Homemade Pickles

I was going to wait until we actually try the pickles to post this, but what the heck. I am sure they are going to be good. With the amount of time I spent in search of dill, they better be nothing less than divine!

J and I went to the Farmer's Market yesterday where we picked up some patty pan squash and pickling cucumbers. Two things we have not bought before. I knew that I wanted to make the pickles this weekend, but we couldn't find any dill at the market, or Tomato Tomato, or Hy-vee. We did find some at Baker's thank goodness. And so the pickle making ensued:

I started by washing the cukes!

I then quartered the cucumbers and soaked them in an ice bath for an hour. I don't know why I was supposed to do that, but I saw it in some recipe somewhere, so I thought it was worth a shot since I only like crunchy pickles!

While I was waiting for an hour to pass, I started boiling the brining liquid and preparing the jars. I decided to try three variations of pickles. There are garlic and cayenne, cayenne garlic pepper, and celery garlic pepper. I put a clove of crushed garlic in each jar and then a little of each of the other ingredients (I really hate measuring as you'll see).

I then put the cucumbers in the jars, poured the brining liquid to the top, then placed the dill sprigs on top and closed the jars. I won't know how they will taste until tomorrow, but they look pretty darn good!

Brining Liquid

4 C water

2 T white vinegar

11/2 T Kosher salt

Put in a saucepan and bring to a boil. After two minutes removed from heat and poor into jars with cucumbers in them.

Other ingredients:

Pickling cucumbers

Crushed red pepper

Fresh garlic

Pepper

Fresh dill

MIA Already!

Well, the goal was to cook/blog about cooking at least twice a week. In over a week’s time, we have cooked, just forgot to take pictures or blog. Last Sunday we had Hank and Corkey over and made bruschetta for the appetizer. Then we had a salad with candied almonds, strawberries, goat cheese and raspberry vinaigrette. For the main course we had Chicken Saltimbocca alla Romano with roasted baby red potatoes. It was delightful and deemed our “go to” meal for when we have guests. We really just need to work on the timing.

Then on Tuesday, we took our show on the road. We were meeting to talk about Fantasy Football, and what better food to have those discussions over, than pizza. We made each person a mini-pizza dough and they added their own toppings to each one.

The toppings included ground Italian sausage, pepperoni (par boiled to reduce fat/grease), fresh spinach, garlic, mushrooms, red onions, green peppers, artichokes, and fontina and Parmesan cheeses. We grilled them on a Weber grill that was heated to about 500 degrees. Each pizza only took about 5-6 minutes to cook. These were delicious and it was fun too!

So since I am supposed to write ABOUT cook, not just about what we cooked, I’ll get started with that portion now. I am going to tackle the ingredients for the pizzas.

The Italian sausage was easy, it just needed to be browned and drained. The pepperoni was also easy. Just bring a small pot of water to a boil and throw the pepperonis in. You will be amazed how much fat/grease is released this way. Making your pizza more enjoyable and less soggy. The spinach was coarsely chopped. The garlic we sliced thin. Same with the red onions and green peppers. The mushrooms and artichokes were pre cooked. I like to cook the mushrooms first with just a bit of EVOO. Once they are cooked through, I removed them and cook the quartered artichoke hearts. We like to do this to get most of the moisture out and get them nice and brown. The cheeses were just grated.

Make sure and remember the crushed red peppers for the table!

Why blog about cooking

There are tons, literally tons, of blogs out there about food and cooking. So why would we start out own, seemingly very late in the cooking/food blog world? We thought it would be fun to start a blog about our cooking adventures as a way to library our cooking photos and to document what has worked and what's failed in the kitchen, bust most importantly as a creative outlet for writing.

We are going to try no to be "those people." The people that start a blog with fervor only to let it go by the wayside days or weeks later. My goal is to update this at least twice a week with both pictures and stories about what we have been cooking.

Wish me/us luck!

Cheers!