I’m not sure when “pickles” came to indicate cucumbers that are pickled, and nothing else. You can buy pickled garlic, pickled eggs (eeeeeew), but the pickles section is predominantly composed of cukes. Oh sure, there’s variety: sweet pickles, bread & butter pickles, dill pickles, kosher dill pickles, zesty dilly pickles, pickle chips, and more. But they are all cucumbers!
It turns out this was not always so. Those of you who can have probably seen many kinds of pickles in your cookbooks. Pickled okra! Pickled beets! Pickled peaches!
And one of my personal favorites, pickled green beans!
Dilly beans start with a heap of fresh, brilliant green snap beans. They’re dirt cheap right now at my local farmers market, so it’s a great time to buy a bunch and pickle them.
Mac and cheese, when I was little, meant the blue box. Oh, beloved blue box of tiny elbows and mysterious orange powder. Then those Velveeta shells came out, and the blue box was supplanted by tiny shells and mysterious orange goo.
And they were delicious, weren’t they?
I discovered, early in my surfing of the foodie corners of the internet, that mac and cheese was something I had never really known. Baked casseroles of pasta and cheese, topped with a decadent crust of cheddar and bread crumbs, seemed to be what the foodie world wanted mac and cheese to be. And I confess! I looooove a good baked mac.
But sometimes, I just want some dang stove top cheesy pasta, creamy and without the crunch, but also without the mystery of the orange powder and goo. Is that so much to ask?
The answer is here, friends. No, this sauce isn’t a classic orange hue. It’s not a copycat recipe of the blue box. But it’s so, soooo good. And, I’m pleased to report, dreadfully easy. No tedious grating of cheese, no tempering of cream, no casserole dish required, no 45 minute bake in the oven.
We had a bit of a cold front move through North Carolina this weekend. Saturday dawned cool and cloudy. I pulled out a pair of jeans for the first time since, I don’t know, April? In combination with students returning for the first week of class, late summer suddenly felt just a teensy bit like autumn. Obviously busting out a fall baking project became an immediate weekend priority.
But what?? Every once in a while, I see a recipe for homemade cheddar crackers traipsing about the internet, and I promise myself, “THIS! This is next!” And then it never is. Until today! This particular cheddar cracker is a pretty basic one (as I imagine all cheddar crackers are) composed of a little butter, a mix of all-purpose and whole wheat flour, some salt & peppers, and a beautiful heap of sharp cheddar.
Most of the other breakfast-y treats I’ve posted here are warm, savory treats: they tend to revolve around potatoes, eggs, or bacon. You might assume that I eat these hearty country breakfasts every day, when in truth, breakfast is usually more of a poached egg and apple sort of affair.
But maybe there’s a happy medium. Something hearty and tasty, but quick enough to pack before I run out the door in the morning. How about some homemade granola?
This granola is not boring. This granola is not bland. This granola is full of oats and almonds and coconut, all toasted together on an ugly old cookie sheet.
It occurred to me today, while I was harvesting tiny cherry tomatoes and tufts of parsley, that I haven’t written a garden update in months. This is quite a change from the first few months I had my plots: I took photos of virtually every change: sprouts peeking through the soil, leaves unfurling, vines climbing. I celebrated each pea pod and jalapeno as though it was the first I’d ever seen. And why not? I’m growing some of my own food! A feat that would hardly be possible without my two little community garden plots.
I’ve always thought the idea of community gardens was a great one, but having now experienced one first-hand, I’m a total convert. I wish every neighborhood, subdivision, and city block could have one. Many of you probably don’t have a community garden easily accessible to you… but many of you might. And if you have any interest in learning to grow a little food, I highly recommend you join.
Need some convincing? Well. I can talk all day about why community gardens are great. But these, certainly, are the top ten perks.
a) pancakes
b) cornbread
c) corn on the cob
d) bacon
e) breakfast
If you raised your hand for none of these things, I question your culinary sanity. If you raised your hand for all of these things, THIS, my friend, is a recipe for you.
Here’s how this happened. I had corn on the cob and bacon in my fridge. I recently saw a recipe for a breakfast hash featuring them, and wanted to make it immediately. Buuuuuuut I wondered: could I make it a little cake instead? Like a latke? Or wait! Even better… a pancake? Or what about a cornbread?
Then it became clear: a cornbread-y pancake (the latke idea was cast aside for another day) studded with corn kernels and bits of bacon? Couldn’t possibly be all bad.
July and August in my childhood meant lots of raspberries. Produce in general, really: my grandparents planted each year a massive garden, and I strongly correlate the start of the school year with boxes of produce on the floor next to the fridge, pan fried okra at dinner almost daily, and raspberries.
Though I love most berries, the raspberry is by far my favorite. Sure, strawberries get a lot of credit as the first fruit of the spring, blueberries sustain me, strong and steady, through the heat of the summer, and blackberries dress up desserts with a splash of deep, fruity decadence. But raspberries, so fragile when picked ripe yet bursting with sweet and tart flavor, will never fade for me.
In Durham, raspberries don’t seem to be a popular cultivar. I’m not sure if it’s the climate or what, but I have only ever seen one, maybe two vendors at the farmers market here with these tiny red berries, and when they do it’s usually just a few pints at a time. So each week of the brief raspberry season in this city, I try to take full advantage. This week, I paired them up with a few luscious peaches for some hand pies!
It’s sort of interesting how some posts come about. Sometimes I very specifically know I want to try a recipe, I cook and photograph that recipe, edit the photos, write a little something, and post it to the world. Other times, something comes wildly out of left field and I MUST move it to top of my posting schedule (yes, I have one) because it will either lose relevance or because I’ve made some food I desperately want to share with you.
I had no intentions of writing about this, evidenced by the fact that I took not a single photo aside from before and after shots. This post arose out of a weekend in the kitchen what was, for lack of a better word, grueling. So grueling that it threatened to bring on a veritable identity crisis for this little food blogger.
Just in case you haven’t picked up on this, I care deeply about eating locally. I started this blog, in part, to chronicle my quest toward learning what that means and figuring out just how much of my diet I could change to local fare. This has involved shopping primarily at farmers markets, foregoing produce that isn’t seasonally available, avoiding chain restaurants, starting a garden, and learning the art and science of canning to capture produce when it’s plentiful so that I can eat locally all year long.
I’d say my experience with canning up to this weekend could be firmly classified in the “dabbling” realm. For a while I just made jam. There’s a reason that jam is widely considered an entry-level canning project. Couple together berries and sugar, boil the heck out of them, and you’re left with pretty little jars in brilliant shades of ruby and purple that taste delicious on everything from toast to ice cream. I’d graduated to making a few kinds of pickles, and I tried an inaugural batch of apple sauce last fall.
But none of those things are life-sustaining. They didn’t replace any staples that I was hitherto buying from the grocery store. I’d procured a water bath canner before my apple sauce project, and I knew I wanted to go further this summer. So this weekend, I took my first real crack at canning food that could potentially replace some store-bought staples with homemade ones.
Well.
Having selected eight recipes to try (if you’re gonna turn your kitchen upside down, you might as well get a lot done) I came home from the farmers market on Saturday morning well-stocked: two pounds of okra, five pounds of peaches, two quarts of figs, several onions and peppers, large handfuls both of parsley and basil, and, most importantly, nearly sixty pounds of tomatoes. I dug every every sizable pot and bowl from my cabinets and cheerfully set to work.
I frequently lament that I need another freezer. We have your standard apartment fridge-and-freezer combo, but our freezer is, shall I say, stuffed. Filled to the brim. There are many reasons for this. I have given up on buying chicken breast and now buy the whole dang bird, break it down, and separate the parts into meal-size portions. I capture strawberries at their peak ripeness, freeze them on cookie sheets, then bag them up to use in winter months when the only berries to be found are the imposters at the grocery store. Insanely, I recently made enough soup to open a deli and froze most of it because really, who wants soup in 95° weather?
Oh, and last summer, after foolishly planting seven basil plants that plotted to take over the world, it was all I could do to keep up with it by tossing it in the food processor with some nuts, garlic, parmesan, and a glug or two of olive oil before freezing it in my ice cube trays to make an army of pesto cubes. (Finding actual ice in our freezer is, coincidentally, impossible. Icy beverage lovers, beware.)
And then there are the pizza doughs. I made about twenty of them in the afterglow of my homemade mozzarella cheese experiment this spring with the leftover whey, and may have over-estimated the value of their convenience in relation to my precious freezer real estate.
While most of my friends sense summer only through the seasonal changes, my university job means the seasons are still distinctively marked by the ends and beginning of semesters. It seems so recent that I was fighting graduation traffic on campus, sending Brad off on an internship, and excitedly making a list of all the recipes, garden projects, canning extravaganzas, and social outings I’d surely have time for in the balmy months of summer.
But here we are, at the beginning of August. Aaaaaaand the list is still really long. Is it possible that it’s longer?
It is. Probably because I keep ignoring the recipes I have on my list to make because I get cravings to make something out of left field. Like this.
