Refrigerator Pickles: Well, Why Not?

There is an episode of the Simpsons with a relatively brief joke that has become my go-to metaphor for getting blocked by too many things.

Montgomery Burns goes to the Mayo Clinic for his first check-up in ages, where they have some rather alarming news for him.

Here, why don’t I let Wikipedia do the work for me? Crowd-sourcing, it’s what all the writers are doing these days. If it’s good enough for the New York Times, it’s good enough for me.  

"Burns discovers that he not only has all existing diseases (including pneumonia, juvenile diabetes and a little bit of hysterical pregnancy), but thousands of diseases the doctors apparently have just discovered in him. However, the sheer amount of diseases prevents any one disease from actually doing harm to him (a condition the doctors call 'Three Stooges Syndrome)."

My tendency towards excess often runs directly into my separate tendency towards getting confused into immobility by excess.  So I get a lot of mileage out of this imagery.

I am at that point with posts for this site. I have a few posts that just need some editing to be ready, a bunch of dishes I’ve photographed that I could write about, and some new recipes to post that can then be organized into Menu Ideas. I also keep trying to develop a narrative or some kind of structure (salads! eating meals!) and then that doesn’t happen in an orderly fashion and I become even more confused.

So when trapped on the phone today for work I edited some photos and decided to maybe just start sticking some stuff up here regardless of the narrative tidiness.

In this case: Refrigerator Pickles. Mainly: why not?

I mean, pickles are actually kind of expensive for what they are (mainly water).  You have to imagine that what you are really paying for is the cost of transporting heavy glass jars of liquid.

And, it turns out, refrigerator pickles are pretty easy and quite tasty. Summertime is cucumber season, so if you, like me, have never tried making fridge pickles, I say go for it.

The recipe I tried was this one for Dill Chips from Martha Stewart. I didn’t have the dill seed so I skipped that, but think I’ll use them in the future for even more flavor.

The process is simple, salt the cukes for a bit to get rid of some of the excess water and rinse them.

Put them with the dill weed in a jar, boil the other ingredients, and pour it all over the vegetables.  Stick it in the fridge and in a week you have made pickles, my friend.

By using the fridge, you don’t have to deal with the frightening elements of botulism. (Recently went to a canning class where I was terrified out of my Laura Ingalls Wilder dreams of a dark and cool root cellar with walls lined with shelves full of preserves. Any activity that requires your attention to never wander, like neurosurgery, or stunt driving or, apparently, canning, is off the list of options for this space cadet.)

You have to wait a little while for them to be ready, and yes, fishing them out of the dill-filled brine is a bit like navigating a particularly sea-weedy beach.

But delicious, and with a least a mild frisson of Handy Homesteading.

I especially enjoyed these pickles on a sandwich with sharp light Irish cheddar, some avocado, mustard and tomato.  They were also great diced in an egg salad as a more flavorful alternative to the usual celery.

Three Bowls, Now with Less Words than Usual!

Normally, this is an economy-sized blog. Such value! So many words before I get to the point!

Well, although the global economy is currently wagging its finger as such Rabelaisian excesses, I will persist.  Just not today.

I am making I think over 30 things – literally, not hyperbolically – for this holiday season and I simply don’t have the time to write 5000 words on that time I was broke in college and ate leftover delivery Chinese white rice with bottled teriyaki sauce that was given to me in pity by my older roommates and it was the best thing I ever ate at that moment and how it relates to the cupcake I just made and What It All Means.

So I will finish up my reports and recommendations from the recent Thanksgiving Dessertaganza in brief. Brief, I tell you!

Venetian Apple Cake: From Dolce Italiano, full recipe available via link to the left.

Nice! Nice and simple apple cake! Flavorful, moist and with a little crunchy from the polenta. Keeper!

Black Pepper Ice Cream: From David Lebovitz's The Perfect Scoop.

Nice, kinda weird! The process to make it is very simple..., just infuse the ice cream base with black peppercorns cracked in a mortar and pestle.

You might not guess it’s black pepper if someone didn’t tell you, just sweet and spicy and floral in an unusual way.  But it's not something I would want to eat on its own. I made the apple cake to eat with it, but I think the ideal thing for it would be a pear tart. Something with a lot of cooked and tasty fruit. David’s recipe isn’t online, but Epicurious has a recipe that is similar and with another possibility for a complete dessert with Walnut Cake and Sauteed Pears. (David has recently posted a modified black pepper ice cream – milk chocolate and black pepper).

Cranberry Granita: For Carolyn and me, this was WAAAAY too much cranberry flavor. The beginning flavor was nice, but the astringent aftertaste was off-putting to me. But! a couple people at dinner like cranberry and they enjoyed it, with one person even taking seconds (when you have 7 desserts, that is saying something).

The process is simple: cook the cranberries with sugar, water, and OJ...

...then blend, strain...

and freeze per the usual granita process.

Next time I would make it with half the amount of cranberry and twice the amount of OJ and see if that works better. On the bright side: a granita is a simple frozen dessert anyone with a freezer can make: no ice cream maker required.

This Epicurious Cranberry Granita recipe will probably be as puckery as David’s, for true cran lovers only.

This other Epicurious one uses Cranberry Juice cocktail and cooked sauce, so might be slightly more palatable to a broader range of tastes. It’s also topped with an Orange Whipped Cream which I think is a great idea for this dish no matter which route you go.

Pumpkin Pecan Pie and Sweet Bay Ice Cream

This dish was based on a misunderstanding.

A few weeks ago, I was brainstorming some seasonal ice cream flavors while cooking at Carolyn and Will’s. Will suggested using a bay and pumpkin combo, which he had seen in a recipe for a savory pumpkin tart infused with bay leaf in Jerry Traunfeld’s The Herbfarm Cookbook.

A couple weeks later, we all had the chance to try that very flavor combination in the sweet form at Traunfeld’s Poppy.

So when Will asked me to bring a dessert to Thanksgiving, and referenced The Herbfarm recipe again, my brain latched on to that. I missed that he was actually suggesting I go with a sage-pumpkin combo.

Oops. Well, I certainly aim to please, so was sorry I missed that tidbit. I think what I wound up doing, though, turned out well enough to make up for it.

So first, the pie. I did a lot of searching on Epicurious and finally decided on this recipe for Pumpkin Pecan Pie with Whiskey Sauce. It got a lot of really great reviews, and I liked the way the pie, made in an 8-inch springform pan, looked in the picture that accompanied the recipe. (With all the cooking frenzy, I didn't get to the Whiskey Sauce part, but the reviews mainly really recommend it as well.)

Carolyn and Will have been chastising me for using canned pumpkin. Since I am easily peer-pressured into making my cooking as complicated as possible, I decided I better start the pumpkin puree from scratch.

This turned out to be a LOT of effort for not a whole heck of a lot of pumpkin. I had to still use a couple of tablespoons of canned puree, risking (and, when I admitted it, eventually receiving) further chastisement.

I had some slight concerns when making the pie filling, as the pumpkin mixture seemed exceptionally sweet. I dialed back the sweeteners in and added a little extra salt to the pecan topping in order to try to mitigate the sweetness, but the finished syrup was still also pretty darn sweet. I started to get a little nervous as I poured everything into the shell.

Now, I could have used this pie-making opportunity as a chance to improve my pastry dough technique but I didn’t. When it comes to pie dough, I just can’t be bothered, which is odd, because I can otherwise always be bothered.

Canned pumpkin aside (which was really just because it hadn’t yet risen to conscious thought that the home cook can start from a whole pumpkin), I am normally eager to do as much from scratch as possible in every recipe.

Someday, I imagine I’ll be part of some snobbish cooking sect that’s all like “You cook with whole molecules? I guess if you like processed food. I only use fresh quarks.”

But there’s still a good chance I’ll be piling those quarks into a Trader Joe’s Pie Crust like I did with this pie because...eh. Can’t be bothered.

So it all went into a storebought crust, and into the oven...for...almost...two...hours...

(Cat also waiting patiently for pie.  Or maybe warming himself by the oven, it's really a mystery that can't ever be solved.)

Despite the storebought crust, two tablespoons of canned pumpkin puree, and slightly-worrying uncooked filling sweetness, the end result was one deeeeeee-licious pie.

(Purty!)

I am realizing I am a contrast lover in my favorite foods. Mixing pecan and pumpkin pie makes you realize how much better each pie’s natural texture is contrasted against the other. Honestly, after eating this, the custardy-ness of a regular pumpkin pie probably won’t do it for me anymore. That was a gateway pie, but now I’ve moved onto this pie equivalent of a speedball.

And as to the Sweet Bay Ice Cream I served with it...Even though it was her dessert at Poppy that used a similar flavor combo, I actually didn’t set out to use a Dana Cree recipe. But as I was google searching for The Herbfarm recipe Will mentioned, I happened upon this recipe of hers on her old blog, so figured I’d give it a shot.

There is a gospel of fresh herbs with many chefs, so I was surprised that she used dry bay leaves. Once I tried the results, I realized ice cream might be one dish that is better served by dry, at least for my tastes.

I’ve made a fresh mint and fresh thyme ice cream, and both of them wound up tasting vegetal. I got more of the note of the fresh leaves breaking down than the actual essential flavor oils they released.

Whereas when the moisture has already been removed with a dry herb, then that cooked-green taste (which, let’s face it, can taste a little rotted) isn’t an issue. I think I might re-do the thyme ice cream with dried and see if that tastes more pleasant.

And while I love to make weird ice creams, my dirty secret is that I usually just like to eat pretty...um...I guess you could say vanilla flavors. I’m more of a freak-in-the-streets, lady-with-my-own-eats kinda ice cream gal. So usually when I make something unusual like this Sweet Bay Ice Cream, I’ll have a couple of bites, but not love it.

But I really loved it with the pie. I’m feeling really challenged trying to explain how bay comes across in a sweet recipe. I keep feeling like imagine the flavor of a eucalyptus cough drop, but take away all the harsh and menthol elements, and then add that to the clean, straight-line taste of a good dairy ice cream. On top of the rich and sweet pie, it was just a lovely combo.

So all in all, while this dish came across because I am a bad listener, ultimately I feel it’s a winner winner, turkey dinner.

Little Breads for Company #4: Parmesan Black Pepper Biscotti

Epicurious Recipe: Parmesan Black Pepper Biscotti

• Advanced Prep: Most biscotti can last for about two weeks in a tightly-sealed container or can be frozen.
• Method: Kind of biscuit-y

Once I discovered my oven issues, I thought, maybe it’s time to give biscotti another chance. It was sort of like discovering your friend who’d been acting erratically had some sort of...mild concussion or hormone imbalance or other legitimate physical reason for being such a very bad time.

But it does still take a while to rebuild trust, so I couldn’t jump just totally jump back in wholeheartedly. So I went with a savory biscotti.

It didn’t register, though, that this savory biscotti called for my favorite thing: cutting fat into flour until you have coarse meal. Sigh.

So if this is what I started with...

...is this coarse meal?

Well, it’s what I went with. I was reluctant to take it any further as I didn’t want the butter to melt from the room temperature and the action.

The dough it created was very sticky and difficult to form into the usual biscotti logs with my hands, even floured. Using two plastic dough separators though, I was able to successfully prod them into shape.

The rest of the baking process is the same as the usual biscotti process: bake in logs, take out...

...cool slightly, cut into the biscuits, re-bake.

So how so they taste? Um, super good. Really super duper addictively good. The large quantity of black pepper adds a spicy almost floral flavor that is a delicious contrast to the richness of the parmesan cheese. Extremely yum.

There are a couple reasons why I wind up making Epicurious recipes so often despite the legion of cookbooks that I own. One is that my bookshelf doesn’t have a handy search function. No matter how many times I yell “SAGE” at it, the books refuse to fall off the shelf and land open to recipes using sage.

The other reason is I do often find the reviews of other users are very accurate to my experience. Unfortunately, about half of the time, I only realize they are accurate after the fact.

Like in this case, I read a review beforehand saying they halved the recipe because the yield is large (5-6 dozen), but afterwards wished they’d hadn’t.

Well, I too halved the yield, and I too wished I’d hadn’t. They are now gone, and I am a little forlorn about it.

Despite the coarse meal dilemma, they are not very difficult to prepare, so I think I might be making another (full) batch, putting some into the freezer. They are also delicious cut further into cubes and tossed into a salad as a crouton.

Yesterday: Crisp Rosemary Flatbreads

Wednesday: Rosemary and Thyme Breadsticks

Tuesday: Buttermilk Biscuits with Green Onions, Black Pepper and Sea Salt

Little Breads for Company #3: Crisp Rosemary Flatbreads

Epicurious Recipe: Crisp Rosemary Flatbread

• Advanced Prep: Can be made two days in advance (although it's super fast so not a big deal to whip up day-of).
• Method: Quick bread with a smidge of kneading.

Of all the recent little savory breads for company, the Crisp Rosemary Flatbreads from Epicurious were probably the easiest: no biscuit hand needed and very little kneading involved. Despite the ease, they were quite tasty and seemed to be successful with folks. Other than the fact that you bake them in batches, they are also very quick. Just mix up the ingredients, knead a few times, roll out and stick in oven.

The picture that accompanies the recipe on the Epicurious site makes these look like they will be lavosh-like in their crispiness.

In actuality, they have more of a saltine-type texture, a mixture of crispness and soft flakiness.

Two of the three big pieces I made were actually not particularly crispy at all, mainly because I didn’t roll them out thin enough. I brought the flatbreads over to Will and Carolyn’s, and Will noted he actually liked the almost biscuit-y texture of the thicker pieces. Personally, I liked the crisper ones, but they were both tasty and slightly addictive after a while.

If you think you would also like a crisper texture, I recommend rolling them out verreeee thin, even if it makes the dough larger than the 10-inch diameter the recipe notes. If you have a good pizza stone, you would probably want to use that instead of the baking sheet called for.

I think the addictive element to these was thanks to the large amount of rosemary, olive oil and sea salt in the recipe. I might have oversalted a bit...note to self: sea salt is nearly invisible when sprinkled onto a damp surface, so you don’t have to keep sprinkling until you can SEE it. It’s there.

Other than the fresh rosemary, the ingredients in this recipe are ones most folks usually have on hand, and with how quickly they can be thrown together, this could be a good choice for last-minute entertaining.

Tomorrow: Parmesan Black Pepper Biscotti

Yesterday: Rosemary and Thyme Breadsticks

Tuesday: Buttermilk Biscuits with Green Onions, Black Pepper and Sea Salt

Little Breads for Company #2: Rosemary and Thyme Breadsticks

Epicurious Recipe: Rosemary and Thyme Breadsticks

• Advanced Prep: Can be made three days in advance.
• Method: Yeasted bread.

Oh god YEASTED BREADS.

(Teeth gnashing, clothes rending)

I really thought that kneading dough was going to be some kind of hardcore A.D.D. torture, like waiting in line without any reading material or getting out of a car (don't ask, it's an odd tic but I'm not the only person with A.D.D. who feels like that) or listening to someone NOT GET TO THE POINT once you've already figured out what their point it.

Everyone has felt an itchy impatience at some point, so it might be hard to really grasp what is so doggone special about the A.D.D. itchy impatience that makes it an actual thing as opposed to, you know, just poor discipline against impulse control.

I guess the best way that I can explain it is that it's that itchy impatience times one million to the point where it feels like actual physical pain and jabbing a rusty nail into your eye to distract yourself or running into traffic/murdering another soul to make it stop are actually momentarily considered as reasonable solutions.

So I have NO idea why I picked a recipe that involved kneading (SCARY MUSIC PLAYS), but I did.  And then I kneaded some dough.

And surprise surprise!

I liked it!  I liked kneading dough.  It was NOT A.D.D. torture, it was actually one of those lovely no-thought mind-clearing activities that feels like a balm or salve for the usual itch of the racing mind.

Nevertheless, I still didn't do it for long enough, nor did I let them rest for quite long enough.  So the breadsticks' texture was a little off. They were still too taut and sproingy to form nice shapes.Instead I kept feeling like I was baking the breadsticks for Naked Lunch or something. 

Or Eraserhead!  Actually, these are the breadstick version of the Eraserhead baby.

Despite the issues with texture and, um, appearance, they were still tasty enough.  I made them for dinner with the Long-Distance Gay Husband, who was in town for a bit, and he happily noshed on them dipped in a cheese dip I made based on the cheese part recipe for Gruyere Rarebit.  He ate enough of them that I knew he wasn't just being polite.

(Quick aside on the Rarebit Dip.  I stole the idea from the delicious Homemade Pretzel and Welsh Rarebit appetizer served at Quinn's.  I liked the one I made - and it was quite easy - but think I personally would prefer it made with Cheddar rather than Gruyere next time.  I also think that cheese would work better with the herb flavor.  But I might just not be enough of a Gruyere fan, so take that with a grain of salt.)

LDGH said he liked that the breadsticks were very flavorful from the herbs used.  The rosemary was definitely the more prominent note, so if you want more equal flavor from the thyme, you might want to up that herb a bit.

I did change one major thing about the recipe - I used regular all-purpose flour instead of bread flour.  The Bread Guy at the cooking school always said that though it seems counterintuitive, bread flour is just too tough to use in bread.  He always recommended using regular all-purpose flour.  So I did. 

I'm not sure how that might have impacted the structure, but I think like my first little bread effort, the main texture issue was more about my mechanical efforts, not the recipe. I will try this one again and would recommend it as a relatively easy and very tasty breadstick.

Tomorrow: Crisp Rosemary Flatbreads

Yesterday: Buttermilk Biscuits with Green Onions, Black Pepper and Sea Salt

Little Breads for Company #1: Buttermilk Biscuits with Green Onions

Epicurious Recipe: Buttermilk Biscuits with Green Onions, Black Pepper and Sea Salt

• Advanced Prep: Make biscuit dough rounds in advance and freeze the dough, bake on day-of.
• Method: Biscuit, obvs.

Since the majority of my rather minimal overall experience in the kitchen has been focused on desserts, you might think the transition to savory baking would be welcome, but it's not.

What I like about dessert baked goods is their cakiness.  (Or, you know, their being actual cake.)

But what I generally like least in a savory baked good is cakiness.  I want chewiness or crispness or flakiness.

And my assumption about the path to chewiness, crispness or flakiness has been that it is paved with Patience and Attention. 

It requires a good "biscuit hand," or willingness to knead and knead and knead no matter how bored you are and how that boredom feels like being covered in fire ants that are as irritated with covering you as you are with kneading that damn dough.

So while the Bread Guy at the cooking school was one of my favorite teachers for entertainment value, I would always watch the students dutifully kneading, and think, "F that!  I'll just buy the Bread Guy's bread at the store."

But I don't know. I guess I decided to try some biscuits. 

I think mainly because I had some buttermilk on hand and needed to use up some self-rising flour that's ticking down to an expiration at the end of this year.  I plugged those ingredients in Epicurious's search and found this recipe.  It has the extra added bonus of using up the cornmeal that has also been languishing in the fridge.

What I hate about biscuit or pastry recipes are instructions like: "Add 1/2 cup chilled butter and rub in with fingertips until mixture resembles coarse meal. Add buttermilk mixture and stir until moist clumps form."

"Coarse meal"?  "Moist clumps"? 

I was on a Kaypro at age 5.  My mind works in zeros and ones.  I don't know how to follow these kinds of directions.  What is the diameter of a piece of coarse meal or a moist clump?  What percentage of the mixture has to have that diameter, and, ergo, what percentage that looks different is acceptable?  I get very Rain Man about this shit.

But I tried it, and I guess it seemed to work okay.

I'm making my own attempts to be more frugal, so I did resist the urge to buy a biscuit cutter and instead, used the can from some pineapple juice I already had on hand.

I made the dough, cut the rounds, and froze them per the instructions I found on the Modern Beet blog.

The first one I cooked from frozen tasted good and had a nice texture, or so I thought. I was less pleased with the ones I then baked on the night of Book Club.  They still had a good flavor, but were less fluffy than I was expecting. 

I have no idea if this is due to my being more ham-handed than biscuit-handed, the recipe not being as good as it could or the time in the freezer.  I suspect user error is most likely culprit. 

The flavor was very nice, though, with the tang of the buttermilk and scallions, the crunch of the cornmeal, and of course the lovely salt-and-peppery-ness of the whole thing.  I think I will attempt these again to see if I can improve my part of the process, and see how that might improve the output. 

If you are fortunate enough to already have a nice biscuit hand, I'd recommend giving them a go.

Tomorrow: Rosemary and Thyme Breadsticks