Ever since I was a kid I’ve loved bread and butter pickles. My mother’s garden always produced way more cucumbers than we could possibly eat, and she would turn the extras into pickles. I don’t remember if she made any other kinds. All I remember is the bread and butter.
Most of my recipes that call for pepper will say “fresh ground black pepper”. Or maybe “coarse ground black pepper”. Sometimes, though, you need cracked black peppercorns. So the handy pepper mill you bought and got hooked on suddenly isn’t enough. Oh great, time for more hardware, right? Nope. Time for a neat trick.
Ever since my wife did the green bean hash au gratin — yes, it’s got a name now — I’ve wanted to do something similar. I still had half the sack of potatoes, but didn’t have any green beans. And, as it turned out, I was out of cheddar cheese, too. Well, that’s going to [...]
No one cooks every night. Sometimes you aren’t hungry. Sometimes you eat at a friend’s house. And sometimes you’re at the amusement park where you have no choice but to eat fair food. You know what I’m talking about. The nutritional value of wallpaper paste and more addictive than nicotine. But something strange has happened [...]
I hate following recipes exactly. It’s why I’m generally not a good baker. Anything that has to be accurate within an eighth of a teaspoon is too fiddly for me. My wife, on the other hand, is a great baker. She’ll start from a recipe, then adjust every time she makes it until she has [...]
