Fermented Cranberry Relish

Friends, it’s been a while. It was nearly a month ago that I wrote about sauerkraut as Hurricane Sandy barreled toward the Northeast. What a month it has been. My family and friends in New York City and Long Island are all safe and sound, but so many people they know have lost their homes.

Last week at my sister Meg’s house we cleared out the living room furniture to make room for rented tables and chairs. We set out 37 place settings and gave thanks for electricity and a warm, dry home. The turkey weighed 28 pounds. There was very little pie left over.

I made a last minute addition to the menu Tuesday afternoon, when while counting down the last few minutes of work before the holiday break, I came across this recipe for fermented cranberry sauce. Continue reading →

Pickled Jalepeños

Last summer I ended up with a glut of jalepeños, and not knowing what to do with them, I decided to pickle them. I’ve never been a big jalepeño eater, and I didn’t really have high expectations for them. I thought they might very well end up as forgotten pickles, but in the end they were quite a hit. When I visited my brother Dave a few months ago, I found him jealously hoarding the brine in the jar long after the last pickle slice had been consumed. My sister Meg has placed a special order for 4 pints this year. We like to put these on tacos, quesadillas, or eggs and grits, or to chop them up and add them to salsas and tomato salads. Continue reading →

Salsa Verde

Mexican food is a staple of my diet, and living in New York City I always took for granted that I could walk down to the corner store and pick up a pound or two of tomatillos any time I wanted them. Now that I live in a much smaller town, I’ve found that tomatillos can be much harder to come by. When I signed up for my community garden plot, tomatillos were at the top of my list of things to grow. Continue reading →

Blueberry Rhubarb Crumble

The temperature has been hovering above 90 degrees all week and this weekend I had my first tastes of sweet corn this summer. Last night on the porch at the Blue Heron, we had it grilled and cut from the cob in a salad with cherry tomatoes and pickled red onions and blue cheese. This summer I’m going to pickle a lot of red onions and eat them on salads with tomatoes and corn and blue cheese. There were fireflies on the porch and fireworks everywhere driving home. This afternoon we grilled some more corn and ate it on my back porch and that was it for dinner. Just some corn, sprinkled with a little salt.

This week was also the start of blueberry season. This is the time of year where every week there’s a new kind of fruit to be baked into a pie. The strawberries are just about all gone now, but there’s still plenty of rhubarb in the garden. Crumble means a little less time in the kitchen than pie, which is nice when it’s 90 degrees. So blueberry rhubarb crumble it was. Continue reading →