kayb

@rotuts, look for the Ball Big Book of Canning and Preserving. Should be lots of pickle recipes.

Fascinating. Glad you're cutting back a bit, glad you're staying with something you so obviously love.

@Anna N, I can almost TASTE that blue cheese dressing. I have a surfeit of blue cheese on hand. Think I will try my hand at making some. I had some more of my leftover-corn-and-bean salad, with a slice of ricotta loaf, toasted, and topped with an interesting spread. I was making homemade veggie juice yesterday, and I strained it through cheesecloth as I don't like the "vegetable smoothie" texture. Started to chunk the remaining paste -- essentially, veggie fiber -- in the compost, and stopped myself; thought I might taste it. Well, it tasted good; as well as tomatoes and tomato juice, it had beets, carrots, spinach, a zucchini, parsley, and a big handful of basil in it. No seasoning at all, and no onion or garlic, but I thought it tasted almost like a pizza sauce (from the basil, I guess). Anyway, I spread it on my toast and topped it with some homemade ricotta. Excellent! Sort of a bruschetta on a grand scale. I'll have that again this week. Dessert was fresh, local peaches, macerated in a couple of tablespoons of sugar, with cottage cheese.

There's also a fairly minimal amount of salt used in a lot of pickling recipes. My pickled green beans didn't call for any salt, but I thought they needed some, so I added a teaspoon per pint jar. Kraut requires only three tablespoons of salt for five pounds of cabbage. My bread and butter pickles require a very little salt, and my ripe tomato relish doesn't have much. Vinegar is a key in preserving things; salt's not a requirement, except for taste. Anything with enough acid content can be water-bath canned for shelf stability.

I can testify to the benefits of brining + SV, albeit not for chicken. I did it with a pork loin and it was fabulous. Brine with sugar, salt, ground juniper berries and caraway seed, 24 hours, then SV with a seasoning rub of allspice, caraway, salt, pepper, and just a touch of cloves, at 145F (sorry, I just can't do pink pork) for 8 hours, then a quick finish in a flaming hot oven with apple cider/brown sugar glaze. Pretty freakin' marvelous.

I have harvested: First fruits of the 2016 crop, if you don't count the herbs I've been snipping for a month. I ate them. I started, in fact, to eat them right on the spot. But I remembered my daughter's warning, "Mama, you wash that stuff before you eat it. You know Jack (the attack Yorkie) pees on all of it." I figured she had a good point, so I brought them in and washed them off, and ate them standing in the kitchen in front of the sink. They were glorious. In other garden news, if squash blossoms are any indicator, I ought to have a bumper crop of yellow crookneck this summer. Zucchini, and my cucumbers, are a little behind the yellow ones.

...balance a six-pound frozen Boston butt on the edge of the chest freezer while excavating for something else, only to knock it off with my elbow, squarely onto my bare big toe. I may not wear shoes for a week. Thank God it's summer. I can get by with sandals. I am also about to buy an upright freezer. Need more freezer room anyway.

Hi, Spork! Welcome to Food Central. The professionals in this forum, and there are some marvelous ones, tolerate mildly capable amateurs like myself quite happily. I've learned amazing things in here and truly expanded my cooking repertoire. SV venison is a fine, fine thing. Wish I could learn to like lamb, and that probably would be as well. Is it good foraging up there in your part of central Appalachia? That's something I wish I was in a part of the world to do. Not a whole lot of foraging here in the Delta.

Years ago, Daddy did electric fence on our garden. Deer jumped it. He took to sitting on the deck with a shotgun around dusk and sunrise. Didn't take long for the deer to clue in.

@Smithy, my father used to make it (only indoor "cooking" he ever did, but he was the kraut-maker in the family), but I've never made it myself. Of course, when I was a kid and we had it regularly, I hated it. I've seen the error of my ways as I've gotten older!

Thanks, @shain, for the info, and @Smithy for the links. Going to try pita again in a couple of weeks.

Maiden voyage at making sauerkraut. Two huge heads of cabbage made about 1 1/2 to 2 gallons of kraut, which went into the bucket to ferment on Friday. I'll check it next week to see how it's progressing. Improvisation when it came to weighting it down. The yogurt container with the cottage cheese lid holds water for a weight.

That's an absolutely horrible thought. "This wasn't just plain terrible. This was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins on it." -- Dorothy Parker

@shain, that's lovely. Did you make your pita? If so, would you kindly share your recipe? I had more salads made from assorted leftovers: black beans with the rest of the roasted corn, homemade ricotta in place of fresh mozzarella (since I didn't have any) on the half-tomato left from yesterday's BLT, and cottage cheese with a bit of fresh pineapple that was just before going south on me. Fine lunch.

Chefs after my own heart. You never have to worry about green bell pepper in anything I cook. And celery only extremely rarely. Stuffed green peppers are an abomination, too. Right, Rotuts?

I don't like Chick Fil A's food, but their lemonade is superb. Forgot to take a photo of my lunch yesterday -- bacon and tomato sandwich with jail slaw on fresh whole wheat bread. Quite good.

I hope the prognosis is not that grim. I do know that I've had the ability and opportunity to try and regularly enjoy many more foods than were ever available in the mid-20th-century rural South in which I grew up. I never had pizza beyond the ChefBoyArDee in the box kit variety until I was a teenager. And while I'll eat sushi in the US, it can't compare to what I had in Japan (or at least, never has to date). I'm encouraged to see the increasing interest in GOOD food, whether local vegetables and meats I cook at home or five-star cuisine with ingredients flown in daily from half a world away. I'm encouraged that schools are offering credit for gardening and raising vegetables and livestock. I'm encouraged that farmers' markets are THE place to be in the summer, and that so many people anxiously await the opening weekend. I'm encouraged that fast-food consumption is dropping, at least a little, and that we are at least aware of the fact there are better alternatives out there. I'm encouraged that there's such a growing movement toward teaching younger generations the skills needed to acquire and prepare healthy meals (my church is holding a class on just this topic later this summer through Cooking Matters/Share Out Strength, the national hunger relief charity). I'm 60 years old. All in all, I probably eat as healthily, and with a lot more flavor and variety, than I did growing up on the farm half a century ago. That, to me, says we're at least making a FEW advances. And if given the chance to travel, whether domestically or abroad, and sample the regional cuisines from the local, non-guidebook, not chain establishments, be assured I will do so in a heartbeat. It's been my experience, so far, there are a good many opportunities for good food still out there. I hope, and think, there will be for a long time, here and abroad.

@chefmd, I've just read through this thread from the beginning. What an absolutely fascinating, and enjoyable, journey! Thank you so very much for sharing your experiences, culinary and otherwise, with us. And my very best wishes to your son and daughter-in-law for a wonderful future. Thanks for taking the time and sharing with us!

This is fascinating. One of the many reasons I love eGullet. Now, if I could get over my fear of working with puff pastry/phyllo, I might give it a shot.....

Whole wheat bread from Reinhart's "Breadmaker's Apprentice." Another new loaf for me. Exactly by the recipe but for using whey instead of water; needed about an extra tablespoon or two of whey to get all the flour incorporated. Lovely crumb and texture; softest and lightest whole wheat bread I've ever made. My rising times, both in the bowl and in the pan, were about twice what the book suggested; in all fairness, my kitchen is pretty cool. The downside? The flavor was...meh. I thought it had little flavor at all. I contemplated using flaxseed meal for the coarse ground wheat or other flour element, and opted for semolina instead. Wish I'd done the wheat. At a minimum, it wants more salt.

Leftovers, some left over on purpose for just such applications. A salad made of leftover roasted corn, cut off the cob, avocado, tomato and bacon; leftover deviled eggs from the weekend, and very nearly the last of the jail slaw I've been munching on for a month (told y'all it keeps forever in the fridge). A most excellent lunch. I was going to have watermelon (that I got for the weekend and we never cut open), but I was too full.

I suspect it has everything to do with people saying "Oh, wow, look what Anna made THIS time!" and diving in. I'm glad I read this thread while eating lunch, else I'd be getting up right now to make cookies. And I don't need cookies. But I WANT cookies.....

@Shelby, tomatoes were excellent. These are hoop-house-started tomatoes from the Amish farmers at the Farmers Market. I'm several weeks away from having a ripe one in the garden, though I'm watching anxiously. It appears I will have a bumper crop of Romas; 22 on the vines already.

Tried a new one, for me: Rose Levy Berenbaum's Ricotta Loaf. For which I had to make fresh ricotta, as mine had been in the fridge too long and begun to mold, and once I made up my mind that loaf was what I wanted, nothing else would do. Fortunately, fresh ricotta is easy and quick. It cooked up a lovely and tasty loaf, with a tight, even crumb and a very rich texture (as one might expect, from 7 tbsp of butter and a cup of ricotta. My only issue was that I had to add about 50 percent more water (for which I subbed whey from making the ricotta). Not the first time I've had this issue with recipes in this book; using the amount of moisture called for seems to yield dough stiffer than pie crust. That can't be right...can it?

@ElainaA, gorgeous!