Adventures in Eclectic Home Cooking
Posted in Food Features, Recipes, Technique on Jan 4th, 2010
Half sour pickles, sometimes called “new pickles”, weren’t my favorite growing up. They were overlooked in the quest for the most lip-puckering sour garlic pickles. As my taste buds matured, however, I came to appreciate the more delicate saltiness of a good half sour pickle. From what I’ve noticed, half sours are made from very [...]
Unfortunately for me, growing up I never knew a good pea soup, let alone one outside of the school cafeteria. My mom didn’t make pureed soups from scratch often, so for me the words “Split-Pea Soup” conjured up images of gelatinous vats of over-salted green-gray mush, not unlike in the Exorcist, that would send me [...]
Posted in Guilty Pleasures, Recipes on Dec 11th, 2009
I had a terrible craving for eggs this week. Not just any eggs though. I wanted deviled eggs… and a lot of them. A normal person would take that as a sign and just make them – I mean, why mess with a perfect thing, right? Not me. I’m far too lazy for that. To [...]
Posted in Food Features, Recipes, Technique on Dec 5th, 2009
Of the three kinds of cucumber pickles I experimented with since the summer, the most successful were the “bread and butter” pickles. Because of their sweetness, these usually aren’t on my crave list. When I think of bread and butter pickles, I think of almost-neon manufactured, sickly sweet, acidic spears that seem to last indefinitely [...]
Posted in Pondering on Nov 20th, 2009
I’ve mentioned before how I have more of a salt-tooth than a sweet one. There’s no better example of this than my childhood favorite: garlic cucumber deli pickles. The saltier, the more sour and garlicky, the better. Ask my mom, she’ll tell you that pickles were pretty much a food group in my diet as [...]
I was a pretty adventurous eater as a child, but not all of my cousins and siblings were. Every kid has at least one food they won’t touch with a ten-foot fork. From what I remember, it didn’t have much to do with taste. We just picked a food we were going to hate (mine [...]
Posted in Food Features on Oct 25th, 2009
Move over Nutella, I’ve found a chocolate spread that’s richer, thicker, cheaper and easier to get my hands on. I’m not sure I’ll ever look back.
Posted in Food Features, Recipes, Technique on Oct 22nd, 2009
This post has been a long time coming. I really wanted to make sure I liked these little guys before posting them. Last night, we finished the jar of lemon pickles we made around the time we had Iron Chef Lemons at work. That’s how many lemons there were – it took over three months [...]
Posted in Food Features on Oct 4th, 2009
For me, fall means apple picking. And apple picking means apple pies! The minute the weather turned crisp, we grabbed some friends and headed upstate to pick as many apples as we could carry. Empires and Jonagolds were ripe in abundance so we filled up mostly on those. Empires have a pure white flesh and [...]
Posted in Recipes on Sep 21st, 2009
I love refried beans, but I’m trying to pay more attention to the amount of processing food goes through before it gets to me. Refried beans vary greatly between companies and sometimes have ingredients I wouldn’t want to use in every situation (lard and preservatives, for example, in the non-vegetarian varieties). They are often high [...]
