The great pickle experiment....

I love sour pickles.
You know the ones in the big jars at the Deli?  The ones that make your mouth pucker when you bite into them.  I can remember crunching down on sour pickles at the Bel-Air drive-in theater while watching things like 'Salt and Pepper', 'Cold Turkey', and 'The Ghost and Mr. Chicken'.
I like my pickles REALLY sour.
Come to find out, the ones I like are full sours and they are fermented.
And, strictly speaking, do not have vinegar in them.
Well, I like a good vinegar pickle.  Sour, with vinegar, that's what I'm after.
We had a lot of cucumbers to use.

 So, Tuesday I took a run at sour dill pickles.
This is an experimental batch.  So I'm not doing the full-on canning thing.
and this batch isn't going to be the best.
It's been a kinda rough year for the cucumbers.  But they are a hardy lot and have produced well.  We've been playing hide and seek with the cucumber vines and a few of them were out there longer than they should have been.

I ended up peeling a couple of the cukes, cuz the skins were too tough and blemished.
Add to that a lack of appropriate spices and this batch has some problems off the top.

But, I've never done this before and it needed to be done quickly.  We're gonna have to make a trip to Olde Town Spice to get the good spices.

For now, I'm working with what I have.  Which is a jar of pickling spice, which I'm not thrilled with.  I don't like allspice that much, and the commercial mix is loaded with allspice.   But, I gave it a try, it was all I could get at the store that day.  I had ground mustard and coriander, so I went ahead and used it. 

So, with those considerations, this won't be the best batch.  But, I processed the cucumbers before they went bad, and I'll have an idea of what I really want when we get organized for a trip out to St, Charles.

I'm already thinking about what I want in MY pickling spice.





So, Tuesday night I washed, peeled, and cut 4 large pickles.

I decided to try spears and thick slices.  Just for the sake of the experiment.
4 large cucumbers packed 3 quart jars.

I used:

3 cups white vinegar
3 cups water
1/3 cup sea salt

for the brine, and it was salty and vinegary enough for me.

While that was boiling I added spices to the jars.

The jar of spears got a clove of garlic and 1 Tablespoon of dill seed.

The jar of slices got a clove of garlic, 1 Tablespoon of dill seed, and 1 teaspoon of pickling spice.  Who knows, I might be wrong about the allspice.  It's worth a try.

The jar that's mostly slices, that got the last 2 spears chunked up, cuz I couldn't fit them in the spear jar, got 1 clove of garlic, 1 Tablespoon of dill seed, 1 teaspoon of celery seed, 1 teaspoon of ground mustard, 1 teaspoon of ground coriander.

And the list for the spice shop got a whole lot of things added to it.

I poured boiling brine into the jars, weighted them down with cups of water, threw a towel over them, and left the sitting on the counter.

As I write, the jars are still on the kitchen counter, souring.  I tried one yesterday and decided to let it go another day.

We'll have to wait and see what happens....

Happydale Homestead's Taco Chili....

 It is good!
We all like food.  3 of us like to cook.  We have enough crap to outfit 3 kitchens.  Maybe even more than that.  Food around here is always interesting.
Kathy and I started talking about this a while ago.  I think we were talking about the taco meat for the taco pizza, or something, and the idea of making chili with a taco flavor floated.  It sounded good, and was a topic we kept coming back to.  Over the weeks we crafted a theoretical recipe, and an idea of the procedure.
On impulse theory was put to practice last Saturday night.
It was impulse, so we weren't as organized as we could have been.  We ended up using caned beans when all of us would have preferred dry, but that's the way things go sometimes.  I ended up being the only one in the kitchen when it came time to put it together so I got to make the final decision of what went into it.  Kinda scary, if it had totally bombed I was gonna blame it on the beans....

 The first hurdle was getting ground beef with the proper flavor without the packet.
I'm not a fan of the dump a bunch of salsa in the beef and call it taco.  Tried that several different ways and it always comes out too bland.
So I surfed the net for taco seasoning recopies, they're all pretty much the same stuff in varying measures.

What I ended up with:

2 teas. chili powder 
2 teas. paprika
1 teas. onion pepper
1/2 teas. sea salt.
1/2 teas ground cumin
1/2 teas. oregano
1/2 - 1 teas. cayenne pepper
1/2 - 1 teas. red pepper flakes
1/2- 1 teas. chipotle pepper

Throw it all in a bowl and whisk it.
Whisk it good....

Note on spices:  The original recipe called for a 1/2 teas. of garlic powder.  I left it out cuz I added 5 cloves of garlic to the meat.
Most of my spices are the cheapies from Shop n' Save.  They work just fine.
The onion pepper and the ground chipotle pepper we got from The Olde Town Spice Shoppe in St. Charles MO.  It's our favorite spice shop.  Their garlic pepper is fantastic.
I went with a whole teaspoon of the various peppers cuz I added some after the beans and everything were in the chili.  If I were gonna do this just as taco meat I would start with the 1/2 teaspoon and see how hot it was before adding too much more pepper.

I started browning about a pound and a half  of ground chuck.

And whisked together the taco seasoning. 
And then it was time for chopping and slicing and dicing.

I minced 5 cloves of garlic.







Course chopped 1 medium onion.
I added both to the meat after draining the fat off.
When the meat was mostly browned I added the spices and 1 cup water and let it simmer till the water was gone.




While the meat was simmering down.  I seeded & chopped the peppers.

1 minced jalapeno pepper
1 chopped red bell pepper
1 chopped Anaheim pepper
1/2 chopped green bell pepper.

Added those to the meat and let them cook while I opened the cans....
This time I ended up using 2 15oz cans of Hunts Fire Roasted Tomatoes and 1 15oz can of whole tomatoes, with the juice.  Next time:

3 cans Hunts Fire Roasted Tomatoes
1 can tomato sauce.

I let that simmer for a few minutes and then added

3 15oz cans black beans, drained
1 15oz can red kidney beans, drained

I let the whole concoction simmer for about 30 minutes.  Added a 15oz can of refried beans, let that melt in and called it Taco Chili.

This is the fulfillment of a life long ambition for me.  I've always wanted to make a good batch of chili.
It's got a gentle bite to it that fades quickly.  It'll warm you up without hurting.  Good flavor.  Goes equally well with just crackers or topped with cheese and sour cram.

These were GOOD!

Frankenstein cooking at it's best.

Frankenstein cooking:  Taking whatever you have in the house and combining it in new and different ways.

I'm calling these Pepper Pockets.  I can't claim that the recipe is totally original, got the idea from a recipe for stuffed Banana Peppers.  But I modified it a bit.

What you need:

1lb. sausage  (I used Jimmy Deans hot sausage.  It's what I had and I needed to use it.  1lb was more than enough to generously stuff 12 crescent rolls.)
Cream Cheese  (I had a little over half a 12oz container of Philadelphia spreadable cream cheese.  I used all of it, and I was spreading it fairly thick.)
1 onion, chopped  (I used a medium sized onion.  I did a coarse chop and since I was browning the onion that worked just fine.)
Peppers (I used a whole bunch of Hot Banana Peppers.  Sorry, can't really tell ya how many.  I forgot to count and they were all different sizes.  The whole point of this was to use up peppers from the garden.  I think this would work well with Red Bell Peppers, and one good sized one would probably do the trick.  Don't know how well Green Bell Peppers would work.  I think if I were gonna do it with Green I'd use a different sausage, maybe Italian sausage.  That actually sounds good.  Next time I'm gonna cut the peppers a little smaller.  I cut them in thick rings and that made the stuffing a little difficult.)
Crescent Rolls (I had two rolls of Shuncks brand and that worked just fine.)

What you do:

Brown the sausage and onions.
Clean and seed the peppers.  (The original recipe said to add a soft cheese and mix it with the sausage and stuff the peppers.  Some of my peppers were kinda small for stuffing so I just cut them up and added them to the sausage after it had cooled a bit.  You really don't need to cook the peppers, cuz they're going in the oven.  All I had in the way of soft cheese was cream cheese.  Adding it to the sausage seemed like over kill, so I just spread it on the crescent rolls.)
Once you get the sausage and the peppers mixed, separate the crescent rolls.  (You wanna do this while the dough is still cold.  It's going to take longer to stuff each roll than it would if you were just rolling them up for crescent rolls.  If you wait to separate them out they're gonna stick together.)
Take a section of dough and fold the skinny point down on the sloping side and press the edges together. (This makes it easier to stuff.)
Spread a thick layer of cream cheese on the dough.  (I used a piece of wax paper under the dough during these two steps, kept it from sticking to the work surface.)
Put a healthy spoonful of the sausage and pepper mixture on top of the cream cheese.  (Some of it may fall out when you roll it up.  You can either stick it back in or use it on the next one.)
Fold the dough over the stuffing and pinch the sides together.
Bake according to the package directions.  Which for the Shuncks brand was 13 to 17 minutes in a 350 degree oven.  I baked these for 17 minutes.

 

The original recipe said they would freeze well.  Don't know if I'm gonna try that or not.

It's a complete meal.  I'll find out tomorrow how well they reheat.  Even using hot sausage and hot peppers the end product wasn't too spicy.