With All the Frills Upon It
April 20, 2025 – Day 15
Kiptopeke State Park, Cape Charles, VA
It seems that we are on the road a lot on Easter Sunday. This isn’t intentional, it just happens that way. Last year we traveled for the eclipse. This year traveled for the birds. What’s odd is that we both love spring in New England. You’d think we’d figure out by now that we like to be home in spring time! Next year, right?
We lazed about in the morning. Soon it was time for lunch. But we had no time to make our Easter dinner, so we just foraged in the fridge. Paul had his “near Philadelphia” guilty pleasure, Taylor Pork roll.
Being both a regional specialty and a processed meat with a unique taste, pork roll has resisted accurate description and is sometimes referred to as a mystery meat. It contains lightly smoked pork, salt, preservative, and spices. The exact recipes, both Taylor’s and Case’s, have remained trade secrets.
It’s a guilty pleasure that Paul has only when he’s in the area. This is because it’s highly processed, very salty and not at all good for you! Who knows what else is in it. (susan here: years ago his mom made some for us for lunch and I didn’t particularly care for it. The same goes for the other product they make, called Scrapple, which is gross!)
It was a very low energy day for us so we hung out some more. Finally we decided to go birding again. Neither of us wanted to drive far so this time so we went just down the road to the pier with the concrete ships.
Susan observing a pair of Laughing Gulls.
We did get another Life Bird, the Surf Scoter, Male and Female. (or maybe Juvenile, not sure.)
And several Red Mergansers.
We were both starting to get hungry so we decided it was time to head back to the RV to cook Easter dinner. Even thought it is Paul’s month to cook Susan made dinner. She made sous-vide pork loin and scalloped potatoes. At the market the other day she looked at the asparagus. They looked lousy, so we bought fresh green beans. We discovered that we hadn’t packed anything to steam them with so we went without.
Paul wanted to make Buttermilk biscuits! He hadn’t brought any of the items needed to make them. He bought a mix where you just add buttermilk! (susan here: King Arthur Flour would probably have unkind words to say if they found out! <grin>)
After a bit of finagling with racks and baking vessels, we figured out how to get two dishes into the same small convection oven at the same time. Ideally the scalloped potatoes cook at 350º but the biscuits instructions were for 425º. We threw caution to the wind and cooked them both at 425º. And guess what? It worked.
The biscuits didn’t need any rising time. Odd. They were also the consistency of pancake batter. Cutting them into biscuit shapes was out of the question. Plan B it was, he poured them into the tin. We didn’t have biscuits, we had one giant 9″x9″ biscuit!
They were supposed to bake 10-12 minutes and this was after 16. Not nearly brown enough. Susan stuck a fork in, it came out clean and she declared them done.
Dinner time!
The pork and potatoes were divine. The biscuits, well, Paul will definitely be using buttermilk again. Buttermilk is acidic and the acid is needed to react with the alkaline baking powder. Paul experimented with lemon juice at home and it was ok. (susan here: slightly lemony biscuits are weird.) He found he had a metallic taste if you didn’t use any acid. These tasted much better than the home ones. But the texture? It was pretty bad, it was weird in the mouth somewhere between a biscuit and a pancake for texture. The package declared “shards of lard” but there was none of that buttery flakiness you are supposed to have with biscuits. While not a get again quick biscuits in the RV is something we’d like to figure out how to do.
It didn’t stop us from finishing them off though!