Dinner for your weekend: Chicken Enchilada Casserole

Tex-Mex is one of my favorite types of food; when Benjamin and I lived in Austin, we were in heaven, calling it our Golden Age of Tex-Mex and mourning its eventual loss, even as we took full advantage. When we first moved to Arkansas, the lack of really good Tex-Mex was a huge disappointment - I mean, Arkansas is right next door to Texas, surely something should have rubbed off! I once tried to order enchiladas with a verde sauce - usually made with tomatillos - and instead got enchiladas topped with nothing but ground up jalapenos! And Benjamin has been constantly disappointed when he tries to order something spicy, only to be "reassured" by the waiter that the dish isn't really too spicy. 

Lately, the options for good Tex-Mex in Little Rock have improved quite a bit with the opening of Local Lime, Chuy's (an Austin original that is welcome here in Little Rock, but one which we never went to in Austin - not dive-y enough, with long wait times), Heights Taco and Tamales, and The Fold. We don't eat out that often anymore though, and my craving for Tex-Mex occurs far more frequently than our trips to restaurants. What to do? Make my own, of course. We have several good cookbooks for Tex-Mex and more authentic Mexican food, we have various taco and taco salad recipes, and we have Chicken Enchilada Casserole.

This is a family recipe that my dad passed along to me when I first moved into an apartment of my own, and one that I don't remember liking all that much as a child - casseroles being a problem because the good stuff (chicken, cheese, tortillas) is all mixed up with more dubious stuff (onions, canned tomatoes, sauce). But now, I love casseroles, and this one in particular, precisely because everything is all mixed up and the flavors can meld and intensify. I have made a few modifications, because the recipe is originally from a 1976 issue of Diabetes Forecast magazine, and needed a little simplification and spicing up, but it is still pretty healthy, easy to make, and easy to scale up. I imagine it would be easy to freeze in individual portions, if you like that sort of thing (I might, but there are never enough left overs in our house).

So, for your dining pleasure, I give you Chicken Enchilada Casserole:

Ingredients:

1 tablespoon oil

1 large onion, peeled and diced* 

1 or 2 cloves garlic, minced

1 1/2 teaspoons salt

2 teaspoons chili powder (I use 1 3/4 tsp regular, and 1/4 tsp chipotle for more spice)

1 teaspoon ground cumin

1 teaspoon dried oregano

1 can diced tomatoes**

2 cups cooked chicken, chopped*** (approximately 2 chicken breasts. I simmer mine in some lightly salted water until cooked through, then let cool and chop)

1/2 cup chicken stock

6-9 corn tortillas, cut in quarters

1 1/2 cups (or more) grated pepper jack cheese**** (the original calls for sharp cheddar - use whatever you prefer)

Sour cream and avocados

1) Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Get out a medium (2-3 qt) casserole dish.

2) Heat the oil in the skillet and add the onion and garlic. Saute until tender - do not allow to brown. Add the salt, chili powder(s), cumin, and oregano and mix well. Add the tomatoes, chicken, and chicken stock, mix well, and cook for 5 to 10 minutes on low heat.

3) In the casserole dish, layer the chicken mixture, tortillas, and grated cheese, repeating until you have used all the ingredients. You should end up with a cheese layer on top.

4) Cover and bake for 25-30 minutes until bubbling and the cheese is melted. If you prefer, remove the cover and broil for a couple of minutes to brown the cheese. 

My dad always serves this with extra flour tortillas for sopping up the sauce. We like to top it with sour cream and avocados, if they are on hand.

* Our go-to Mexican cookbook always recommends white onions in its dishes, but we usually just use yellow for this one

** Do NOT use the canned ones with herbs and spices already added - just plain. The original calls for three medium tomatoes, and if you have flavorful, ripe ones go ahead and use them instead. I use canned for convenience.

***  For mine, I usually use two chicken breasts that I have simmered in some lightly salted water until cooked through, then let cool and chop. My dad microwaves his, and I think you could use a pre-cooked rotisserie chicken too, if you wanted.

**** The original calls for sharp cheddar, but I never use cheddar for Tex-Mex these days - use whatever you prefer or can find. To save time, you could also use a Mexican blend of prepackaged, shredded cheese.

Thanksgiving dinner

Since this is apparently now primarily a food blog, here is the Thanksgiving dinner we had this year. As you can see, it isn't the traditional turkey, stuffing and mashed potatoes. Some years we go to all that trouble, but more often we prefer to make something different. It is more fun, usually less work, and perhaps even a little bit healthy. This year, we had turkey-zucchini meatballs and sumac sauce from the Jerusalem cookbook. (Here is a slightly modified version from Simply Recipes, if you don't want to seek out the book. But you should at least get it from the library, since it is a beautiful book, as well as full of good recipes). The recipe calls them burgers, but I call them meatballs.  Either way, they are delicious, and the sauce is good enough to justify seeking out sumac. (You can order it from Penzey's, here.)

To accompany the turkey, I made acorn squash stuffed with black beans, corn, and broccoli from a recipe I found at the New York Times website. It was intended as a vegan main course, and I think it would definitely be good for that, but it was also a perfect side. It is very American too, with the squash, corn and beans. I left out the optional rice, since we made our own wild/brown rice as well. To round out the plate we had sweet potato biscuits brought by a friend.

I neglected to get a picture of the pumpkin cheesecake that we had for dessert. Too busy eating it. It also turned out really well. I used ginger snaps in place of the graham crackers in the crust, and they added just enough snap and flavor.

In short, we had a lovely meal, and I heartily recommend giving alternative menus a try for the holidays.

Another icy day

Malcolm and I are sharing a slice of lemon sour cream pound cake, covered in Nutella, because that is the kind of day it is. Icy, rainy, and generally unpleasant; a good day for pound cake and sitting on the couch.

 

Now that I have started running regularly though, I feel a little twitchy at the thought of sitting around all day. Thank goodness the gym is open. I will have to go later and get in some time on a treadmill, just to feel like I have moved around (and burned off some of that Nutella).

Until then, I'm going to go cut another slice.

Edited: I can't believe this is another recipe I haven't shared yet. It is the Cooking Light Sour Cream Pound Cake from the April 2002 magazine. It is my go-to recipe for pot lucks. Try it. You will thank me.

Pumpkin Muffins

I cannot believe that I have never posted this recipe here, since it is one of my favorites, but it doesn't show up in my search of the site.When I used to make these, Benjamin and I would hoard our portions, stretching them to last several days; now, there are four of us in the house (Benjamin, me, Malcolm, and Benjamin's mom), and a dozen muffins was reduced to two lone survivors by the end of the day.

From Gourmet November 2006

Adapted from the American Club

Makes 1 dozen

Active time: 15 min.

Start to finish: 1 hour

INGREDIENTS:

1.5 cups all-purpose flour (I used 1 cup white flour, 1/2 cup whole wheat)

1 tsp baking powder

1 cup canned solid-pack pumpkin (I used a little over 1 cup of baked, purreed pumpkin)

1/3 cup vegetable oil

2 large eggs

1 tsp pumpkin-pie spice (a combo of cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, ginger, and allspice) (I used 3/4 tsp cinnamon, 1/2 tsp ginger, 1/4 or 1/8 of the rest)

1.25 cups plus 1 Tbsp sugar

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

1 tsp cinnamon

Equipment: 12 foil or paper muffin liners; a muffin pan with 12 (1/2-cup) muffin cups

DIRECTIONS:

Put oven rack in middle position and preheat oven to 350F. Put liners in muffin cups.

Whisk together flour and baking powder in a small bowl.

Whisk together pumpkin, oil, eggs, pumpkin-pie spice, 1.25 cups sugar, baking soda, and salt in a large bowl until smooth, then whisk in flour mixture until just combined.

Stir together cinnamon and remaining 1 tablespoon sugar in another bowl.

Divide batter among muffin cups (each should be about 3/4 full), then sprinkle tops with cinnamon-sugar mixture. Bake until puffed and golden brown and a wooden pick or skewer inserted into center of a muffin comes out clean, 25 to 30 minutes.

Cool in pan on a rack 5 minutes, then transfer muffins from pan to rack and cool to warm or room temperature.

More fall cooking, now with recipes

My last post prompted one of Benjamin's aunts to get in touch and send along a family recipe for apple pie. Since I still had 7 or 8 pounds of apples waiting to be eaten, and I've already made my standard apple crostata three times this fall and wanted a change, I gave it a try. It is sort of an apple crisp pie, i.e. there is no rolled crust, just a topping that you pat into place; that is a huge plus in my book, since I really hate making pie crusts. They are too finicky and easy to mess up; no matter how fool-proof the crust is supposed to be, I can manage to mess it up, or at least be incredibly dissatisfied with it. Anyway, the Rider family apple pie recipe is too good not to share, so here it is:

Rider Family Top Crust Apple Pie

Filling:
4-5 peeled & sliced apples
1/2 c sugar
2 T lemon juice
2 T orange juice

Topping:
1 c flour
1/2 c butter, cut into small pieces
1/2 c brown sugar
1/2 t cinnamon
1/2 c nuts, chopped (I used almonds, because that is what I had in the freezer)



Layer apples in a greased pie pan and sprinkle with sugar and juices. (You could probably mix them in a bowl first and then put them into the pie plate, but I didn't, and it worked just fine.)
Combine topping with a fork or pastry cutter (or in food processor) and pat on top of the apples. 

Bake at 400 for 30 minutes.  Great with vanilla ice cream on top!

Sorry, no picture. We ate it all before I thought about taking one. 

And I realize now that while I have mentioned crostatas on this blog a number of times, it doesn't look like I have ever put up a recipe or even a picture (although that doesn't seem possible). Rather than type it out, I am just going to include a link to it from Giada De Laurentiis and the Food Channel. As far as pie recipes go, it is pretty easy, but it does involve a crust of sorts, so it takes more time than the Rider family recipe. 

Fall cooking

It is fall again, and for the last month or so, I have been busy finding ways to preserve and use some of the bounty. We had enough jalapenos this year that even Benjamin couldn't eat them all, so I tried pickling some. I think I had about a pound and got three pint-sized jars.

Apart from having to wear gloves to avoid getting too much hot stuff on my hands, it wasn't any harder than making regular pickles. They have to cure for a while, so we haven't tried them yet.

I made another batch of regular pickles yesterday too, after I bought a vegetable assortment box at the farmer's market that came with two pounds of cucumbers. There was no way we were going to eat all of those - I like them in salads but often forget to use them, and they don't last very long. I discovered after I started that I was all out of dill seeds, and since Malcolm was napping and I didn't want to waste time, I decided that I would use caraway seeds instead, since I had two cans of those (why?!). I have used them before and can't say that I really noticed a difference, so the three jars I made yesterday should be fine, if not kosher dills.

My other preserving challenge was entirely self-inflicted. I ordered a bushel box of apples from the farmer's market to dry in the dehydrator and use for apple crostatas and other such yum-yums. For several nights after Malcolm went to bed, and one early morning when he had me up at 5 AM, I spent an hour or two peeling and slicing apples and putting them on trays. 

Of course, the next day I had to bag them up. I put some into a ziplock bag for immediate consumption and vacuum-sealed the rest. We've had one crostata so far, and I plan to make another this week while my mom is visiting. I still have at least four pounds of those apples in the fridge, and then I went and bought another 6 pounds of other varieties, so there may be another night of peeling and slicing in my future. Or maybe applesauce. We'll see.

The last challenge is the most difficult - collard greens. I seem to have planted a few too many this year, and we are over-run. I've used it in place of kale in a gratin, make our standard collard greens and black bean wraps, used it in omelets, given some away...The problem with greens is that you can't really can them at home, so you have to find ways to use them while they are fresh. I just saw a recipe for kale chips in the microwave that said you could substitute collards, so that will probably be my next project.

Nom nom nom

Malcolm has been trying solid food for about a month and a half now, with limited success. He likes the rice cereal - if I put cinnamon on it - and eventually reluctantly accepted mashed banana, but doesn't seem to like much else. Until yesterday. He tried to steal my pear at lunch and happily ate some when I held it for him, after rejecting pear puree multiple times in the past. Since I don't want to sit around holding fruit for him, we got him a mesh feeder, and he loves it. So far, he's used it for banana and pear with great success; soon we'll be trying the other fruits and vegetables he's already tasted. I guess he just wants to feed himself, none of this nonsense with spoons - I wonder where he gets his independent streak?

This week I like: Reading Terminal Market

Sorry for the lack of posts this week. I am in Philadelphia for the Special Libraries Conference, and I forgot to bring the pictures from our Memorial Day weekend hiking trip. Oops. I will have those for Thursday. In the meantime, I have fallen in love, not surprisingly, with something food-related. There is a covered/indoor market here in Philadelphia a lot like Pike Street in Seattle. It is the Reading Terminal Market (pronounced Red-ing, not reed-ing). It is in the area where the Reading train terminal used to be, and it has so much good looking food. Yesterday, I had lunch at a gyro stand. This morning, I had a Nutella-strawberry crepe. I have bought some apples for snacking, and scones for nibbling in my room. If we lived in Philadelphia, this would surely become a regular Saturday morning destination.

A Visit to Falling Sky Farm

Moveable Chicken Houses

I am almost a month behind on taking pictures off the camera - I though digital cameras were supposed to remove the lag between the taking and the viewing. I guess that only works if you actually take time to get them off, just like film. Anyway, last month, between storms and tornadoes and before the hot weather, we attended a farm day held at Falling Sky Farm, one of the farms we get food from at our farmer's market. Cody and Andrea are the driving force behind our online market/CSA, and are really motivated and interested in providing local, humanely grown eggs, chickens, pork and beef. They hold a farm tour day semi-annually, but we have never been able to go before.

The day was gorgeous, with a breeze, but not too much, and it was sunny, but not too hot. The farm is about 100 miles north of Conway, just at the edges of the larger hills and mountains up that direction.

Chickens, trying to decide if we are friendly

Andrea and Cody raise laying hens, meat chickens, grass-fed beef, and acorn-fed pigs (well, not exclusively, but they do get to root around under oak trees every day). I only have pictures of the laying hens - I forgot to charge my camera battery, and it died right after the first stop on the tour.

Yup, not a threat. Let's investigate.

They move the cows and chickens daily, so that the grass isn't overgrazed, and the chickens get a chance to scratch through the manure, which helps spread it around and eliminates bugs.

Charge!

The tour was great, although I only have these few photos. We walked around to the cows and the pigs, then had a delicious potluck with the other visitors. I love that we are able to go see the farm where our food comes from, and see that the animals are happy and healthy and that the land is healthy as well. I also love that we are able to support small, local farmers, since they should be the backbone of our food economy.

Visit their website. If you are interested in learning more about the local food movement, slow food, etc, there are many, many resources available on-line and at your local library. Read Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, go to a farmers market. Start a garden.

Donovan Family Obsessions, or my visit to Bellevue, Part One

My dad in a standard photography pose.

I took a quick trip home to Bellevue over the Easter weekend, and got tons of good pictures. My family is fairly moderate, apart from a few obsessions, but whenever I get home to visit, we indulge those obsessions. This trip was no exception - we hit most of them: photography, good food, and books.
 

Obsession #1: Photography

The Saturday I arrived was their first nice day of the year, the kind of day that locals hope outsiders never see (because then they would never leave), the kind of day that compels you to go outside and do something, anything. So, we did. Dad and I took our cameras to the Bellefield Nature Trail, handily located about a mile and a half from home. It was always a great place to take the dog on a weekend afternoon, and there were certainly plenty of people there with the same idea. I took a boatload of pictures of the park, and the skunk cabbage (enough of those to make one entire blog post), but you are going to have to wait for the photography part of the trip, because this post is about obsession #2, good food.

Brandon (Mr. Orangette, owner) at the oven.

One of the first things I said to my parents when I made my plane reservations was "We have to go to dinner at Delancy." They were happy to oblige. I have been waiting impatiently for my chance to go, ever since the restaurant first opened, since the last time I was in Bellevue, it was Christmas-time, and the restaurant was closed for a short vacation. Wah!.

I forgot to take a picture before I started eating. Too good to wait...

 It is a wood-fired pizza restaurant owned and run by Molly Wizenberg, the blogger behind Orangette, and her husband (who she met because he read her blog - seriously, go read her book about it). On the blog, Molly's descriptions of setting up the restaurant, building the oven, and then of the food that they served, was enough to make me drool all over my keyboard. Anyway, if there was any chance at all that I could get to Delancy this time, I was going to take it.

 

Mom's white pizza - a cheesy, crispy bit of deliciousness.

We went that first night, and was it worth the wait! Not a fast-food place, the pizza took a while to come out of the oven, mainly because the restaurant was packed. People, it opens at 5, we were there at 5:10, and it was already full. We barely squeezed in. By the time we left, there was a line out on the sidewalk waiting for our seats. The salad was perfect to share with my mom - lettuce, a green goddess dressing, bacon... yum...

Dad's pepperoni and sausage pizza, with homemade sausage.

But the pizza was the star of the night, of course. Crispy from the wood-fired oven, topped with the best tasting ingredients. We got three, although that was being a little greedy, just because we wanted to taste them all. And we had dessert, a rhubarb poundcake with mascarpone that was tangy and sweet and oh so good. Oops, starting to drool there a bit. Anyway, it was delicious, and if you live in the general Seattle/Ballard area, you should go. If possible, go often. The menu changes regularly with the seasons (and it has changed since I was there), so you need to go a lot to get all the goodness they have to offer. Wish I could join you!

Making ravioli

Filling the ravioli mold

Over the weekend, I got it into my head that I needed to make ravioli, and bake bread, at the same time. (Well, strictly speaking I didn't plan that both had to be at the same time, it just happened that the time I did one was also the time I had to do the other). Now, in the past we have tried to make ravioli, and not had much success. Either the filling was too wet, or the dough too sticky, or some such thing. So this was kind of my last-ditch attempt - if I couldn't get it to work this time, I was going to give up on fresh pasta ravioli and just use won ton wrappers. For this final attempt, I used Mark Bittman's recipes (egg-less pasta dough and filling) from How to Cook Everything.

Ravioli successfully released from the mold!

 For whatever reason - maybe I was more careful, maybe the different dough recipe I used was less troublesome - the ravioli worked perfectly. In the picture above you can see my ravioli mold.  It has little cups where the filling goes, and wavy ridges around the edges.  You take the little rolling pin and roll between each piece of ravioli, on top of the ridges, and that helps to separate each piece.

Such lovely, delicious little dumplings...

I think my dough was a little too thick for the ridges to cut all the way through, but I just used the pizza roller to do the final cut. They looked perfect, just like the ones at the store, but without preservatives and extra unnecessary ingredients.

Sprinkled with cornmeal to keep them from sticking - marginally successful.

In all, the recipe made two cookie sheets worth of ravioli. Enough for 4 or 5 people. I served them with a quick homemade pasta sauce and fresh bread.

The loaf on the left barely made it to Monday morning. It is gone now.

 And so, now that I have successfully made ravioli, I am eager to repeat the experiment. Maybe a sausage filling, or pumpkin. Yum.

Thanksgiving

Just look at the size of those biscuits.

Thankfully, my pictures from Thanksgiving were not among the pictures lost in the, er, accident.  We had a lovely meal - roast chicken with roasted root vegetables, stuffing muffins, Quaker bonnet biscuits (which somehow puffed up to almost life-like proportions), roasted broccoli with walnuts, pumpkin pie, and an apple crostata.  Yum yum.

Crystal was unable to go home for Thanksgiving, but we were very happy to add her to our table (not to mention her pie and broccoli).

It was a lovely evening, the food was splendid, the company delightful, and the weather suitably rainy.

This is turning into the summer of trying to can new things. First pickles and now pears. Not that pears are all that different from peaches, but I have never canned them before. Anyway, my CSA/farmer's market had pears for sale a week or two ago, so I decided to purchase a batch and can them. Canned fruit is just lovely in the middle of winter, especially if you are trying to eat locally as much as possible.

I used the reliable Joy of Cooking for my instructions, which were much the same as for peaches.  Peel, boil in syrup, can. I managed to do it in about an hour on Sunday afternoon. Now, I was only doing about 5 pounds, or 3 1/2 jars, but still, pretty simple.

Here you can see both my canning pot, on the left, and the pears boiling in their light syrup, and my canning funnel - best tool I have for canning (although I could definitely use one of those grippers for wide neck bottles...).

Close up of the pears. One difference from the peaches is that I used an anti-browning powder to keep them a lovely white color. I could have used it when I canned peaches (Dad always did when he dried apples), except that I didn't have any on hand. This time, I made sure I was properly prepared.

Love the steam coming off the top of the funnel in this shot. It was all swirly in the air-currents from the boiling water and the air conditioner.

And the final product. I had a small amount left that wouldn't fit in the jars (but not enough to make the little jar into a big jar) so I stuck it in the fridge and at it for breakfast this week. Yum.  There may still be peaches available at a market or farm stand, although this summer has been so hot and dry that isn't a given, so I may have more canning to do this month.

Dinner on the Bayou

It says "Cotham Mercantile," I think.

 Saturday night we decided to have a little adventure (that is, we went somewhere we haven't been before, that was all of 30 minutes from our house) and visit the original Cotham's for dinner.  It is on the direct opposite side of Little Rock from Maumelle, but thanks to the modern invention of the freeway, it only took us about 30 minutes to get there.

Once you cross the Arkansas River, you are in an entirely different geological area - instead of hills and mountains, there are flat rolling plains and oxbow lakes, and this sort of bayou area (I checked with a native Louisianan to make sure I wasn't mischaracterizing it when I call it a bayou).  Even the trees are different down there.

It is sort of hard to tell from this picture, but that grassy area was fairly marshy, and the glint of white in the middle is water, a side branch of the river.

This doesn't capture just how wobbly the place looks in person.

Cotham's sits out over that bayou on stilts.  From the outside, it didn't look like it was stable enough to house a restaurant, and frankly, it was a place that we would have driven right past, assuming it to be an abandoned building, if we hadn't been warned. Apart from the people on the front porch and the parking lot full of cars, it really did look, umm, sketchy.  The building was a mercantile store in its past life, and was made famous by Bill Clinton and other Arkansan politicians during campaign seasons past.

Don't you just love that "paneling"?

Inside, it is all fake wood paneling, left-overs from the mercantile store, and kitsch. That hub cap burger really was the size of a dinner plate - we saw several go by, but didn't dare try it ourselves. We could have shared one, if we had so desired. The rest of the menu is pretty standard Southern - fried chicken, chicken fried steak, and fried catfish.

A rare moment when the tables weren't full.

I went with the catfish. It came with hush puppies (my first real ones, I think), corn fritters, and onion rings.  The only unfried part of the meal was the coleslaw, but since I don't really like coleslaw, I didn't eat much of that.  The catfish was really good - not dried out and over cooked or anything - and the sides were tasty. The desserts looked pretty good, and included fried pies and a Mississippi Mud Pie, but Benjamin wasn't hungry enough for dessert, and I couldn't quite tackle one on my own, so we abstained. Shame. Now we will have to go back.

Friday (Foreign) Food

It is Friday at last, and I don't know about you, but I could use some good food. How about a lovely Belgian waffle (which we actually ate in Amsterdam, I think)? A nice, dense, sweet, but not too sweet waffle, with real chocolate syrup (none of that corn syrupy Hersheys junk).

Not a waffle person? How about mini-pancakes?  These little beauties are from the cheese market in Alkmaar. Fresh and hot off the griddle. I am making myself drool.

And of course, we need something to drink.  This lovely libation is a cherry beer - tart and tasty. Benjamin imbibed this one at a restaurant on the covered shopping street in Brussels.

If you prefer a more traditional beer, here is one from our beer tour in Brugge. I even tried this one. I think I prefer fruity beers myself, but that is what is great about Belgium: there is a beer for everyone!

And, should you need some solid food after all the sweets and beers, try a rice table at an Indonesian restaurant.  You get all these little dishes, with enough for each of you to get a taste. So very good... Is it lunch time yet?

We interupt this tour for a snack break...

 Green Beans from our garden

Let's take a quick break from the trip recap for some food - I am sure the Dutch and Belgians would approve.  We have cooked some really good meals lately, so I'd like to share them with you.

I love getting our food directly from the farmers. It makes a meal like this, risotto (rice not from farmers - but it is the only part that is from the store), broccoli rabe and squash, and pork milanese, that much better.

We have started using our grill again, now that it is summer.  Last week we had grilled salmon with a Cajun rub and grilled zucchini with cous cous. So very good.

In honor of the symbolic start to summer, and because it is just darn good, we grilled burgers (meat from Ratchfod Farms here in AR) and whipped up a batch of the best potato salad in the world. And ate the green beans fresh from our garden. Ahh...

(I just realized that all these pictures are on the same plate. Hmm. We only have one red plate. Interesting. Well, it is a striking background to the food.)

Tomorrow we will return to the tour...