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....

I can cook...

It's a good thing, and I ought to 'own' it.
So...
I can cook fairly well...

I make a pretty good spaghetti sauce.  The past few years, I've had enough homegrown tomatoes to make at least one batch from scratch.  We're bagging up tomatoes for the next batch now.  I've already got homegrown oregano dried and waiting.  I'm hoping to have some good peppers for it this year.

I'm getting close to a really good meatloaf.  I've got the mix down for taste.  I'm still working on the balance of consistency and cooking time, so it's not squishy.  I don't like squishy meatloaf.

I have achieved the lifelong ambition of a decent batch of chili, check it out:
HappyDale Homestead's Taco Chili

I've cobbled together a pretty good Sloppy Joe recipe.

I can bake a decent loaf of bread.
I've adapted that basic recipe several different ways.  The latest metamorphosis is a Garlic-Pepper-Parmesan roll that goes with the Sloppy Joes really well.  The Asiago cheese version was a big hit.

I can make good cookies of all kinds.

I have made a fairly flaky pie crust.  I can bake Brownies, corn bread, pies, and cakes from scratch.  I've fried, boiled, and baked eggs and potatoes.  I've made crepes, pancakes, turnovers, popovers, donuts, and candy from scratch.  I've made many Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners.  I've even made some diabetic treats.  I like to deep fry things.

Thanks to my Deary Departed, I have a killer recipe for Egg Nog:
And I can make Wassail.

I have baked scratch made biscuits on a campfire.  Yes, they were cooked all the way through and turned out light and fluffy.  Only a couple were scorched on the bottom.

This last weekend I grilled a satisfying, medium-well strip steak, with a grilled baked potato, and a plethora of grilled veggies.

And, I am a good Frankenstein cook.
Steve, my Deary Departed, and I perfected Frankenstein cooking back in the day.
Frankenstein cooking is the practice of walking into a kitchen, surveying what is there, (Frankenstein cooking allows for a limited supply run.  As long as it's not a grocery run made solely for the meal, and the additions are minimal.  If you know, you have veggies and meat at home, and you pick up 1 or 2 things to add, it still qualifies as a Frankenstein meal.  Remember, the good doctor had to go out for parts...) and crafting a meal out of it.  This is a vital skill when money is tight.  If yer eating Ramen Noodles for a week, it's good to be able to change it up a bit.  I've made things with Spam and macaroni that weren't half bad.
Last night, I made soup.  The last of the steak was gone, and I still had a whole lot of roasted veggies left.  I had to go get a printer cartridge yesterday, so I got a roll of hot sausage, some vegetable broth, and a box of noodles.
I didn't want a whole lot of meat in the soup, just enough for flavor, so I only used a quarter of the roll of sausage.  The rest is frozen, awaiting a future use.
I grilled the veggies with a garlic pepper, butter, Extra Virgin Olive Oil mix.  But, unfortunately, I didn't think to grill any garlic.  So I chopped up a few cloves and threw it in with the sausage while it was browning.  I also threw some chopped onion in with it.  I did grill an onion last weekend, but only one, it was particularly tasty, so there wasn't much of it left.  There was a yellow bell in the fridge that needed to be used, so I chopped that up and threw it in, too.
While the meat was browning and the vegetables were sweating, I cut up the leftover grilled veggies.  There was most of a Zucchini left, which was what inspired the soup idea.  There were a few asparagus, half a red bell pepper, and a little of the onion left.  I grilled mushrooms too, but I ate all those.
I dumped all that in a pot, added the vegetable broth, water, and some chicken base.  I dumped in the sausage and the fresh veggies and put it on the stove on high.  While it was heating up, I threw in some oregano, a little thyme, and a pinch of ground coriander.  When it boiled, I threw in some tri-colored noodles.  Only about a quarter of the box, they were just there to add some body.
I let it all simmer till the noodles were done.  Made a nice big batch of soup.
And, now I have some sausage and noodles for some other meal.
No telling where they'll end up.

Watching the speech....

All right, this is a truly non-sequitur, spur of the moment.
But I just started watching Sanders' speech from last night, And I gotta ask:

How the hell is Hillary Clinton the nominee?

I just don't get it.
How is rolling over, licking the boots of the PTB, and validating their chosen one, going to change anything?
Seriously?
How are 4-8 more years of war, capitalist excess, and Wall Street pandering going to make things better for everyone?
I'm about 10mins in and he's talking about leaving a better world for the grand children.
And I'm seriously afraid, that boat might have already sailed.
PERMAFROST IS MELTING IN THE ARCTIC!!
Yes, it is another non-sequitur.  But it is a vitally important bit of information.  To the entire world.  We don't have 8 more years to dick around with 'clean coal'.  If we can't chill the poles back down, we're dead.  The planet will burn us out, and start again.
And, jeeze, just had a serious sense of Deja Vu....
How's that for non-liner progression?

OK, I'm at the 15min mark.
He's restated the goals of his campaign.  Which are what motivated all of us Bernie of Busters, or what ever you want to call us ardent supporters.
He's talking about the kind of leader we need, while demonstrating that he, not Clinton, is that leader.
I'm wondering how he doesn't see that.
I'm wondering how more people don't see that.
I'm wondering how he justifies telling us to vote for the corporate chosen one.  How do you spark a revolution and then rationalize capitulating to the status quo?
Clinton may 'understand' that a person working 40 hours a week should not be living in poverty.
But, she's not gonna do jack shit to change that.  She's going to push through the TTP.  She's going to keep the wars going.  She's going to let the oil and gas industry and Wall Street continue business as usual.
How does that help me or anyone around me?

Let's end the movement towards Oligarchy seen in this country?
By voting for the Oligarchy?!

And of course, we've gotta drag out the Trump Club....

I'm just about at the end.  He's laid out a lot of things that Hillary Clinton 'understands'.  Does he honestly believe she'll act on that understanding, and bite the hand that's rigging the election for her?  She just declared that single payer won't work.  She's gonna push the TTP.  We all know she wants to go to war with Russia.  She'll say anything to get elected.  Doesn't mean that's what she believes.

And we can pretty much blame the poor excuse for true health care reform that Obama care is, on Clinton.  A good chunk is lifted directly from the plan she put together all those years ago.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want to see that pitiful plan just blown away.
I'm a single payer advocate.  As I mentioned above, she's recently declared single payer a non-starter.
So, I know with her in the White House, that ain't happening.

I just don't get where Bernie's at right now.
Maybe he's more trusting than I am.
I don't believe that Clinton is on board with many of these issues.
The only candidate that would fight for all of these issues is Bernie Sanders.  With Clinton, all this promised progressiveness is gonna vanish like a puff of smoke the day after the election.

Sorry Bernie.
STILL AIN'T VOTING FOR THE WAR-MONGERING CORPORATE WHORE.

Tonight's time waster....

A spur of the moment thing.