Pickled Horseradish

You could also call this prepared horseradish. Either way, it's the way to bag the store boughten stuff. And really, this is ridiculously easy. Get one of those scary looking horseradish roots that can be fodder for many a joke. I used to work the dreaded brunch shift and one of the opening tasks was to make the bloody mary mix. Needless to say, hung over waiters are not one to hold back on a ribald joke involving horseradish. So. Are you familiar with fresh horseradish? You should be! It's so good. 

I found this simple preparation in the Joy of Cooking. You clean your root, then peel it, then grate it. I grated it with a Microplane which didn't take too long, but I guess you could do it in the food processor. It might be a bit too coarse, though. Beware! Horseradish is fierce. I had to walk away a few times because I got a good strong whiff, and it just about burned my nasal passage up to my brain.

Grate it into a glass bowl filled with a cup of white vinegar and a 1/2 teaspoon of kosher salt. Pack it into a clean jar and keep in the fridge. I'm hoping for at least a few months for this big jar. Might have to whip up a Bloody Mary brunch party soon...

October Tigress Can Jam: Marinated Peppers

This month super spicy Kaela at Local Kitchen picked a pepper for the October Tigress Can Jam. I'll admit that I'm a total wimp when it comes to spicy stuff. Add to that a toddler in the house, and it's very rare that I cook with chili peppers. Sweet peppers are nice, but I don't have them all the time. They weren't in my garden this year or last, come to think of it. They don't normally figure into my diet. That's why I love the Can Jam. It makes me think of things I wouldn't normally think of. Like peppers. Next year I'll grow peppers. It was sort of a revelation.

Right after I bought these lovely peppers, I started getting free peppers thrown at me. So, I diced and froze a bunch of green peppers, and have a bunch of little red hot peppers drying (I do use them, sparingly, I just don't like super spicy). I chose these sweet peppers because they were so gorgeous. And so, I happened upon a recipe for marinated peppers in Linda Ziedrich's The Joy of Pickling which sounded perfectly delicious and simple, to boot.

The next day, I opened a fridge jar. They were delicious even though the recipe calls for them to sit for three weeks before eating. Simple, great as antipasto but probably just as good sauteed with some good sausage or on a pizza. And the liquid makes a great salad dressing, Linda says. However, as I stare at them in the cupboard, I keep on wondering about how much oil is in them. The National Center for Preservation has a similar recipe, albeit with a bit more acid (in the form of lemon juice) in it's ratio. I never thought I could can peppers like this, so it seems strange to me. But, this is why I'm growing peppers next year. Have you ever canned peppers this way?

Marinated Sweet Peppers

adapted from Linda Ziedrich's The Joy of Pickling

2 1/4 pounds of bell peppers (cut in thick slices, seeds and membranes removed)

3 cloves of garlic

3 sprigs of fresh herbs, I used lemon thyme

1 cup white vinegar, I used red wine vinegar (7% acidity)

1 1/2 teaspoons of pickling salt

1 cup of olive oil

Put the peppers into a large bowl and cover them with boiling water. Let them stand until they are soft.

Drain the peppers. When they are cool put them into a hot jar, one that you've already place a clove of garlic and a sprig of your herb of choice in.

In a nonreactive pot, heat the vinegar and salt. Once it boils, add the oil. Bring the mixture to a boil again. Pour immediately over peppers to cover. De-bubble, clean and seal lids. Process in boiling water bath for ten minutes. Let sit for three weeks before eating, and once open, store in fridge.

Sweet Green Bean Quickles

Here's a quick little pickle recipe. I call them "quickles" because they're quick and, well, pickles! They're a perfect snack with drinks. Easy to pick up and munch on. Slightly sweet, with a nice acidic bite, rounded by the warmth of celery seed. They are perfect served with some sharp cheddar, slices of apple and hearty brown bread, accompanied by a nice brown ale.

Or maybe on the side of a super dry, dirty gin martini. Make your martini with a splash of brine and garnish with a pickled green bean!

1 1/2 pounds of green beans, topped not tailed (meaning: remove the stem part and not the tail)

Brine:

3 cups of white vinegar

1 cup of white wine vinegar

6 tablespoons of sugar

3 teaspoons of pickling spice

1 teaspoon of black peppercorns

1 clove of garlic, smashed

1/2 teaspoon of celery seed

Bring the brine to a boil, dissolving the sugar. Let simmer for ten minutes. Depending on how long your beans are use either a pint or quart, wide-mouth variety. Make sure your jars are nice and clean, and hot. You can fill them with boiling water, or super hot tap water. Once the brine is ready, take it off the heat, fill the jars with the beans, and then fill to cover the beans. Seal them, let the jars cool a bit, put them in the fridge. They benefit from a few days, but you can eat them a few hours later, too. Store them in the fridge.

P.S. There's still a few days to leave a comment for a chance to win Food Heroes by Georgia Pellegrini. I've asked folks to tell me who their food heroes are, and the answers are amazing! I am totally enjoying reading everyone of them.

The Lost Art of Real Cooking - Give Away!

A while back, I received this special little book in the mail, The Lost Art of Real Cooking by Ken Albala and Rosanna Nafziger. I was immediately taken with it, and since then, it's been moving around the house with me, sitting on my night stand and taking up residence in the kitchen. I intended to read it thoroughly before writing this, but due to the nature of the book, I wandered a little. I got carried away. I picked it up and put it down. I don't think the authors would mind this a bit. I think this book wants you to open it up and just delve into it. It doesn't necessarily need a read through. And it can be revisited over and over.

Eclectic, esoteric, irreverent were some of the words used to describe this book of sometimes "laborious and inconvenient" things to make. It's not so much a book of recipes, as it is a book of cooking ideas. Take the pretension out of many of the delicacies that you find being peddled at fancy food establishments, and a good deal of the time you'll find food that folks like you and me have been making for hundreds of years.

There are many sections to get lost in, from fermented vegetables to fermented beverages, bread making, meat curing, fresh pasta, grains and desserts. And don't forget jams! There is a good sense of humor, from both writers, who take turns explaining their respective topics. Albala is a professor of history (and author of many books), so you'll get some interesting information on say, a medieval pig recipe. Nafziger is a chef and editor who hails from West Virginia, and likes to reference her homespun West Virginian upbringing.

Some of the things that fascinated me was learning about Koji mold and utilizing wild yeasts for your bread making. I wanted to follow the recipe for a gallon of beer, but I haven't yet gotten there. Talk about inconvenient food, Albala tells you how to make and grind your own malt. Apparently, the purist home brewers he talked to scoffed at this idea, and he went ahead and did it anyway. I applaud this gumption, but go read the description on how to grind malt! (But then again, I have no problem taking days to make a jam or jelly.)

The book itself is formatted like an old-timey cookbook, which if you're like me, and have piles of cookbooks spilling out of your bookshelves, you know all about. Vaguely cryptic and sometimes insufficient in detail, these kinds of books have recipes like little pieces of flash fiction, all of a paragraph long. In The Lost Art of Real Cooking, the narrative is the route taken on most of these, and I'll be honest, it flusters me sometimes. Although I like to wing it, and make things my own, I do like bullet points and clarity. But it teaches a great lesson: get in there and just do it, all ready! Stop shilly-shallying and make the goshdarn fermented pickles already!

So, I'll admit it. I've made a great deal of cucumber pickles in my life, but never fermented them! Gadzooks! Please don't think less of me. I've jumped this hurdle, and made it safely on the other side. Why, you ask? Oh, I don't know. I've fermented other things, but cucumbers just didn't make the list. This book nudged me. It said: come on, just put some cucumbers in some water, salt, spices and vinegar and just do it already. It's one of the nicest parts of this book. It's encouragement makes you feel like you made the decision yourself, when in fact they were nudging you all along.

The Pickles:

I packed my garden's cucumbers into a sterilized half-gallon mason jar. I put in two garlic cloves, and some pickling spices, a bay leaf, and a dried hot pepper. I covered it in a brine made of 1/2 cup of kosher salt mixed with 8 cups of water. I stuck a glass in the jar (which I saw being done on a blog, but I can't remember which one! What a great idea!) to weigh the cucumbers down, keeping them submerged under the liquid. I put the jar in the basement, and almost three weeks later, I had the most incredible, crunchy, salty, sour pickles I have ever had. And I've had some good pickles.

P.S. Check out Ken Albala's blog at http://kenalbala.blogspot.com/

and Rosanna Nafziger can be found blogging here: http://www.paprikahead.com/

To win a free copy of this liberating book, leave me a comment below and tell me what inconvenient and laborious foods you've been making this summer! You have until midnight, Wednesday, August 25 when the winner will be picked by the random-number generator. Please make sure to leave an e-mail address if you don't have a blog linked to your comment, so I can find you if you win!

Quick Dills

This month's Tigress' Can Jam focus was cucurbits or The Cucurbitaceae, picked by Laundry Etc. It's a family affair, you know? A big crazy family those cucurbits. And I totally did not rise to the challenge and make a cantaloupe jam like I wanted to. Or watermelon rind pickles. Nope. Not me. I couldn't find local melons, sadly. But I found local cucumbers and a few of them were even from the garden, so good on me. For this recipe, which is a solidly easy, crunchy pickle, I used some lovely lemon cucumbers and some mixed in double-yield picklers.

These are Quick Dill Pickles, and the recipe is from that trusty tome, The Joy of Cooking. You don't want to let these sit for too long in your pantry, as the brine is weaker and the curing quicker than for traditional pickles. This recipe is perfect for the first of the crop, so you can enjoy some pickles during the rest of the summer, while the crock brines the big haul.

Quick Dill Pickles

adapted from The Joy of Cooking

4 pounds of pickling cucumbers, sliced into 1/4 inch coins or in the case of lemon cucumbers, slice them in thick rounds, then quarter the slices. You want to go for some sort of shape uniformity.

Pack the cucumbers into hot pint jars along with a clove of garlic, a teaspoon of pickling spices, and a pinch of extra dill seed and peppercorns.

Combine in a non-reactive pot until just boiling:

3 cups cider vinegar

2 1/4 cups water

1/4 cup pickling salt

Add the hot vinegar solution to the jars, leaving 1/2 inch of headspace. Process for 10 minutes.

Vietnamese Carrot and Daikon Pickle

For this month's Tigress' Can Jam the focus, as many of you know, was carrots. A perfect pick, I thought, especially for me because while I've always been curious about carrot recipes my preserving fancy gets overwhelmed by more immediately enticing items. The sturdy dependable carrot is always there and sadly gets overlooked. I always have carrots around. I use them in so many recipes. And thanks to clever root cellars and great winter markets, I got to purchase some beautiful, local carrots from Four Winds Farm in Gardiner (check out their seedling sale in May, if you're local).

I went the straight and narrow for this post, but who can ever can just one recipe for the month's pick? There are too many interesting and delicious recipes to try. I think my next endeavor will be a chutney. But for now, we have a most satisfying and simple recipe. I have made this as a fresh pickle from The Joy of Pickling by Linda Ziedrich. I didn't know it could be canned, and didn't find out until I was flipping through the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving. It's key to bahn mi or perfect aside some nice Vietnamese pork chops.

The tweaking I did to this recipe was to halve it, add coriander instead of star anise, and add a sprinkling of turmeric because I thought it would impart a nice color. I also grated the vegetables instead of them being julienned, using a hand grater that makes a nice, long strand. The adapted version follows.

1 1/2 cups white vinegar

1 1/2 cups water

3/4 cups sugar

1 tsp. grated ginger

1 lb. carrots, peeled and grated

1 lb. daikon, peeled and grated

1 tsp. coriander seed

A sprinkling of turmeric- maybe an 1/8 of a teaspoon?

In a heavy-bottomed pan, combine vinegar, water, sugar and ginger. Bring to a boil over medium heat to dissolve sugar. Add carrot and daikon and stir for one minute. Add turmeric. Remove from heat.

Place 1/2 tsp. of coriander seed in the bottom of each hot jar. Pack hot vegetables in the jars within a generous 1/2 inch of top of jar. Ladle hot pickling liquid to cover vegetables, leaving 1/2 inch headspace. Remove air bubbles. Process in boiling water for ten minutes. This yielded two pint jars, firmly packed.

Pickled Eggs

You know when you're depressed and uninspired how everything is dull, and you just let things go? And then, when that mood passes, it's like you woke up with a desk full of work to do. Right now, I'm in front of a big huge desk full of work to do. Which is actually a great thing because when I start not wanting to cook or eat anything it's a sign that things are really going south. Cooking up a storm of sweets? There's a problem, but it's being channeled. Not wanting to cook anything? Houston, there's a big problem, and we're not sure if the landing is going to go well. Well, so far, landing in February has been a good thing. January has been long and arduous. But the days, they pass, and all the while get longer, and already there is chatter of sowing seeds, and well, how can you be in a funk when that's going on?

There was some brine left in the fridge from my turnip and radish pickles and damned if I was going to throw that gorgeous pink stuff out. I tried to make this last week, but the eggs I boiled turned to shreds when I tried to peel them. They were turned into egg salad. I was so irritated that I waited a whole week to try again. Today's batch came out perfect. I boiled them with salt and a splash of pickle juice.

This recipe is from Linda Ziedrich's The Joy of Pickling. It's incredibly easy, if you have some beet pickle juice, or something similar to it, lying around. I have yet to taste these, but just seeing them in the fridge cheers me up a little.

1 cup of beet pickling juice (beet pickle juice?)

1 cup of white vinegar

1 tsp. of pickling salt

1/2 tsp. peppercorn, crushed

1/2 tsp. allspice, crushed

1 bay leaf

12 hard boiled eggs

Bring brine to a boil. Put peeled eggs into a jar (one quart, or two pints). Pour cooled liquid over eggs, seal and refrigerate. Let sit for 6-24 hours.

Pickled Turnips and Radishes

This morning I opened a jar of pickles I made this summer from my bountiful lemon cucumber crop. They are outrageously good bread and butters with extra coriander and turmeric. So good in fact, that my fifteen-month old kept jamming them in his mouth. I had to hide the jar or else he might have eaten them all. Which, yeah, I don't think so! I think that was his first pickle experience. It was really quite beautiful to watch. We have a believer. He then helped me make this pickle recipe. He's really good at pushing the food processor on and off.

I was so excited to write about these pickles because they look incredible. But, it will be a few days until I can back that up empirically. I based it on a couple of recipes, mostly Linda Ziedrich's Pink Pickled Turnips for the measurements. There are a bunch of recipes for this Middle Eastern pickle, and they all have beets in them. Seeing as how I drank my last beet yesterday (with some carrots and ginger), I decided to use these watermelon radishes instead. Both the red turnips and watermelon radishes are local, purchased at the winter market the other day. The radishes are from but a few miles from my home, as the crow flies. I wondered if the reds and pinks would do what the beets do, and that is color the pickle. And yes, they did. A beautiful pink blush showed as soon as the brine hit the vegetables. I will post back to record their success (or failure).

2 1/2 pounds of turnips and radishes, cleaned, trimmed and sliced in fine rounds

4 garlic cloves, crushed

2 cups white vinegar

2 cups water

3 tablespoons of pickling salt

teaspoon of celery seed

1/2 teaspoon of peppercorns

a few sprigs of fresh dill

Sterilize three pint jars, or a 2 quart jar, if you have it. Put the vegetables into a large glass bowl. Dissolve salt in water and vinegar. Pour over vegetables. Add spices. Pack vegetables into hot jars. Add brine to cover. Remove bubbles and add dill. Seal tightly and let them stand at room temperature for about 10 days. Then refrigerate. Will keep for about a month.

Vietnamese Pickled Carrot and Celery Root

It's not surprising that many people turn their palates to Asian flavors after the holidays. And pickles are always good for digestion and good health. I made these quick pickles based on a recipe from Linda Ziedrich's wonderful pickling book, The Joy of Pickling. They were totally easy and completely delicious. I loved using celery root in a new way. The original ingredient was daikon, and I thought celery root would make a fine, if slightly drier, substitute. We had it over brown rice, with edamame and diced avocado drizzled with dressing (ginger, garlic, oil, lemon-lime glaze, rice wine vinegar). So good!

Vietnamese Pickled Carrot and Celery Root

Recipe adapted from Linda Ziedrich's Joy of Pickling

1/2 pound combined carrot and celery root, grated (a small carrot and normal sized root)

1/2 tsp pickling salt

4 teaspoons sugar

3 tablespoons rice vinegar

Toss vegetables with salt and let sit for ten minutes. Drain any accumulated water. Dissolve sugar in the vinegar, pour over mixture. Let sit an hour. Store in fridge for a week. Drain off any liquid to serve.

Beet Quickles

Quickles are quick pickles. These are glorious. Anything with beets arrest me with their glorious, jewel-toned beauty. Haven't even tasted them yet. No matter. I know they will be heavenly. Here's the recipe:

2 red or golden beets
1 fresh Thai chile
1 cup rice vinegar
1/4 cup sugar
1 fresh bay leaf
1/2 teaspoon black peppercorns

Scrub, trim, and peel 2 red or golden beets. Slice thinly, and transfer to a jar. Split 1 fresh Thai chile in half. Bring chile, 1 cup rice vinegar, 1/4 cup sugar, 1 fresh bay leaf, and 1/2 teaspoon black peppercorns to a boil in a small saucepan. Pour hot mixture over beets. Seal jar, and refrigerate. Beets will keep for 1 month.

Pickling Time

The lemon cucumber plants that seemed so prolific are now getting covered in some kind of mold and seem to be dying quickly. I wonder: is this normal senescence, as the weather seems to be turning autumnal very quickly, or is this truly a disease of some sort? No matter. I have picked and pickled all I can and will move onto other endeavors. Last night I made six pints of quick dills. It is the easiest recipe ever. We shall see how they taste in six weeks!

Recipe: Joy of Cooking, Quick Dills