Family Dinner with JP

Pickles! Who the hell doesn't love pickles? And the beauty of it - you can pickle ANYTHING! Cucumbers! Garlic! Onions! Cauliflower! Beets! Eggs!  I read up a bit on other types of pickling brine, and adapted the original recipe for use in making zesty dilly beans (pickled green beans, a little bit spicy). Please note : these are rookie pickles! I know a lot of you out these may be scandalized that these aren't sealed in a hot water bath and stored for 2 months. Don't be such a Pickle Purist, ya dingus! Or else teach me your more complex pickling ways ... But for the rest of this, these are unbelievably good pickles that we can make at home without any special equipment. This recipe is for Quick Pickles. Jar them, and they'll be ready to eat the next day. The pickles are best if eaten within 12 days. These are not long-term pickles! These make great treats for attending dinner parties, for late night drunk snacks, and for tabletop gaming sessions. Spoiler: I kn...

As usual, it tends to go back to Anthony Bourdain or Julia Child. In this case both. Bourdain informed me of the ease and utility of making your own stock from your scraps of vegetables and bones, and of keeping the stock around in the freezer, pre-measured in one cup containers. Julia provided extensive notations and descriptions of making the perfect stock out of just about anything. Such a simple thing to make, but when done right, a stock is a delicate, flavorful base from which you will build your recipe. Thankfully, the stock in this recipe is fast, cheap, and easy.  Many thanks to Laura (and her recipe blog  ) for the recommendation and base recipe from which I worked. This jam is vegan, which I am surprised to write as you are to read, and it is absolutely delicious, which surprised me even more. My dinner guest, one who has tried several of my recipes now, for the first time ever went back for seconds! I found the soup to be hearty (see: old rustic joke...

The first time I ever had hash, I was in high school. I'd spent the night at my friend Rob Dentry's house, and in the morning his father made us corned beef hash. We smothered it in hot sauce, and I ate until my stomach hurt. It was one of the most delicious things I'd ever had, and I think some part of me wondered why, in a childhood where I grew up eating scrapple and Taylor Pork Roll and S.O.S. (chipped beef gravy), my family had deprived me of this delicious, salty, starchy vehicle for Crystal Hot Sauce. To be fair, everything can be turned into a viable vehicle for Crystal Hot Sauce. At any rate, years later, after the baptism of my godson, the lot of us went out to breakfast. This is where I first experienced corned beef hash in a non-cat food state. Giant chunks of tender but crisped corned beef (rustic), with a perfectly poached egg on top. This was the elevation of something I never knew could be elevated. It was only in the last year that I first came up...

The keys to a good pizza, in my humble opinion, all rely on minimization. A good crust, light on the sauce (but let's intensify that sauce, shall we?), easy on the toppings, washed down with a nice IPA. There are few things better in life than good pizza and a beer. And believe me when I tell you, a little bit of this pepperoni sauce goes a very long way. Resist the urge to drown your pizza in it, or to bathe in it yourself. Like all good things, it should be enjoyed with restraint and moderation. HAHAHA. Psyche! You're going to want a straw for that junk! Baking and food blogging are new to me. When you start a new hobby, there are so many things you can do to make huge improvements on the front end. In the early stages, changes and purchases are improvements of miles; later in the game, major changes and purchases are improvements of inches. In terms of moving ahead miles with this new blog project, I have recently acquired: a light source and reflector (expect impr...