Pickles 2: The Ginger-ing

All you vegetables are just pickles to me

Pickles are awesome. This is an undeniable fact. Some of you might remember that I have strong feelings about pickles, because I've actually totally made them before on this very blog. To be honest, that might be my favorite post that I've made, and not just because of the multiple links to the exact same video clip from the Little Rascals. I'd say it's like 50/50 delicious easy pickles and Little Rascals. The point is, last week when I was supposed to be sitting home alone writing a blog post in a pile of sadness caused by not traveling, I totally was in south Florida instead. It was incredible despite, technically, being in Florida (The gator wrestling capital of the world). And while I was there I ate at a restaurant that served me the best damn pickles I've ever had in my life. I seriously considered asking for the recipe. And by "seriously considered," I mean "I totally did, but they shot me down." You know, like when a guy at work seriously considered asking out Candace from accounting. The point is, they wouldn't give me the recipe. And I only know one solution to that sort of rejection.

Ingredients:

1 English Cucumber (While the nationality of your produce isn't really my business, in general English cucumbers don't have big seeds, and are longer and narrower. All of which are good things since we're going to be cutting everything in to bite-sized slices. So just this once, god save the queen)
2 standard-issue Carrots
1 Red Onion
3 cloves Garlic
1 standard-issue hunk of Ginger
1.5 cups Water
1 cup Apple Cider Vinegar
3 TBSP Salt
1.5 TBSP Honey
2 tsp Black Peppercorns
1/2 tsp Saffron threads
1 Star Anise pod
1 Lime

Now, I just want to be clear. I started experimenting with weird pickle flavors because of the pickles at this restaurant, but I didn't re-create them. Much like Jack Black said, this is just a tribute. A tribute which happened to turn out tasty and super easy to make, which worked out as a nice bonus. That said, the first thing you're going to have to do is make your brine. So throw your water, vinegar, peppercorns, honey, salt, and star anise in a pot and set them to boil. Yes, boiling vinegar will make your whole kitchen smell like vinegar. Yes, it'll be worth it for the food. Plus, you neighbors will stop complaining about you never inviting them over for meals. While this is going down it's time to deal with your vegetables. Peel and roughly chop your ginger and garlic and throw them in to some container with a lid. Peel your carrot and slice it into thin rings. Similarly, slice your cucumber into thin rings, and then peel your onion and slice it in to...not rings. Cut your onion in half and then just slice it relatively thinly. The exactitude of each knife cut isn't important. These are pickles. They'll turn out ok even if they look a little weird, just like children. Just make them bite-sized and as uniform as you can, and then throw them in your container along with your saffron. Slice your lime, add it in to the party, and you're like 99% done with this recipe.

Delicious on tacos. Or burgers. Or cardboard.

Once your brine boils, turn the heat down and let it simmer for about 10 minutes or so. Then dump it all over your jar of vegetables. Let the whole mess get down to room temperature before throwing a lid on it and dumping it in to your fridge. Now here's the deal. Since you cut everything thinly, these pickles will take shape pretty quickly. After about 4 hours they should already taste pretty pickley and delicious. That said, the longer they sit, the more intense flavors will get packed in to them. They should last for a couple of weeks in the fridge. Or, more accurately, if they were in your fridge for a couple of weeks they'd still be good to eat. There's no way they're actually going to last in your fridge for more than a couple of days though. They're just so tasty. Also, pickles are super refreshing on a hot day. Which is all that Florida knows how to do, I think. The locals there start wearing heavy coats and boots when it drops below 80. I'm pretty sure it would take me all day to explain to them the concept of what snow even is. Anyhow, happy pickling!

Kalamata salad

Life can be hard. It can just sort of wear you down until you feel trapped in an endless routine, demoralized and dissatisfied. I'm speaking about other people's lives, obviously, because I'm somehow on like my 4th vacation so far this year. And it's only May. It's been kind of a whirlwind of a year, and I'm still not entirely sure how/if I managed to afford it all. But here I am, sitting on a Mediterranean beach, playing guitar, and actively waiting for the other shoe to drop. Eventually this will all come to an end, reality will butt its stupid face into my business, and I'll end up cleaning chimneys or something to retroactively finance my life of raging excess and occasional Airbnb use. All I'll have left will be the memories, the recipes inspired by my travels, and probably cirrhosis of the liver. Good times.

Ingredients:

1 lb. Baby Spinach (the adult spinach leaf has a darker color and a rougher texture, making the infant Spinach the easier prey)
2 Tomatoes
1 smallish Red Onion
1.5 cups pitted Kalamata Olives
2 cloves Garlic
1/3 cup Lemon Juice
1/3 cup Extra Virgin Olive Oil
1.5 tsp Dijon Mustard
1/2 tsp Salt
1/4 tsp Black Pepper

The first thing you're going to have to do is come to terms with the fact that you're going to eat a salad. Sure, salad is essentially a pile of leaves and other detritus that was probably first eaten as some sort of prank, but it's also allegedly healthy. Eating it, instead of real food, can help you live a longer, healthier life. A long life...full of salad. Yay? Once you've come to terms with this grim reality, we can work on making our salad not suck. Peel your onion and then cut it into quarters. Then thinly sliced those quarters and disdainfully toss them into a bowl. Remove the white core from your tomatoes, then chop them (the tomatoes) in to chunks and add them in to your bowl of disdain. Make sure your Spinach is dry, then throw it in there too, along with your olives. You're pretty much done at this point. Say what you will about salad, but it's super easy to make.

Actual salad for humans

It's time to talk about dressing. Many people who want to eat more salad despite the fact that it's salad will try and disguise it with a ton of sugar and fat. While this is tasty, it kind of ruins the entire point of eating salad in the first place (health concerns and/or masochism), at which point you may as well just eat a burger or some ice cream, because it's got the same nutritional value and will taste much better. So we're going to get our deliciousness from less contradictory sources. Torture lemons until you've got your 1/3 cup of juice. Then combine it with your oil, mustard, salt, pepper, and a tsp of the juice your olives were sitting in. Then choppity chop your garlic into tiny bits and add it in to the party. If you let this dressing sit in the fridge for a day or two it'll get even better, but you can totally use it right away. Just mix the whole thing together, toss it on your salad as needed, and consume. Congratulations! You successfully outwitted nature, and ate something both healthy and tasty. Stupid nature.

Mint Julep

This bridge connecting with Indiana is one of Louisville's top
attractions. That's right, their "attraction" is a way to leave

You know how it is. It's some time around midnight and you're driving around with a friend trying to figure out what to do between the hours when normal people go to sleep, and when you go to sleep. And eventually, after some hemming and hawing, you settle on the obvious choice. You drive to Kentucky. At least that's what happened to me earlier this week. In my defense, I wanted to do it and you're not the boss of me. I learned some valuable things along the way. One is that Indiana is boring and goes on forever. Seriously...think about it. One of their main attractions is that you can go hang out with the Amish. I have nothing against the Amish, but if they're your main tourist attraction then you've obviously collectively given up as a State. The main point of all of this is that two days ago I was in Kentucky, the current home of bourbon, horse racing, and apparently not much else. But who says I need anything else? Also, I didn't see any horse races.

Ingredients:

Approximately 10 Mint leaves (Spearmint is traditional, but that's mostly just because it's pretty common in the south. Use whatever mint makes you happy.)

Bourbon

Superfine Sugar (You want the sugar to dissolve as much as possible in the bourbon. Some people use simply syrup or powdered sugar, but you can't really muddle your mint with those. Which is a problem for me. And now for you.)

Ice

The first thing you're going to do is get a weirdly specific history lesson. Because the Mint Julep has a couple weird little traditions around it, most of which I'm ignoring because I don't own silver cups. Oh, one of those traditions is that they're served in silver cups. Or sometimes pewter cups. I also don't have pewter cups. Essentially, a Julep was a kind of medicinal drink back in the day when doctors were like 5 times as fun, but only 1/2 as effective as they are now. It was said to be "restorative," which is late-19th-century-speak for "fun," and people would often start their day with one. It can technically be made with any liquor, but since it became the official drink of the Kentucky Derby, bourbon has been the most common base. Why is it the official drink of the Kentucky Derby? Well, Kentucky is crazy hot and humid in the summer, and drinking some icy mint-based drinks had to help with that. And after drinking enough bourbon, maybe it wasn't as boring to watch horses run in a circle. 

Of course the glass isn't full. I had to taste it.
For....quality assurance. Yeah, that holds up.

Anyway, step one is to toss your mint and sugar in the bottom of a cup and muddle them a bit. Muddling, for those of you who don't have mounds of useless knowledge stacked up in your brain next to a carton of commercial jingles from the 90s, is essentially pressing firmly down on fresh ingredients in a glass so that the flavors get released and can seep into the drink better. The sugar will help with this. The tiny sugar crystals will tear into the mint just slightly. Then pack your glass full of crushed ice if you can get it, or regular ice if, like me, crushed ice only happens to you at fancy cocktail parties and dinners that you're only able to attend because you won a raffle (That actually happened to me). Anyhow, add in your bourbon until it's about 3/4 of the way full and stir to combine. Top the rest of it off with ice, and enjoy living the life of a southern gentleman. Except you can't afford things like horses. Maybe you can afford glue. Go drink your bourbon and do some arts and crafts.

Tired Returns

Oh, and waterfalls. There were also waterfalls.

So it's 2017! That apparently happened. And with it came the grim realization that I lied to all of you. I said that I was going to keep updating this blog while I was on vacation. I even implied that I might update it more than usual with random trip nonsense. This was not the case. And sure, I didn't intend to lie to you all. I had no way of knowing that the old unsupported blogger app would finally crap out and keep me from updating from my phone. But that doesn't really matter. What actually counts is that I went to Scotland and played around with frickin' Owls. Seriously...even if all the technology worked all of the time, I would not have been focused on updating whilst on this vacation. I was focused on owls. And castles. And whiskey. And....I dunno...natural splendor? But I'm back! And it turns out that when you get back from a day of about 14 hours of plane travel, you're hungry. And because you've been gone for two weeks, you pretty much only what's in your freezer to work with. Fortunately, my freezer was well stocked....with cheese. And not much else. But cheese, plus tomato/herb crusted mini-pitas that I bought from a supermarket, equals delicious mini pita pizzas! Which will totally soothe your soul after a long day of travel, and distract you for about 45 seconds from the fact that owls and castles are behind you, and you have only your whiskey to remember them by. And the pictures. Mostly the whiskey.

Ingredients:

Mini Tomato/Herb Pitas (Yes, this is kind of weirdly specific. But it's what they had at the grocery store. Get regular mini-pita for all I care and smear some tomato sauce on it. Actually, that sounds better. Do that instead.)
Cheese
Vegetable Oil

Nothing like melted cheese to help you forget the horror
 that is WOW airlines. 

That's right. 2 ingredients. Because one thing you don't want to do when you've been on a plane for 16 hours that day is have to mess around prepping different ingredients, hungry and tired and just wishing you were either back in Scotland or dead, whichever you can get to faster. So simplicity is key here. Take your oil and coat the bottom of a cast iron skillet. Throw down your pitas until you get a solid layer (Yes, you've just come off of 20 hours of plane rides, so you're probably not going to have the energy to literally "throw" anything anywhere. Maybe "listlessly prod.") Cover the top with cheese. How much cheese? If you need to ask that question, you may not be deserving of cheese. It's delicious and you're tired. Go nuts. I had about 5.5 ounces on my batch, but that's just because my weary hands gave out from all of the sprinkling. Toss that sucker in a 450 degree oven for about 10 minutes, and then take it out and enjoy! There's nothing like cheesy deliciousness to welcome you back to your dreary life after crazy travel and adventure.

Hot whiskey

The name pretty much says it all. It's my last night in Ireland, and I'm enjoying my last truly Irish hot whiskey. Oh, you haven't heard of hot whiskey? Because it's insane. One awesome airbnb host introducing me to it, and one awesome Bushmills employee actually putting some in my hand, has legit changed my life. It's the absolute perfect drink if you're feeling a little under the weather, or if it's just cold out. Or if you just like delicious awesomeness. What's that? Alcohol is a depressant and isn't good for your immune system, so you think you can disprove it being good for feeling sick? Cram your word hole. Because this is Ireland, where magic, and rainbows, and pure joy come from. And I've personally experimented, and it works. Why are you still arguing? Didn't I already tell you to shut it (I did)?

Ingredients:

Irish whiskey

Water

Lemon

Cloves

Cinnamon

Honey

The first thing you're gonna need to do is go to Ireland. Because it's awesome. While you're there, stay in Ashford Castle. It's pricy, but insanely worth it. I'm seriously considering selling a limb so I can go back (unrelated question: how much do limbs go for on the black market these days?). 

Seriously. I stayed in a castle. It has...battlements. It's legit. It's alsogot forests   and falconry and horses, and clay shooting, and pretty much everything a castle should have. So go there. Romp around the forest. Work up a chill. Then go indoors. And weep because life will never be this good again, and castle-less life isn't worth living. Now it's time to drink some magic!

The recipe I'm giving you is slightly more involved than the typical pub recipe. It's the recipe for the hot whiskey they gave me at Bushmills, which was the best one I had. Take a spice bag (a spice bag, apparently, is a bag you shove spices in to infuse the flavor into cooking liquids without the mess of straining spices. Or you could ignore the spice bag, and just chew your whole spices, like a man. A potentially toothless man.), and cram cinnamon and cloves all up in it. Dump it in some water, and boil it until it's good and dead. Then take a slice of lemon and a smidge of honey and throw them in the bottom of a glass. Add in some whiskey and some steaming-hot-spice-water. Twice as much water as you've got whiskey. Now stir lightly, and drink it down. You won't regret it. I guarantee it (not a guarantee). Then wander back into the Irish wilderness and tackle a new day of absolutely insane awesomeness. 

This isn't exactly the same. This is the hot whiskey from the airport hotel I'm spending my last night at. It's not quite as awesome as the stuff I got at Bushmills, but it's still fairly epic. Now I get to go to sleep so I can make my early morning flight and go back home to LA! (Seriously guys, how much can I get for say...an arm. I can probably sell a couple arms. Don't ask whose.)

Kubbeh Soup

So, I'm adventuring around a bunch of countries for the next couple weeks, and right now I'm in Israel. Which, it turns out, is awesome. The people are friendly, the country is beautiful, and they seem blissfully unaware of just how creepy their advertisements for eyeglasses are. 

I'm pretty sure this couple just finished feasting on the souls and flesh of the living before posing for this picture in their lensless glasses. But that's not really the point. The point, which you may have guessed by now, is that my sister made some crazy awesome soup for me over the weekend. And I managed to weasel it out of her (read: politely asked her for it). It's got pretty much everything I look for in a soup. Awesome flavor, variety of texture, and dumplings. Because dumplings are awesome. Seriously you guys. Dumplings. 

Ingredients:

3 Large Onions

1 lb. of lean ground meat (my sister used turkey, which was awesome. I wouldn't say no to ground beef though. Because beef.)

1 28 oz. can of Crushed Tomatoes

7 Carrots 

3 Sweet Potatoes

1 lb. Semolina (traditionally kubbeh is made with bulgur. But that's not how my sister made it. And also, traditionally it's not made into soup. So shut it)

2.5 TBSP Smoked Paprika 

1 TBSP Olive Oil

1 tsp Black Pepper

The juice from 1/2 a Lemon

An unspecified amount of Salt

A huge, but still unspecified, amount of Water

The first things you're gonna need to do is to gather all of your vaguely middle eastern friends. Then ask them, preferably from a distance, how to spell and/or pronounce Kubbeh. Then watch the ensuing chaos with malicious glee. And popcorn. Because it seems like every family calls it's something different. But whether you're making Kubeh, Kubbeh, Kubbah, Kibbe, Kibbeh, Quibe, or any other weird variant, it's all the same. So heat up 1/2 your Olive Oil over medium heat, finely chop 2 of your Onions, add in a normal human pinch of salt, and sauté until they're golden and awesome smelling. Then add in your Ground Meat and half of your Black Pepper, and continue to cook it until the meat's cooked through. This is easy to spot, because the drool in your mouth will get to the point where it actually impedes your speech. Turn off the fire, and set your meat mixture aside. 

Heat up the rest of your oil, again over medium heat, in a large pot. Choppity chop your last remaining onion, crushing his tiny hopes that he wouldn't share the fate of his fallen brothers. Sauté it with another pinch o' salt until it yellows and smells awesome. Chop your Carrots and Sweet Potatoes into bite-sized chunks, and add them in along with your Crushed Tomatoes, Paprika, Lemon Juice, the rest of your Pepper, and about 2 TBSP of Salt. Let it cook together for about a minute before adding in...just a ton of water. Picture all the water in the world. Then picture that you took about 12 cups of water out of it. That much water (the 12 cups, not the rest of the water in the world). Crank the heat to high, and bring that sucker to a boil. 

While you're waiting the approximate 1 lifetime for your pot to boil, make your dough. Combine your Semolina with an average human's pinch of salt, and 1.5 cups of water. Take a small handful of this goopy nonsense, and roll it into a ball. Gently use your finger to daintily from a divet in your dough. Then roughly cram as much of your meat mixture (remember your meat mixture? It was like 12 paragraphs ago.) into your divet, and stretch the dough around it to form a meat filled dough ball. Repeat as needed until you run out of meat, dough, or patience. Drop your fledgling Kubbehs in your boiling pot, and let them cook for a 1/2 hour. And there you have it! Delicious soup filled with awesomeness and grammar-based sectarian violence! 

And that's what I've learned so far in Israel. That, and how to haggle with cab drivers. And with everybody else.