This post is about pickles. Not your regular brownish-green vinegary mouth-puckering pickles. It’s about bright-green, crunchy, slightly salted pickles that taste fresh, slightly garlicky and with a hint of dill – pickles of my childhood. The closest thing to these that can be found in your regular grocery store is the Claussen Pickles but they are a far cry from the real thing. Rarely you can find excellent Ba-Tampte Half Sours usually in the kosher refrigerated section. For a better version head on to the Russian Store, they are sold by weight at the counter (grab yourself a couple of pickled apples and tomatoes while you are there).
Sometimes you can find a pickling spice mix at a Russian store, or if you have friends who will smuggle it for you illegally from Eastern Europe.
In the absence of pre-made spice mix I always use dill weed (fresh or dry) or dill seed, lots of garlic, some black peppercorns, maybe a hot pepper (be careful how hot), if you have cherry leaf or two, a horseradish leaf (which I’ve never seen sold here) and a few bay leaves.
Yesterday after a downtown lunch I stopped by the City Market and bought about 5 lbs of fresh pickling cucumbers.
These are not gigantic-looking things sold in Wal-Mart, they are small, light-green,bumpy and crunchy. In this area they are available only during the summer. I brought them home and soaked them in the kitchen sink to let all the dirt come loose. I also cut the ends off and pierce the cucumber with a knife in the middle. This way the brine has more surfaces to penetrate the cucumber.
From there on the process is simple – wash the cucumbers and put them in the jar, adding garlic and spices at the same time. The hard part is to guess the amount of salt. The general rule of thumb is 1 tablespoon of salt dissolved in 1 liter (quart) of warm water, I think it has to be a regular tablespoon heaping with salt. Lately I’ve been using 2 measuring tablespoons of salt per quart of water.It doesn’t have to be extremely salty, maybe slightly saltier than you’d like to taste. The whole point is to keep the fresh taste and crunchiness and not to over-salt the pickles. Fill the jar to the top, cover and leave on the counter. You can start tasting the pickles the next day or two. When they reach desired taste, place them in the refrigerator.
They are good with any food or drink, a hot dog, a sandwich, a shot of vodka or just by themselves.
They are good when you are eating with great friends…
…or when you it’s just you, pickle and this song….
I’ll pay attention when your real life sandwich looks like this photo, otherwise I am watching the road. You betcha™.
Many things are wrong with this, including idiotic faux-foreign words like “Frappe” (WTF?) and “McCafe´”, but “reboot your brain”?, do you reboot it before or after getting a “frappe”? And what if it reboots in a safe mode? I ain’t lovin’ it.
Nothing wrong with this billboard, but every time I passed it I thought that it succinctly expresses my general attitude towards ballet. Couldn’t have said it better myself.
The 8th of March is The International Women’s Day – a celebration of women young and old, beautiful and smart, lovely, witty, (sometimes) funny, unique and irreplaceable. Thank you for letting us bask in all that.
My feelings are best expressed by a Japanese Karaoke performer, whose song I was lucky to capture at the St.Louis Japanese Festival few years ago:
The ad wizards who thought it was a great idea to put small print on a highway billboard came up with another gem.
Here are my suggestions for the future billboards:
My car kicked your car’s rear end;
My car’s big black tailpipe is longer than your car’s tailpipe;
My car took away your car’s gas money;
My car swallowed a luxury car and now it craps exhausts luxury;
My car voted for McCain;
If you come up with your own winning caption I will throw in up to 700 miles for your choice of a magazine subscription.
Continuing with the subject of advertising if your child is composing/performing a jingle about the hemorrhoid treatment center, you are within your rights to demand back all the money you’ve spent on the music lessons. (the jingle starts on the 20th second of the clip).
Few words before this post. No, I did not become a fan of weddings, but I thought that the fact that this wedding happened exactly 63 years ago today is the neatest thing; people in these photos should be in their 80’s so it’s not impossible that someone would remember being there or hearing about it. None of the text below belongs to me, it was reproduced from the Life Magazine article from July 14th, 1947, which has many additional photos and a detailed description of the preparations and the ceremony. Although my friend Hyperblogal was already operating his photography business in 1947 these photos were not taken by him; a famous Life Magazine photographer Nina Leen gets the credit for them. Lastly, this is going to be long, so keep scrolling. More photos can be found here.
