Cooking from Scratch
Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to feed about 35 four- to twelve-year old kids a light lunch or snack. And, it’ll be scheduled for two days after you return from a trip. That’s sort of the deal we accepted when we signed up to be snack chefs for one day at Vacation Bible School. So, before reading on, what would you have made?
Continue reading “The Lee Brothers’ Pimento Cheese”
It’s cherry season, and, while we love fresh cherries, we also like to see what we can make from them. Sure, there’s a lot of desserts made with cherries, but what about something savory? Today, we decided that we’d try making some cherry mostarda. Now, we don’t know about you, but we’ve never even tasted this Italian condiment, so we figured we’d scratch up a small batch for testing purposes. Sound interesting? We’ll show you what we did.
Continue reading “Cherry Mostarda”
Can you make spaghetti sauce? Then you can make ketchup! Really! And it’ll be better than the stuff you buy! Really! We think the Heinz Company has a lot of explaining to do, as this, perhaps one of the most popular condiments, is also super simple to make right in your home kitchen. How in the world did they fool us?
Truth to tell, we don’t buy ketchup; we really don’t like the sweet glop they sell in the plastic squeeze bottle, as it doesn’t taste like much of anything. Occasionally, one of us will use some when we’re eating out, but mainly to add some moisture to a dry burger or fry. Not because it tastes good — any other condiment would be better — but, simply because it’s moist.
Continue reading “Ketchup Made from Scratch”
These are real pickles. Not the kind that you get in a store, but real 100% fermented pickles. The kind your grandparents (or maybe great-grandparents) made or bought. At one time, the method we’ll show was the preferred method for making pickles. But today, almost no one makes pickles with 100% fermentation anymore. Do you want to know why?
Continue reading “Real Pickles”
We know what you’ve been thinking. You were wondering when we’d get around to posting a recipe for Worcestershire sauce, right? No? Uh, we can’t believe that you wouldn’t want to try your hand at making Worcestershire sauce. It’s fun to say, since it’s pronounced much differently from the way it’s spelled, so it has to be fun to make, right? Right? Well, even if you don’t scratch up a batch of Worcestershire sauce today, maybe one day you will, and this recipe will be right here for you.
Continue reading “Worcestershire Sauce”
We originally were going to post these mushrooms as just a part of a larger dish, but they turned out so well and seemed so versatile and tasty that they really deserve their own short post. Now, we’ve read about pickled mushrooms in various cookbooks, but never really thought about making them. And, of course we’ve seen and had marinated mushrooms in the past, but these are a bit different. So, we won’t give credit to any particular book, but, instead, Continue reading “Quick-Pickled Shiitake Mushrooms”
We’d seen this recipe in several books over the years, and, while we thought it was interesting enough to keep the recipe, we were never sure that we’d actually try it. We never really have a bunch of lemons all at once. Instead, we tend to buy them one or two at a time as we need them. Plus, we have no idea what these preserved lemons will taste like, so we didn’t want to buy lemons just to try it out. Then, when we had visitors last month, they left us with a bunch of fresh lemons; rather than make lemonade, we made preserved lemons.