Sunday, September 27, 2009

Green tomato dill pickles



I purchased this pot for making beer. However, it's intended use was for water bath canning. Given that I am unable to keep up my consumption of red tomatoes with their ripening I decided to pickle them before that could happen. It was my first adventure into pickling and canning. Here's to NO botulism! After scouring the internet for quite some time I came up with a recipe and then proceeded to make 12 pints and 6 quarts of pickles. Hopefully they are tasty. I harvested the tomatoes, chiles and celery from my garden. I sliced big tomatoes, halved the medium sized ones and kept the cherry tomatoes whole.

I used a brine that was 2:1 water to vinegar (apple cider). For 3 quarts of liquid I used about a 1/2 1/3 C sea salt and a teaspoon of sugar.

For the pint jars I added:
- 1 clove garlic
- at least 1 serrano chile
- 2 T freshly chopped dill
- 1/4 tsp dill seed
- carrots, celery, cauliflower, onion
- peppercorns, star anise (1/5 of a star), cardamom, cinnamon, ginger, mustard seed, coriander seed, caraway seed, clove, allspice

1/2 inch headspace. I used a 10 minute bath for pints, 15 minutes for quarts

I haven't tried them yet. It was a fun project, real frontiers-men like.

Thursday, September 10, 2009

General Tso's Hobo Tofu



Time to make some Americanized Chinese Food I thought.
Course of Action:
1. Search internet for recipes.
2. Process recipes through brain.
3. Create new masterful recipe.
4. Produce: General Tso's Hobo Tofu.

First I flavor inject the tofu with vegetable broth and stuff. Then I cut it up, coated it with cornstarch and fried it. Then I made the hobo sauce: sugar, ketchup, vinegar, bbq sauce, soy sauce, mushroom sauce, ginger, garlic, onions, peppers, sesame oil and cornstarch slurry to thicken. Add some vegetables. Ta-da. I call it hobo because of all the low-brow ingredients.

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Fresh Corn, Tomato and Quinoa Salad



I picked up some bicolor sweet corn whilst in Wisconsin and harvested some tomatoes and cucumbers from my garden and made this salad with some red quinoa.




It was well received.