Easy Brined Dill Pickles..

The problem: You're growing cucumbers for pickling, and they are getting to proper size one or two at a time, but all the recipes you find are for a big batch. You keep putting them in the fridge and they are wilted by the time you have enough saved up for a recipe's worth.

The solution: Use this recipe for one jar at a time pickle production. 

1. Make a brine- I'm using 2T of kosher salt for every cup water. Try it and if they come out too salty, adjust. Go ahead and make too much (like a 4 or 5X recipe), you'll use the rest on another day.

2. Wash your cucumbers, remove the prickles as you do.. 

3. I like to slice mine into 'spears' first. They will pickle faster, and I seem to have better luck fitting them in the jar. 

4. In a clean jar place the cucumber spears, a smashed garlic clove, a sprig of fresh dill, and a sprinkling of red pepper flakes (or fresh pepper if you like). Pour in the brine. 

5. Cover the jar with something that breathes and a rubber band- keep it at room temp but not direct sun for about 3 days. 

6. Put your lid on and put them in the fridge. If your pickles are too salty, you can dump some water and replace with fresh water. Excess salt will leach out into the water.

Feel free to add onion, green tomato, etc; whatever else the garden is putting out in excess. Here is a fresh prepared batch sitting out. Notice the color difference in the new brine. As it matures it will become 'milky' in appearance.

Peach Cobbler

We planted a tiny little 3 foot peach tree last year, and it is a champ! As spring started it was making so many little peaches that I worried all its limbs would break under the weight. We knocked about 2/3's of the little peaches off the branches, and we've still gotten about 25 beautiful ripe peaches from it.

So what to make with them? I'm a little hesitant to make anything, as I'm just crazy for ripe peaches. It almost seems a waste to eat them any other way. Finally yesterday (after eating them for about a three days) I had my fill and decided to start with a cobbler.

If you saw my olallieberry cobbler post, you are probably getting the theme, but I LOVE cobblers. So much easier than pie, and I prefer that sweet biscuity cake in the mix to pie dough. It's nice when your preference is also easy.

If you are local and want some good peaches, there is a little fruit stand on the 118 that has great peaches coming soon, if they aren't there already. Can't remember the name, but I go there every summer and will be again once these last 9 peaches are gone!

I used this recipe, and totally recommend it. http://allrecipes.com/recipe/southern-peach-cobbler-2/

I recommend staying clear of any cobbler recipe that doesn't have butter (cut in method) in the 'cake' portion of the recipe.

Here are the pictures. As always, nothing cooked with fruit looks as appetizing as the fruit itself, but believe me, this is GOOD!

Cobbler

Olallieberries are coming in. Besides the artichokes, there isn't anything in the garden that fits my "all thumbs" gardening style so well. Plant it, walk away, and return when it's time to harvest. This years bunch is going to be about five times what we picked last year. Our first pick went to a cobbler.

Nothing more to say here. Behold...

Coq au Vin

Coq au Vin is our signature dish.

It's been a favorite of mine, since before I ever had chickens. Since before I ever tasted it really. I was in culinary school when I first heard about it. I remember my teacher telling us the history of it, and as we often had to the day before we made an important dish, we had to research and write a (very) short paper about the dish. It's a dish that is a solution to a real problem; and the problem is that half of every egg that hatches gives you a rooster. A rooster that eats as much as any egg laying hen without giving back eggs. Now you don't get any roosters or hens unless you have a rooster, this is true, but you only need one (maybe 2 at the most if you want a backup) for 15 or so hens. So that is 13 or so roosters that you don't need, and they were just running around squabbling or eating up all the pasture etc. Coq au Vin was the solution.

When you eat it, you'll never know you're eating something born of necessity either. A rooster braised in Burgundy and chicken stock, with sauteed pearl onions, mushrooms, and lardons. It sounds like a luxurious extravagance really, but as it turns out, it really does require that treatment. While it is likely slaughtered young (at least at my house it is) so that it doesn't put too much a dent in the food source, it still can be pretty tough. You wouldn't even need to compare against a chicken leg to see the difference. Whether it's because of exercise young cockerels get from jousting each other in play, or from male hormones, or both; a rooster drumstick is very strong. It really practically looks like red meat as well. So if you are preparing such a meat, you want to use a slow cooking process that will extract the collagen, thereby tenderizing it. Luckily for those who will eat the dish, that collagen actually gives extra flavor and a silkier texture to the sauce. Collagen is after all what gives us gelatin as well.

So here is a process which takes a nearly inedible piece of meat, adds lots of fresh aromatic veggies herbs and wine, and given the right technique, becomes something really wonderful. This is the REAL cooking, as opposed to searing a little bit of tenderloin which starts off as something special. It appealed to me for being something incredibly conservative as well as being something which wasn't wasteful. After all tenderloin could feed us all, but there's a whole lot of cow left after that. This is the same sort of thing if you think of your whole flock as a cow- the rooster is that 'bad' cut of meat you might give to the dogs otherwise. And Coq au Vin is it's transcendence!

Unfortunately, the school I went to decided to have us prepare a really large 'batch' of Coq au Vin, as a class. Not saying that my own pot would have made something better, cause who knows- but the dish we all made together was very disappointing. It would be many years till I would have it again. It would have to wait till I had chickens.

I've had it now made from store bought chickens as well as from homegrown birds, and I still think its best when it stays closer to its origins. Store bought chicken doesn't have the strength to go through that process. Give me a rooster or an old stew-hen any day. And if the same flock that produced them has long since paid for itself in fresh eggs, so much the better. Cheaper, tastier, and raised healthier and happier.

We made Coq au Vin this last weekend when my sister and her family were visiting, so here are the pictures.. Unfortunately, we didn't shoot one of the finished product before we ate, so the final one is from a dinner last year.

Two pair of leg and thigh, floured and ready for the pan

Veggies cut and ready to go

First sweat the pork

In the pork fat saute the mushrooms, and onions

Brown the bird

Deglaze pan- add two bottles of pinot- some tomato paste- celery carrot and onion- fresh thyme- and the browned chicken itself. All go into the fridge over night.

The next day braise it all, dump the mushy carrots onions and celery, add the sauteed veggies and pork in its place

Finally reduce the sauce and serve! 

We like it over brown rice instead of egg noodles. 

Pictured here with sweet potato and brussels sprouts.

Marmalade

It's a pretty great thing to have mature fruit trees around, though with the hustle of the seasonal garden we often forget about them.

This is especially true of the oranges. There are 6-7 orange trees here on the property we rent. Why 6-7? Well that discrepancy depends on what you call a tree. There is one here that was just full of dead branches when we moved in. I trimmed it pretty hard, because I figured it was a lost cause and was preparing to cut it out entirely, but the battery on the chain saw died out before I could get to the main trunk. Before I got back to the job, it suddenly sprouted a whole bunch of pretty vigorous suckers- so we've decided to give it a chance. I know that might sound foolish to some people, but one of the best producing trees here is nothing but a HUGE stump (biggest around I've seen on an orange) that has a big, round, tangled mass of suckers coming out of the top of it. The oranges it produces are quite small and stay pretty sour, but in my opinion they make for perfect juice and the quantity is best of all the trees. This tree is the very one that got me fired up to make marmalade today.

Since it grows pretty close to the hedge that blocks us from the street, I couldn't help but notice it when I was walking around the hedge chasing a lizard. And what I noticed was this: All the (30 or so) 'oranges' on it were empty shells hanging like so many dried out old Christmas ornaments. There were no oranges on this tree at all anymore, just some old hard peels still attached to their twigs.

So I got to googlin'. It sounds like this is the work of 'roof rats', aka- black rats. I don't find this hard to believe at all, because we sure do have them. We have been in a sort of truce for most of the past year, with the exception of the compost bin incident, and the crawl space incident (the only time I have resorted to poison). This certainly means war.

First thing is to pick all the oranges, from all the trees. Well, all but one anyway- I'm leaving the tall one in the driveway to let them get REALLY sweet. But what shall I do with all these oranges?


We turned to Fine Preserving, a book which I bought long ago simply because I thought it was written by MFK Fisher. It wasn't, it was written by Catherine Plagemann- but the copy I bought was a reprint and annotated by MFK Fisher. Anyway, it was a happy accident, cause that book is full of recipes for strange and forgotten preservations that I'd never heard of before. I've been hoping to get to this book eventually (making something from it that is) but I haven't done anything but read from it till now.


So, here we were staring at all these oranges and wondering whether to juice them or eat them, donate them, try and barter them or what- when we thought of marmalade. Not only does this book have a great recipe for orange marmalade (it actually has two), but it also contains one for every other citrus fruit you can think of (OK, not starfruit). The one we chose uses both lemons and oranges.

A few hours of peeling, chopping, cooking and jarring later- and we've got some oranges tucked away where the rats can't get to them, in the form of about a gallon of marmalade. It's pretty good too, though I'm really supposed to wait a week for best taste.

Here come the pictures..

Confetti Stir Fry

That's what Jen calls it. I call it delicious. It has been different every time I've had it, depends on what's coming out of the garden.

This one has swiss chard, bull's blood beet greens, blue solaise leeks, yellow squash, garlic, daikon radish, and some rice cooked in our own chicken stock. Yum.

Everything but the rice is from the yard.

Breakfast

So we had some of our artichokes last night, with some homemade aioli (delicious).. Funny thing was I was making the aioli from memory, and forgot that I need to whip up the yolks FIRST, before adding oil. I had just whipped up olive oil, yolks, garlic, salt, and pepper- all together. Of course it wouldn't come together, and I had to stop and think about it. Not a disaster right? I just started a new batch of yolks (with a tiny bit of lemon, cause I like it), then poured the whole earlier broken batch over it while I whipped. Bottom line was I made an EXTRA rich aioli, since it had about double yolks necessary. And I was left with a whole mess of eggs whites.

So we looked in the garden this morning, found a young yellow squash, and a couple green onions, sauteed those in some butter (with some store bought baby spinach) and then scrambled the egg whites on top.

Don't know about you, but I think egg whites are kind of boring. There was nothing to do now, but feed the scramble back it's own yolks. In the form of a generous serving of aioli of course! Funny how it all works out..

Very tasty. Onion rye toast with butter and raspberry jam on the side.