Cheater's Chicken & Dumplings

It had been a while since I had the pleasure of a meal of chicken and dumplings, and I'd never made them myself, before today; so I decided to hit the Internet and see if there was any inspiration there.

Grandma's Pickles

So I’ve been making pickles for a while now – mostly fermented dill pickles, which Mom doesn’t care for. I tried making “Bread ‘N’ Butter” pickles, which are not fermented, and for a while she seemed to like them, but eventually she decided they were too sweet. They weren't the pickles she had grown up with, made by her mother!

Barbecue Ribs, Take Two

As cuts of meat go, ribs aren't a really good deal. You usually end up paying steak prices for a lot of bone. Recently, however, while shopping with My Honey, we spotted some baby-back ribs at a really good price, and they were really meaty, too. We were able to scarf several racks to bring home.

Mariner's Onion Sandwich Rolls

I learned to hate onions at an early age. When I was about 5 years old, I was victimized by an older, male family member, who thought that it would be funny to give a child a raw onion, saying that it was just a different kind of apple. Being a naïve and trusting child, I accepted the gift of the “different apple”, and took a bite. To put it mildly, I was disappointed, and almost thirty years passed before I would again voluntarily eat anything with onion in it.

Mariner's Smoked Pork Meat Stock

I have frequent need of pork stock in my cooking, and it's not often available on the store shelves. Sometimes, as an afterthought to crock-cooking a large piece of pork, I make my own, by simply covering any bones left after deboning the pork with water, and cooking all of the meat off. This can yield significant amounts of broth, but is somewhat haphazard in terms of the flavor and amount.

Mariner's Cabbage Soup

I don't often make this one, because afterwards, the First Mate usually bans me from the galley (I apparently make a terrible mess!). I particularly like this soup on a cold or rainy day - or a cold and rainy day (like today). There's nothing fancy here, just plain, good food.

Mariner's Seafood Cocktail Sauce

We don't use a lot of cocktail sauce; in fact we've probably used less than four or five tablespoons of commercial cocktail sauce in our home in all 48 years of our marriage. Once in a great while, however, we buy or make something (usually a seafood dish) that just demands to be complemented by that piquant combination of flavors.

Mariner's Low-Country Boil

Some years ago, my Honey and I decided to be spontaneous, and on the spur of the moment hit the road to spend the weekend in Savannah, Georgia - without having made hotel reservations! Big mistake...

Bread-N-Butter Pickles

So this past Friday I started another (40 lb) batch of my fermented dill pickles. Most of my relatives seem to like my pickles (at least that's what they say!) but my Mom is not a big fan them... in fact, Mom isn't particularly fond of dill at all, nor does she particularly like most sour foods, . In discussing that fact yesterday, she allowed as how she does like what she calls (and my Grandma used to call) bread-n-butter pickles.

Beef Stew

There is a well-known and revered brand of shelf-stable (canned) beef stew, recognized by its red plaid label. Many people like it, and on occasion, I've enjoyed it myself. The problem is, like most other ready-to-eat canned meals, I find it to be expensive for the amount of food you get, and a single can doesn't usually go very far.

Slow Cooker Boiled Peanuts!

Well, our fabulous Thanksgiving Day feast and Family Reunion is well past, and I have almost a year to recover. Good thing... I'm getting pretty old now, and the preparation for that event is becoming real work!

Hot Sauce

Ever since I got into fermenting my own sauerkraut and pickles, I've wanted to try my hand at making my own hot pepper sauce. I'm particularly fond of Texas Pete® Original Hot Sauce, using it on a lot of different foods. I'm not vain enough to think I could duplicate that flavor and texture - I don't plan to use the additives that make that possible! - but I hope that I can produce a product that will make an acceptable substitute.

Mom's Pound Cake

Pound cake is widely-known for both its taste and its simplicity. I think Mom began making her own version of this cake about the time of my senior year in highschool.

Mariner's Home-style Vegetable-Beef Soup

I've been making this soup, on rare occasion, ever since I retired, at which time I temporarily assumed some of the cooking chores for which my Honey would otherwise have been responsible. I don't know why I haven't already posted it, because we really like it, and so has everyone who has had any of it. Anyway, I had a need to make some today, so I decided it was time to share my recipé. If you decide to re-create this, you'll need the following:

Mom's Chocolate-Iced Layer Cake

Following the death of my father, in 1989, my Mom asked that the family begin celebrating Thanksgiving Day together regularly, in remembrance of him. She held that Thanksgiving was Dad's favorite holiday, and that it would be appropriate for the family to meet together at that time. We agreed to her request, and for nearly 28 years now - with only one exception - we have held our family reunion on Thanksgiving Day, in memory of our Dad.

Lonnie's Brunswick (Whatchagot) Stew

For quite some time, my brother Lonnie has been making his version of Brunswick Stew. This is a favorite dish of mine, and he traditionally brings it to our Family Reunion, after which I try to make off with all of the leftovers. It's apparently also quite popular with a whole bunch of other people, because somebody is always asking him for the recipé. After the last flurry of such requests in social media, I contacted him and asked if he would like to have me post the recipé here, allowing him to respond to such requests with a url instead of individual messages. He thought that was a good idea, so here goes:

Mom's Old Fashioned Dark Fruitcake

Most of the time, when someone mentions fruitcake, it's a joke.  I have to tell you though, my Mom has made a tradition of baking fruitcake for many years, and I think it's wonderful!  I'm not particularly fond of any of the commercial fruitcake products - they're all too dry or doughy - but Mom's cake is very different.

Canning Mariner's Black Bean Soup - Revised

This post is "Canning Black Bean Soup v2.0, and revises and supplants the original post on the subject. I have changed the process to accommodate additional experience with the recipé.  The previous version was my first attempt to achieve consistency in the distribution of soup components between jars of the same batch of soup. It worked, in terms of improving consistency, but it resulted in a tremendous increase in the complexity and amount of effort.  In this version, I have abandoned that approach, opting instead for a little more care in charging the jars with product. As before, the recipé for this soup isn't radically different from the original crock pot version; it has only been slightly modified to accommodate processing with a pressure canner.

Dill Pickles

July 17, 2017 (this is when the story actually begins)

Some weeks ago I started a project involving fermentation - sauerkraut - and it was successful enough that I thought I might try some other fermented foods.  The choice of what to try is a no-brainer: dill pickles, of course!

Undine's Courtboullion

Mariner heard about a different way to prepare fish, Cajun/Creole style, and decided we should try it. It's called Courtboullion (pronounced kū-bĭ-yōn), and it is a kind of poached fish - usually catfish, but it can be made with pretty much any fish (some say, any kind of seafood!).

Hummus Fail - or - Why I Can Chickpeas

My sister lives some distance away, from both me, and the area in which we grew up, and she has ever since she married a sailor and moved away, at the ripe age of... well, never mind!   Just accept that it's been a long time. I visited her in her home for the first time, a few years ago, and in addition to entertaining us, she fed us some great home-made snacks.  I had never had hummus before, but I really enjoyed spreading her hummus on some sesame crackers.  In fact, both my Honey and I enjoyed it so much, we badgered Sis until she gave us the recipé!  We've been making it ever since. I won't publish the recipé here, because it's not mine to share, but until recently it seemed nearly foolproof.

Sauerkraut!

Saturday, April 22 2017

Everybody who knows me knows that, especially since I retired, I despise weekend traffic.  Too many people going too many places, too fast, and too rude!  Since I don't want to be seen on the 11:00 PM news, being hauled away by the police for a "road rage" incident,  I just stay home.  This may seem to have little to do with food and cooking, but it explains (at least in part) why I am able to put together this blog about making sauerkraut.

Mariner's Quasi-Csabai

I was 13 years old when John Kennedy faced down Nikita Khrushchev, during the Cuban Missle Crisis, and I lived about 12 miles north of the Florida State Line. For my entire life, up to that point, Emergency Preparedness - or as we called it then, Civil Defense - was a significant focus in the lives and education of school children in the American South, and those conditions shaped the minds and spirits of an entire generation of Southern children. We expected "The Bomb" to arrive any day, bringing with it TEOTWAWKI (the end of the world as we know it); and the fact of Soviet imperialism simply reinforced those expectations.

Mariner's Slow-Cooker "Baked" Beans

This time of year, many of us are looking forward to several, if not many, celebratory gatherings with family and friends. Quite often those gatherings are organized around a feast of some sort, which means food and cooking are on my mind... again.

Mariner's Quick and Easy Italian-Style Sausage

Let's be clear about this, right from the start. This recipe is not an Italian Sausage recipe. For one thing, there's no fennel in it. For another it has a lot of what Americans think of as traditional Italian seasonings, that do not appear in any of the "real" Italian Sausage recipes I have found. So, what we really have here, is a basic pork sausage that attempts to taste the way most Americans might think an Italian sausage should taste - hence the appellation, "Italian style".