Dill Fridge Pickles and Basil Fridge Pickles

I actually got a chance to do some cooking with my co-blogger last week! The garden had a whole mess of cucumbers - literally more than I could carry - and we thought it would be good to do some pickling. Now, there is a whole art of fermentation and canning and etcetera etcetera, but come on, it's summer. If you're not eating the pickles fast enough that plain refrigerator pickles will serve just fine, you're doing it wrong.

(Briefly: you can ferment cucumbers - or most things, really - in a jar with some salt and water and after a while you will have something sour. You can also can pickles with boiling water and then they can sit on shelves for quite a while. OR you can put some vinegar and salt on some cucumbers and seasonings, stick it in the fridge, and call it a day. Thought so.)

Dill Fridge Pickles (adapted from Smitten Kitchen)

Ingredients:

• 1/2 whole mess of cucumbers (I'd say I used about eight? It'll really vary depending on how big your cucumbers are. Don't sweat it. Just keep filling up jars until you run out of cucumbers)
• Fistful of dill
• 2 cups white vinegar
• 4 tbsp kosher salt (the type of salt actually matters here, since the iodine in table salt can turn pickles dark. I mean, you can still eat them, but they may look odd)

Basil Fridge Pickles (adapted from Food52)

Ingredients:

• 1/2 whole mess of cucumbers
• Fistful of basil, sliced thin
• 2 cups apple cider vinegar
• 1/2 cup mirin or rice vinegar
• 4 tbsp kosher salt
• 1/2 cup sugar

Instructions

Chop up your cucumbers into rounds, nice and thin. Start filling up jars. You don't have to use Mason jars for this, although Mason jars are very useful containers. If, for instance, you've been saving salsa jars, they'll work just fine. Fill them up near the top, but leave about 1/2 inch of space. 

Add the herb (basil or dill) to the jars. You want to have enough of it in there to see, but not so much that you can't see the cucumbers. One head, or two large sprigs, of dill should be enough; two to three large leaves of basil.

Mix up the brine - that's the vinegar, salt, and sugar if using it. Shake until all is thoroughly blended, then start pouring it over the cucumbers. Fill up each jar a bit more than halfway with the brine. There'll be cucumbers sticking out of it. That's okay! The salt will start drawing out the cucumber liquid soon enough, and by tomorrow you'll see that the brine will cover the cucumbers.

Close your jars. Shake them well. Stick them in the fridge. You'll be able to see them turn to pickles - they'll turn from dark green to olive green. Eat them up, yum. They'll keep for about three weeks.

Root Beer Float Ice Cream

Did you ever, while looking for vanilla extract at the grocery store, see the Root Beer Concentrate and wonder what it's for?

Is it for making your own soda? Are you supposed to cook with it? If yes, what? And then I was at my favorite local ice cream shop and they had Root Beer Float ice cream as a special flavor last night and it is my new favorite thing. And so naturally, I had to figure out how to make it myself.

And then I was impatient. This is a custardless ice cream, cream, sugar, and extracts. No eggs, no cooking. Mix up the ingredients and pour in the ice cream maker. Easy peasy. Custard ice creams are usually creamier, smoother, than egg-less ice cream. Fresh out of the ice cream maker, of course it always feels creamy; this one, without the eggs, gets some ice crystal throughout it in the freezer after a day, which makes it feel even more like the foam on a real root beer float.

This ice cream tastes like summer. It tastes like the foam on a root beer float, or when you've mashed all your ice cream into your root beer. (Please tell me I'm not the only one who does that.) It tastes like something you eat on the way home from the beach. You can almost feel the salt drying on your skin eating it.

You know you want to try this.

Root Beer Float Ice Cream

yields 1 quart

2 cups heavy cream

2 cups milk*

3/4 c sugar

1 tablepsoon vanilla extract

1 tablespoon root beer concentrate

Pour all ingredients in a mixing bowl. Whisk. Taste and add more flavor if needed. Freeze according to your ice cream maker instructions.

* You can use one quart of half and half instead of the milk and heavy cream

Cherry Upside Down Cake

I had a desire to bake and wanted to use fruit. I had cherries around the house. I settled, eventually, on cherry upside down cake, because that was the right amount of cherries I had left. I am used to pineapple upside down cakes, with canned pineapple and maraschino cherries. And that is tasty! But this tastes like fresh fruit and is exceptionally delicious.

Cherries, amaretto, very simple cake. You could replace the cherries with any fruit. And the amaretto is totally optional, I am just a huge fan of amaretto mixed with stone fruit.

A word of warning about this cake: it is a very thick batter and needs to be spread out over the fruit. It also comes out a little dry, adding whipped cream was delightful.

Upside Down Cherry Cake

yields one nine inch cake

Topping (or the bottom?)

1 cup of fruit

1/4 cup brown sugar

1/4 cup butter

1/4 cup amaretto (optional)

Cake

3/4 cup butter

3/4 cup sugar

1 tablespoon amaretto or vanilla extract

2 eggs

2 cups flour

1 tsp baking powder

3/4 tsp salt

Preheat oven to 350 and grease a 9 inch round cake pan.

Melt the butter and brown sugar together. I melted them in the microwave, you can use a stove if you are averse to microwaves. Mix in the amaretto. Stir in the fruit, and pour into prepared cake pan.

Cream butter and sugar. Mix in amaretto/vanilla, then eggs. Add in dry ingredients.

Pour over fruit and glaze mixture.

Bake for 30-40 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean. The brown sugar mixture will caramelize and bubble up the sides. Let cool in pan. Loosen the sides with a knife and invert onto a plate, bringing the caramelized glaze and cherries on the top.

Strawberry Shortcake Cookies

Strawberry shortcake. Always a tasty idea in the summer. These are an all in one combination. They're a bit like scones, a bit softer than a cookie cookie, and totally delicious.






Soak diced strawberries with lemon juice and sugar. This draws out juice and enhances the sweetness of the berry more than you'd expect from a small amount of sugar.

Make a simple biscuit dough out of flour, baking powder, sugar, salt, butter and cream. Mix in the strawberries and bake.







I recommend adding ice cream and whipped cream, too, cause seriously, why not? And what is strawberry shortcake without cream?

Yum.

Strawberry Shortcake Cookies
Adapted from Martha Stewart

2 cups of strawberries, diced to about 1/4" cubes
1 tsp lemon juice
2 tbsp sugar
2 c flour
1/2 c sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
6 tbsp cold butter
2/3 c heavy cream
turbinado sugar for dusting

Preheat oven to 350. Cover baking sheets with parchment paper.

Mix strawberries, lemon juice, 2 tablespoons of sugar.

Combine flour, remaining 1/2 c sugar, baking powder, and salt. Cut the butter into cubes and mix in with pastry cutter. When dough resembles oatmeal, mix in cream until the dough starts to come together. Add strawberries and mix in.

Scoop out approximately 1/4 cups, shape into rounds and pat until flat-ish. Sprinkle some turbinado sugar on top. Bake for 20 minutes.

Yields: 1 dozen cookies. Martha says you need to eat them quickly.

Watermelon Mint Sorbet

Have you ever been sitting there eating watermelon and thought to yourself, "This watermelon is tasty and delicious and really refreshing but I wonder if there's any possible way I could make it more refreshing?"

No? That's just me then? Well, I figured it out. You add mint and turn it into sorbet. It's amazing. It's the perfect treat for a hot day. I bet you didn't realize you wanted to eat this until just now, but now you know! It refreezes to coming out as a similar consistency to watermelon, but it's super cold and has a refreshing hint of mint. You should make this for your next cookout. You should make this just to have in your freezer to eat when it's hot and gross out.

Watermelon Mint Sorbet

1 small seedless watermelon

1 c sugar

1 c water

2 mint teabags* (make sure they are just pure mint)

Dash of lime juice

1/4 c vodka **

Bring water and sugar to a boil and cook until the sugar has completely dissolved. Add mint tea bags. Let sit out until room temperature, then refrigerate until cold.

Cut watermelon and scoop innards into blender. Add a dash of lime juice. Blend until liquid, this is fast, but you might have to push the watermelon back down towards the blades. It took me two blenders-full to turn the watermelon into juice. Combine watermelon juice and simple syrup.

Pour in ice cream maker. When the ice cream maker has finished doing it's thing, move sorbet into Tupperware and stir in vodka. Freeze in freezer for a few hours.

*There is no reason whatsoever not to use fresh mint if you have it. I don't have an herb garden and the grocery store was out of fresh mint when I went looking for it so I used mint tea instead

**Booze helps keep your sorbet from turning into ice in the freezer. I spent a couple of days trying to decide if I was going to use rum, tequila, or vodka, and settled on vodka for two reasons. One, it adds little in the way of flavor. Two, I couldn't find tequila in my liquor cabinet, and the only rum I could find was coconut. So, I went with vodka. I encourage experimentation and ask you to let me know how yours turns out if you try something else.

Grilled Meatballs Variation 2 - Lentil Collard Meatballs

So last week we brought you the grill variant of Brooklyn Farm Girl's Baked Lettuce Soy Sauce Meatballs, but you know that I never make just one recipe at a time. So here's another variation on the grilled meatballs idea. As you can see from my garden box, I have lots of lettuce, but I also have lots of collards. Could they also be incorporated into meatballs?

Pictured, top to bottom: beets, collards, kale, lettuce

I think I'm trying to see how far from meatballs I can take this and still call it meatballs. Certainly meat is not the main ingredient here. It adds some nice flavor and holds things together.

These come out a bit blander and a bit drier than last week's variant - not unpleasantly so by any means, but they're less conducive to just popping in your mouth. These I would serve with some sort of sauce - maybe a garlicky yogurt-based one, maybe a chutney. Alternatively, you could just cut down the proportion of lentils and collards to meat.

Ingredients

• 1 lb ground meat (I used beef, you can use whatever you like)
• 2 cups cooked lentils
• 2 cups cooked collards
• 2 eggs
• 3 cloves garlic
• splash of oil
• splash of soy sauce
• seasonings (I used about a tablespoon of creole seasoning mix)

Instructions

Wash your collards and slice them finely. You can wrap your bunch of collards to form a tight roll and cut thin slices right through it; that'll give you about the size you need. Depending on how big and tough your collards are, you can also include the stems if you cut them finely enough. If they're particularly robust, though, tear out the stems.

Heat the oil in a large skillet, saute your garlic, dump the collards in and start cooking them down, stirring frequently. You may need to add a splash of water to help them cook down. Add a splash of soy sauce, at least two tablespoons worth. You want the greens to be thoroughly wilted. They won't lose as much volume as the lettuce you cooked last week, but they will shrink a bit.

Cook your lentils, if you haven't already. Actually, if you're not starting with cooked lentils, you'd better do that as the first step. Lentils don't take as long as other dried beans, but they'll take you at least half an hour.

Mix all ingredients - meat, lentils, collards, eggs, seasonings - together. If you want to, blend everything in a food processor. I didn't, in this case, but I would next time. It's a pain to clean and sanitize a food processor after having meat in it, but it does give a very fine even texture to the mixture.







Form the mixture into golf ball sized meatballs, and place them on a greased cookie tray.

Cook in a 350 oven or a medium grill for 30-45 minutes or until cooked through.

Grilled Lettuce Meatballs (Variation 1)

Grilled. Lettuce. Meatballs.

I have some garden boxes in my front yard, and despite the best efforts of April to kill off my first seedlings (snow halfway through April? for reals?) they are now flourishing, to the extent where I have to have a good excuse NOT to eat salad for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. That was why I was so excited to see Brooklyn Farm Girl's Baked Lettuce Soy Sauce Meatballs.

Look at this! Isn't it pretty? It's an old bookcase full of lettuce!

The other thing I've been trying to figure out how to do more of: grilling vegetables. Meat's expensive, after all, and grilling, in addition to being delicious, doesn't heat up the kitchen. Turns out that if you put the heat on medium-low on the grill and put the top down, you can bake stuff in it just like an oven. It may be a bit more imprecise (well, for sure it's more imprecise with me; if you're the committed type you could maybe figure something out, I don't know) but that works just fine for a recipe like this.

The harvest from the box above

I really like these. The lettuce is both delicate and earthy, so these taste more complex than just a regular ball-o-ground-meat. You can, I suppose, treat them like other meatballs and put them in sandwiches or sauces, but if you put out a plateful of them at, say, a barbecue, I don't think you'll ever get that far!

Ingredients

Don't be afraid to squeeze the lettuce to bunch it for chopping.
You're going to be sauteeing it anyway.

• 1 lb ground meat (I used ground beef; you can try ground turkey, add in some ground pork, why not, if you can get it from a decent/affordable source)
• 1 cup breadcrumbs (this is a great way to use up stale bread, heels of bread, buns that you toasted but that nobody ate, that sort of thing. This is not a recipe worth buying breadcrumbs for.)
• 2 eggs
• 1 Whole Mess of Lettuce (I guess about 3 cups? 1 head? 1 garden box worth?)
• Splash of oil
• Splash of soy sauce
• 3 cloves garlic (or, you know, more. Garlic's good.)
• Seasonings (I used oregano, thyme, and adobo powder. Mess around. )

Instructions

Chop it up about this much.

Wash your lettuce and chop it nice and fine. I chop it crossways.

You'll lose a lot of volume here.

Heat up the oil in a large skillet, saute your garlic a bit, and then add the lettuce. That's right, you're sauteeing the lettuce like it was a bitter green. WHAT. I know, why didn't you think of that, right? It's all right, I didn't think of it either, but you bet I'm doing it now. It'll wilt up pretty fast, so keep stirring it around and don't let it burn. Add the soy sauce - a couple tablespoons or so. Turn off the heat.

It's about 1:1:1 bread:meat:lettuce by volume.

Get a bowl and mix together the remaining ingredients: meat, breadcrumbs, seasonings, eggs. Add your mess of lettuce. You can mix this together by hand or you can stick it in a food processor. I've tried both ways and they both work fine; it depends on the sort of texture you like in your end product.

Form the mixture into golf ball sized meatballs and stick them on a greased cookie sheet. You can put em right up next to each other. They're not cookies; they'll shrink rather than expand.

Ready for the grill

Cook in a 350 oven or a medium-low grill for 30-45 minutes or until cooked through.

Cost:

• Meat: $3.50
• Breadcrumbs: Marginal; come on. If you don't have leftover bread, wait till you do to make these.
• Eggs: $.50
• Lettuce: Free from the garden! Or about $1 worth, I guess.

Serves: However many people 18 meatballs serves. What else are they eating?