, and talk turned of the breakdowns we had; the broken axle, the wheel bearing, etc.  Afterward one of the little girls asked her Mom, “Didn’t those people ever have any fun?”.  But to quote TIGHAR’s First Law of Expeditions, “Adventure is what happens when things go wrong.