Refrigerator Pickles

You know how you can show someone you care about them?  Cook them something they love to eat.  You know how you can show someone you REALLY care about them?  Cook them something they love to eat, but that you hate.  This, my friends, is a true sacrifice.  Occasionally I will saute mushrooms for my mom and husband to add to their pasta, or their stir fry.  I have to, like, touch them.  And smell them.  My kitchen smells like them when I'm done.  And I have to live knowing that my skillet once had mushrooms touching it.  And yet, somehow, I plow forward, for the benefit of those I love.

This past Father's Day, I made authentic New Orleans style muffaletta sandwiches for my dad, because apparently some people don't think olives are gross.  Weird, right?  The smell of them almost made me hurl.  But, again, I powered through, for my dad's sake, because it was such a delight to see how much he enjoyed it.  I felt like a god damned saint.

This recipe is one of those moments where I made something I would never eat--pickles.  I do not eat pickles.  I do not like pickles touching my food in any way.  I do not like pickles to have been on my food and then been picked off.  IT LEAVES JUICE, YOU GUYS.  I do not like pickles to be in the same room as my food.  I don't even like the word pickle.  It's just SILLY, that's why.

But, hey, my family all likes them.  So, because I have a garden growing cucumbers like crazy, and because my husband asked me to make Cuban sandwiches, I thought I'd give it a go.  This is a recipe from my Grandpa's side of the family that has been tucked into my mom's recipe box for decades.  I've never known her to ever make them, but I bet that will change now, because she raved about them.  So did my dad; he said they were perfect on the Cuban sandwich.  But of course, you can make them yourself if you don't trust the opinion of someone who likes olives.

Uncle Gene's Refrigerator Pickles

As the name probably implies, these are not meant to be processed and canned for long term storage.  They are not cooked, which keeps them really crunchy.  But that does mean you need to store them in the refrigerator, so this doesn't make a huge batch.  I ended up with 2 (very full) pint sized jars.  I used pickling cucumbers, so I did not peel them.  Of course, that part is personal preference.

6 cups thinly sliced cucumbers
1 medium onion, sliced
1 3/4 cups sugar
2 Tbsp. pickling salt
1 tsp. dried dill weed
1 cup cider vinegar

Combine onions, sugar, salt, dill, and vinegar.  Give it a really vigorous whisking to try to dissolve as much sugar as possible.  Pour over cucumbers and refrigerate at least overnight before eating.

Apple Cake

It's officially fall now, and you know what that means?  Apples!  You know what else I love about fall?  Cakes!  Fall and winter are prime cake baking time because it's finally cool enough to actually enjoy having the oven on, and the cozy feeling that comes with it.  As opposed to summer when, unlike my parents, I will indeed turn my oven on, but when I do, I'm often chased into the basement to get some respite from the heat.  To recap, 2 great things about fall: apples and cake.  There is an obvious next step staring us in the face here, and it's called apple cake.

There must be some kind of apple cake high council that met long ago and ratified the master version of this recipe, because the many variations I encountered were all basically the same at their core.  The amount of oil, sugar, eggs and flour was very similar from one to another.  I saw one that called for half butter and half oil.  I saw a few that called for a bit more flour or a bit less apples than I used.  A few contained nutmeg in addition to or in place of cinnamon.  One more contemporary version called for serving a butterscotch sauce on top, which seemed cloyingly sweet and unnecessary to me.  I love butterscotch as much as the next girl, but do you want to taste the apples or not?  And there was one that called for canned apple pie filling, which is an absolute travesty any time of year, but especially now.  In the end, I went with a version that my mom has always made and has been in her recipe file for decades.  Since it is very similar to most of the recipes I found, and because it was always so good, I changed absolutely nothing.  Who am I to argue with the National Association for Apple Cake Integrity?

Apple Cake

As you can see, I used a 9 x 13 pan, but my sister-in-law makes a similar recipe and uses a Bundt pan.  I like to make a foil liner for the pan when I make a snack cake like this so I can lift the entire cake out of the pan to cut it.  That way I don't scratch up my bakeware with a knife.  I used Granny Smiths because their tartness complements the sweetness of the cake nicely, but the choice of apple is obviously up to you.  The batter will be very thick; it's almost more like a cookie dough than a cake batter.  You will need to smooth it out into an even layer before baking.  I served mine for dessert along with coffee or milk, as the diner preferred, but it was great the next morning for breakfast, too.  Also works well as just an anytime snack. 

2 1/2 cups all purpose flour

1 tsp. baking soda

2 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. salt

1 tsp. cinnamon

2 cups sugar

1 cup oil

2 eggs

2 tsp. vanilla

3 cups apples, peeled and chopped (if using Granny Smiths, this is about 2 or 3 of the jumbo ones, or 4 to 5 smaller ones)

1 cup pecans, toasted and chopped (optional)

Preheat the oven to 300 degrees.  Prepare a 9 x 13 baking pan by lining with foil and spraying the foil with vegetable oil cooking spray, or leave out the foil and grease and flour the pan.

In a medium bowl, combine the flour, soda, baking powder, salt and cinnamon and whisk until well mixed.  Set aside.

In a large bowl, whisk together the sugar, oil, eggs and vanilla.  Add the flour mixture and stir until just combined.  Add the chopped apples and nuts, if using, and fold into the batter.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan, making sure to spread it out into an even layer and into the corners of the pan.  Bake for 1 hour at 300 degrees.  Allow to cool before slicing.

 

Cinnamon Sugar Cake Doughnuts

I started seeing an acupuncturist recently, which is a really interesting experience.  I don't know why it is that having needles shoved into your ears and forehead is relaxing, but trust me, it is.  Anyway, one of the first things she told me was to think about going gluten-free and dairy-free.  So what did I do?  I went home and thought about it while I made doughnuts.  After taking my first bite, I decided I had thought about it enough.  Honestly, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't even know how to eat gluten-free, but I know for sure it means no doughnuts.  To which I say, no deal.

Our ancestors LOVED them some doughnuts.  Like, really loved them.  At least, I assume they did because almost every single old book in my collection has a minimum of one doughnut recipe.  Most have more than one including at least one cake doughnut recipe and one yeast.  (By the way, if you're wondering why I'm spelling it doughnuts as opposed to donuts, it's because all my old recipes spelled it that way, so it's my homage to those early 20th century cooks.  Ah, the good old days before laziness had even invaded the way we spell things.)  As visual proof of the plethora of doughnut recipes, here's a picture of all my books open to the doughnut page, and this doesn't even include the recipes on my computer from the books that I scanned before I returned them to their rightful owners.

This picture also gives you an idea of where I start with each recipe I work on.  (Recipes from my Grandma are the exception because I just take her original and go from there.)  But generally I get all my old books out and find as many versions as I can of what I want to work on and start cherry picking my favorite ideas from each one, and that was what I did here.  It's especially helpful with these old recipes to have lots to work with because so many of them are so vaguely worded that it really helps to be able to compare them against each other when one calls for "an amount of butter the size of an egg," or to "mix in enough flour to make a stiff dough."  I'm a scientist!  Give me measurements, dammit!  I'm still trying to figure out what it means when they say, "mix all ingredients as for a good cake."  I see that more often than you'd realize.  What do they mean?  Did they ever mix up bad cakes?

There's certainly no bad cake here.  Up to this point, the only doughnuts I had ever made on my own were baked in a doughnut pan with a Stonewall Kitchen mix.  While they are very good, I don't exactly consider them homemade.  They are homemade in the same way that Hamburger Helper is "making dinner."  (Marc can tell you that I laugh sarcastically every time we see that commercial and the people act like they are heroes for throwing some ground beef in a pan with a packet of powdered cheese.)  Stonewall Kitchen's tasty mix notwithstanding, I've now come to the realization that it's really hard to beat a light, cakey doughnut hot out of the oil with a little bit of a crusty exterior.  And given that they are so easy to throw together, why not make your own?

Homer Simpson once asked, "Doughnuts: is there anything they can't do?"  They sure can't make me want to give up gluten.

Cinnamon Sugar Cake Doughnuts

This recipe as written makes about 6 or 8 doughnuts.  I was afraid to make any more than that because I knew Marc and I would have eaten all of them, no matter how many there were.  It should be very easy to double if you want to make a full dozen.  Also, the dough keeps very well in the fridge.  Marc and I made 3 to split for breakfast one morning, then fried up the remaining dough the next day.  There was no difference in the ones that were made from fresh dough and the ones that were made after the dough had been refrigerated.


1 1/2 cups flour, plus a little extra as needed
1/4 tsp. ground nutmeg
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. salt
1 egg
1/2 cup sugar
1 Tbs. melted butter, cooled
1/4 cup buttermilk

Topping

1/2 cup sugar
1 tsp. cinnamon

Whisk together flour, salt, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon and nutmeg.  Set aside.  Mix the topping ingredients together in a wide, shallow bowl and set aside.  Begin heating about an inch of oil in a Dutch oven.  Put it on a low heat while you mix up the dough.

In a medium sized bowl, beat the egg.  Whisk in the sugar, melted butter and buttermilk in with the egg.  Stir in the flour mixture.  If the dough is very sticky, add more flour, 1 Tbs. at a time, and stir into the batter until it is not too sticky to roll out.  This amount will depend on how much moisture is in your flour and your kitchen in general.  It ended up being 2 Tbs. in my case.

Lightly flour a work surface and pat the dough out into a circle about 1/4" thick.  Remember to occasionally check to make sure it's not sticking to the work surface; add flour as necessary.  Use a doughnut cutter or a couple biscuit cutters to cut out doughnuts and holes.  I used a 3 1/2" biscuit cutter for my outer circle and about a 1 1/2" cutter for the hole.

Boost the heat up on the oil until it reaches 350 degrees.  Carefully pick up the cut out doughnuts with a spatula and slide into the oil.  Fry the doughnuts until golden brown on both sides, about 1 to 1 1/2 minutes per side.  Remove from the oil and drain on paper towels.  Immediately roll in the cinnamon sugar mixture. 

Pumpkin Bread

If you took all the old cookbooks I have in my collection and vowed to make a different quick bread recipe from them every day until you ran out of variations, you'd be making nut bread until the day you dropped dead.  Banana bread, date bread, nut bread, muffins of every flavor you can imagine, and possibly some flavors you can't imagine (I saw one version that contained salt pork), there is virtually no end to the way our ancestors threw together flour, baking powder, sugar, etc.  I'll probably get around to trying some of the nut breads some day, but in honor of fall, this time I decided to try my hand at pumpkin bread.  I found two pretty old recipes from my collection and one from my mom's Betty Crocker cookbook circa early 70s that I used as my inspiration.  That said, I didn't really use any of them even close to as-is.  I took my favorite ideas from all of them and pulled some ideas out of my own strange little brain and out came this beauty.  Not that I want to be responsible for encouraging you to eat any raw egg at all, but I'm not gonna lie, I licked the hell out of this bowl and the batter was divine.

 

 Just as a side note, one of these days I'm going to have to post some of the recipes I just don't feel like I can "save," because some of them are hysterical.  In the course of paging through some of the old books while researching the next recipe I'm hoping to do (also known as doughnuts) I was reading some things out loud to Marc as we were alternately laughing and trying not to vomit.  Let me just say, people in 1909 ate some nasty sounding crap.  Think cold fish layered with sliced hard cooked eggs and thick white sauce (whatever THAT is) and served over lettuce.  Or watercress, depending on your taste.

But put that yucky stuff out of your mind right now.  There's pumpkin bread waiting....

Pumpkin Bread

This recipe makes 2 loaves but you could probably cut in half without much trouble.  I suspect you could substitute greek yogurt for the sour cream, but I haven't tried that yet, so it's just a hunch.  I put 1/3 cup of chopped, toasted pecans in one of the 2 loaves.  Two of my three inspiration recipes contained raisins but that didn't interest me one bit.  But if you want them, about 1/3 cup per loaf ought to do it for that, too.  Personally, I like it best plain with no nuts or anything extra in there.

3 1/2 cups flour
1 tsp. salt
2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. ground cloves
1/2 tsp. ground nutmeg
1/2 tsp. ground ginger
4 eggs
2/3 cup oil
2 cups sugar
1/2 cup maple syrup
3/4 cup sour cream
1 lb. canned pumpkin
nuts, 2/3 cup if you want nuts in both loaves, 1/3 cup for one loaf (optional)
raisins, 2/3 cup if you want raisins in both loaves, 1/3 cup for one loaf (optional)

Preheat oven to 350.  Whisk together the flour, salt, soda, baking powder, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and ginger in a medium sized bowl.  Set aside.

Whisk sugar, eggs, syrup and oil in a large bowl until well combined.  Add pumpkin and sour cream and stir together.  Stir in dry ingredients until just combined.  Spray two 9" x 5" loaf pans with vegetable oil.  Or you can do like I did and make a parchment paper sling and line the pans that way.  Evenly divide the batter between the two pans and smooth the top with and offset spatula.  Bake for about 50 to 60 minutes, rotating the pans halfway through.  Cool in the pans for 10 minutes.  Remove from pans and place on  a wire rack to cool completely.

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

If the forecast for this weekend holds, I think Marc and I are going to have to go hiking.  We haven't really been since we were in Maine back in June (which, by the way, is solidly in first place on my list of favorite places to hike, or do anything, really).  So maybe that's partly the reason we haven't gone lately is that I figure the first post-Maine hike is going to be a let down.  Or maybe because our summer got seriously disrupted by having to move 1,260 miles across the country.  Or partly because I have been forced to be low key a lot since we moved here due to medical treatment.  Or because we live in Kansas now, and where do you go to "hike" in Kansas?  If you know the answer to that question, please drop me a line because I'm not trying to be snarky, I just genuinely don't know.  At any rate, I think it's long overdue, and surely we can find a good trail somewhere, even in the flat lands of the Midwest.

In the past, I have found out the hard way that adequate snackage is vital on a hike.  A few times I have not done a good job of preparing for a hike or a lengthy paddle in the kayak and hit the proverbial wall with quite a thud.  One time, paddling on the Hudson River up in New York, I got so tired halfway through that Marc had to tie a rope from his boat to mine and drag me back up the river, against the current.  He's quite a guy, isn't he?  Without him I guess I would have just floated all the way down to Manhattan and on out to sea.

About a month after the incident where Marc towed me back up the river like a derelict tugboat, we went to Maine for the first time, and since the menu of activities consisted mainly of hiking and kayaking, I got smart and made some snacks ahead of time.  Enter this oatmeal cookie.  I've never been a big fan of oatmeal cookies in general, I think because they usually have raisins in them, which are not my favorite.  But I discovered this recipe, another gem from Grandma Marguerite, that she wrote out by hand into the aforementioned cookbook that she gave me for Christmas one year.  I am sure she just clipped it out of a newspaper or a magazine and I have no idea how old it is.  In contains instant vanilla pudding mix, which isn't usually something I would bake with, but the thing that really caught my eye about it was that the traditional raisins had been swapped out for chocolate chips.  SCORE.  Figuring that the sugar would give us quick energy, the oats a little bit longer lasting energy, and the chocolate would just be awesome, I decided these would be perfect for our outdoor activities.  It's gotten to the point now where they are nearly as quintessential of a hiking companion as our dog, Maggie.

Overall, this is a pretty traditional cookie recipe, what with the creaming of the butter and the sugars, etc.  As I said, I would not usually bake with instant pudding mix, but every time I try a new recipe, I pretty much make it the way it's written the first time and I don't tweak it until the next time, if I feel like it's got potential.  In this case, I loved the cookie so much as is that I made very minimal changes.  So, yes, I even left the pudding mix in.  The only things I did differently were that I upped the amount of brown sugar and decreased the white sugar, since brown sugar is more moist and therefore gives a more chewy texture.  Another improvement to the texture was my choice of rolled oats as opposed to quick cooking oats, which also have a more oaty flavor, in my opinion.  I also nixed the second egg white in favor of just a yolk, again hoping for more chewiness.  My last change was to increase the size of the cookie.  The original called for using 2 teaspoons of dough, which seemed utterly laughable to me.  I went for a hardy 2 Tablespoons.  At this size, you'll get about 30 big, fat, chewy cookies.  You could also throw in about a cup of nuts, if you like.  I have occasionally put in pecans for a bit of protein.  Go bake a batch and then take a hike.

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

I grew up in a house where you underbake cookies so that they stay soft as long as possible, so that's what I did here.  They will bake all the way through and be safe to eat, but they will be soft.  If you want them a little more done, have at it.

1 cup butter, softened (2 sticks)
1 cup brown sugar, packed
1/2 cup white sugar
1 egg
1 egg yolk
1 tsp. vanilla
3 cups oats
1 1/2 cups flour
1 pkg. (3.5 oz.) instant vanilla pudding mix
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
1 cup chocolate chips
1 cup chopped nuts (optional)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  In a medium bowl, stir together oats, flour, dry pudding mix, baking soda and salt until well combined.  Set aside.

In a large bowl, cream butter and sugars together with a mixer until fluffy.  Beat in egg, egg yolk and vanilla.  Stir in dry ingredients with a sturdy wooden spoon.  This is a really stiff dough and it will take some muscle to get it all combined.  Stir in chocolate chips and nuts, if using.

Cover a baking sheet with parchment paper.  Drop cookies onto the sheet using 2 Tablespoons of dough at a time and use your palm to flatten them out a little.  I only do 8 cookies at a time on a baking sheet because these are big cookies.  That said, they don't spread a whole lot so you could probably get away with a few more on a sheet if you want.  Eight is a safe number, though.

Bake one baking sheet at a time for 10 minutes.  Allow the cookies to sit on the pan for at least 5 minutes before removing and placing on a cooling rack.  Don't skip this step or they will be too soft to move and will fall apart.  Makes about 30 to 32 large cookies.