Rosh Hashanah: Apples and honey for a sweet year

August 26, 2013 by 1 Comment

WE ARE IN Elul, the last month in the Hebrew calendar. That means Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, is right around the corner. This year, it starts the evening of September 4 and continues until sunset September 6.

If you have Jewish friends or co-workers, you may hear them say, “Rosh Hashanah is so early this year!” Indeed it is. Sometimes it doesn’t start until the end of September. In fact, this is the earliest Rosh Hashanah can be—the last time it started the evening of September 4 was 1899! (The latest date it can be is October 5, which won’t happen again until 2047.)

The Jewish calendar, like the Muslim calendar, is lunar, with months of 28 or 29 days. But unlike the Muslim calendar, the Jewish calendar makes corrections to keep the holidays seasonal: Rosh Hashanah will always be in the fall, and Passover will always be in the spring. It’s a complex system, involving seven leap years in a cycle of 19 years.

Adding a month in leap year

In a leap year, an extra month is added to the calendar. The coming year is a leap year, so there will be a second month of Adar in the spring, before Passover, which will push back everything that follows. Next year’s Rosh Hashanah won’t start until the evening of September 24.

Rosh Hashanah is known as Yom HaDin, Day of Judgment. Traditionally, this is the time that God decides everyone’s fate for the coming year. One’s fate is “sealed” on Yom Kippur, 10 days later, allowing for a period of atonement and repentance that can reverse a less-than-favorable decree.

The season of spiritual introspection starts for many people at the beginning of Elul, the month leading up to Rosh Hashanah. Ideally, we should spend time every day in Elul thinking about what’s happening in our lives, what’s going on that we’re not too thrilled about, what we want to change, and how we’re going to behave to bring about that change.

The real question: What’s for dinner?

In actuality, though, most Jewish women spend a good deal of time during Elul thinking about who they are going to invite for Rosh Hashanah dinner–or whose house they are going to go to for dinner–and what they are going to serve or bring as part of the dinner. Who will make the fish? Chicken, brisket or turkey? Should we buy the food now, or will there be a big sale next week? If we start cooking now, do we have enough room in the freezer?

The meal often includes the usual suspects of Ashkenazic (Eastern European) Jewish festive dining: chicken soup, gefilte fish, and roast poultry or meat, along with sweet side dishes made with carrots, sweet potatoes and/or fruits. For dessert there might be an apple cake or honey cake.

Want to try the sweet-sticky teiglach this year? Among the holiday dessert options, you might hear about teiglach, a confection made by boiling small balls of dough in a honey/sugar syrup until you have a nice, sticky mound of honey-coated pastry, often mixed with nuts or fruit. Confession: I have never even eaten teiglach, much less made it. It’s quite labor-intensive, and I don’t even know anyone who makes it—though I might give it a try this year, now that I’m retired!  This looks like the best of the many recipes I found online, and is the one I’m likely to try.

No matter what’s on the menu, every Jewish holiday table will include apples and honey. At the start of all of the festive meals–lunch and dinner on both days of the holiday–we dip a piece of apple in honey and recite a blessing, asking that our lives be renewed for a good and sweet year.

Why apples? According to the Jewish educational organization Aish, the Jewish people are compared to the apple in the Song of Songs (2:3): “As the apple is rare and unique among the trees of the forest, so is my beloved (Israel) amongst the maidens (nations) of the world.”

A side note: the Talmud, the major compendium of Jewish law, says the fruit on the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden was wheat, figs or grapes, not apples. According to Aish, there is one Jewish source that mentions an apple as being the fruit of temptation, but that source doesn’t have the authority of the Talmud. However, the Christian world adopted the apple story. Some scholars think this started with a pun in a Latin translation of the Bible: the same word, “malum,” can mean “apple” or “evil.”

Why honey? Not only is it sweet, but it recalls God’s promise, repeated often in the Torah, to bring the Children of Israel to “a land flowing with milk and honey.” In those days, the reference was more likely to have been to the syrup of overripe dates than to the bee honey we are more familiar with.

Here is a recipe for honey cake that I often make at Rosh Hashanah. I wish all my readers, of whatever faith, a sweet and happy year.

The Best—and Worst—Strawberry Shortcake

August 19, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Note from Feed The Spirit columnist Bobbie Lewis: Today’s post is by guest writer Lois Armstrong, who has been a good friend for more than half my life. We met when she hired me to be the publications coordinator at Sinai Hospital of Detroit many moons ago. We worked together again when I was communications director at Hospice of Michigan, where she was a VP. We stayed in touch after Lois, a Detroit native, moved to Phoenix. She is now president of Solstice Living Solutions in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

My husband’s mom and dad, Betty and Frank, met at church. They eloped when Frank’s formidable mother, Ruth, refused to approve the marriage.

They made a life in Bucyrus, Ohio, where each worked their way up in their professions—she from secretary to insurance underwriter, he from advertising manager to publisher of the local newspaper. Ruth lived with them the whole time. Betty forgave Ruth for trying to keep her away from Frank when they were young and for repeatedly flooding the laundry room when Ruth was old.

Betty’s life came to an abrupt end when she fell head-first off her bicycle and sustained a severe head injury. She was 65. By the time my husband and I arrived at their home, Frank was sobbing with his head in his hands. When he finally looked up he said, “She was such a good person.”

A wonderful baker

Though Betty couldn’t get the meat, the veg and the potato on the table at the same time, she was a wonderful baker. Many of Betty’s recipes stemmed from the time during World War II when Frank was fighting in the Pacific and she kept house for her daughter, my 2-year-old husband and Ruth.

One family favorite was her wartime Strawberry Shortcake. It was made with a scant cup of this and that—sugar and other commodities were rationed—and a pint of strawberries that she could buy, during the war, for mere pennies.

One summer shortly before she died we were all gathered around the table. The strawberry shortcake was served. Frank took a bite, looked up and said, “Betty, in 40 years this is the worst shortcake you ever made.” Betty later reckoned she’d forgotten the baking powder, but at the time, she simply burst into tears.

Even today, when I serve this dessert, as I do often, my husband and I cannot take a second bite without saying, “Betty, in 40 years this is the worst shortcake you ever made.” I’m proud that we loved both Frank and Betty enough to remember them exactly as they were.

Here is Betty’s recipe, which serves 6 to 8.

Mindfulness with Geri Larkin in cooking and in eating

August 11, 2013 by 1 Comment

By BOBBIE LEWIS

When people ask me why I keep kosher, which greatly limits what I eat, I answer that one of the reasons is that it helps me be mindful about food. I can’t put just anything into my mouth. First I have to be sure that the food itself is kosher. Then I have to be sure I’m not mixing meat or poultry with anything made from a dairy product. For me, this elevates eating into a holy act that connects me with the Jewish community and with more than 5,000 years of Jewish history.

Interested in reading more? I do plan to devote some future Feed the Spirit columns to the meaning of keeping kosher.

But, today, I’m turning farther East—to tell you a little about Buddhist mindfulness and food. When I read one chapter of Geri Larkin’s latest book, Close to the Ground, recently, I got a new appreciation for the idea of mindfulness. You can meet Geri today in a new in-depth author interview.

A factor in enlightenment

Geri is a well-known Buddhist writer after nearly two decades writing books for various publishers. In this, her 11th book, she turns to the nuts and bolts of enlightened living. She draws on a 2,000-year-old portion of Buddhist teaching that lists seven factors that can contribute to enlightenment, including mindfulness, energetic activity and joy.

Geri doesn’t give readers long sections of Buddhist analysis. Instead, she tells delightful stories of experiences that made her, and the people around her, vividly aware of these seven factors in their own lives.

In an interview, Geri said she was determined not to get “too Buddhist-y” in the book.

“Many Buddhist teachings and practices take years to appreciate and develop. It takes a long time in life to approach what might be called mature spirituality, but we have to start somewhere. And we all can start, every day, with small things we experience and choose to do,” she said.

Mindfulness in meal preparation

Carefully preparing meals can be an experience of mindfulness. Geri’s first experience in real cooking was at a Buddhist retreat, when she was asked to chop a box full of onions. She didn’t even know enough to peel the onions first, and hacked away at them with a dull knife, onion pieces flying everywhere.

Geri says since then she’s prepared countless meals, she’s eaten food at many retreats and she’s been served many meals as a guest. “And I can always tell when things were prepared mindfully, when the cooking itself was a spiritual practice,” she said.

She adds, “Whenever I want to know how I’m doing, vis a vis mindfulness, including today, all I have to do is look at an onion I’ve chopped up. The same is true for all fruits and vegetables. When the pieces are even and neat and piled somewhere carefully, mindfulness is in the air.”

Along the way, Geri became an accomplished cook. Her latest book includes this recipe, which will serve 4 to 6, depending on how hungry everyone is. (And many thanks to loyal reader and Read the Spirit contributor Debra Darvick for taking the time to make the recipe and photograph the result.)

Kreplach keep family tradition alive

August 5, 2013 by 1 Comment

Note to Readers from your host Bobbie Lewis: Got questions on any our food stories? Just ask us by adding a comment below. Our earlier story on pickles already has drawn questions—and answers.

I remember my grandmother’s kreplach, little pasta dumplings filled with beef and onions. They could turn an ordinary bowl of chicken soup into something ambrosial. They were something way beyond my mother’s limited cooking talents, so we enjoyed them only on infrequent trips from Philadelphia, where we lived, to Brooklyn, where my grandparents lived. I’m determined to remedy this deficit. I recently learned how to make kreplach from my friend Ruth Marcus, who invited me to her house for her family’s annual kreplach-making marathon.

(Kreplach, by the way, a Yiddish word, is plural. The singular is “krepl” — but no one ever eats just one!)

Every culture has something similar

Almost every culture has something similar to kreplach. You’re probably familiar with Italian ravioli, Polish pierogi and Chinese wontons. There’s also buuz (Mongolian), manti (Turkish), momo (Nepali), pelmeni (Russian) and many more ethnic permutations. Kreplach are usually triangular. Some say the three sides represent Judiasm’s three patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but I think that’s what we generously call a “bubba meise” – an old wives’ tale.

Ruth, on the other hand, is an inspiration. Every year for more than 35 years, she has been gathering her family – first her own three children, now her daughter and the three granddaughters who live nearby – to make hundreds of kreplach in a single afternoon.

Transmitting family recipes—and values

Ruth is living proof that cooking with children and grandchildren is one of the best ways to transmit family values and lore. She grew up in Baltimore, eating kreplach made by her grandmother, Lillian Miller. Now she uses the recipe from Lillian – known to Ruth’s children and grandchildren as Mema – along with several family objects that have taken on almost ritual significance.

There’s a tablecloth Mema gave to Ruth as a shower gift, now used only for rolling out kreplach. There’s Mema’s old wooden rolling pin, and a pretty china plate that once belonged to Mema, where the kreplach rest before going into the pot.

As toddlers, granddaughters Isabel Johnson, 7, and Olivia Johnson, 5, played with small portions of kreplach dough while the grownups worked. Ruth gently teases them about how they used to sit in their highchairs and say, “Roll it, roll it, roll it.”

Now Isabel is experienced enough to roll and cut the dough, and Olivia can portion out bits of ground beef for the filling. Both can fold the square pieces of dough into triangles and crimp the edges. Ruth’s oldest grandchild, Sydney Marcus, 18, goes to college in Colorado but timed her summer visit back home to Michigan to coincide with Kreplach Day.

Ruth and the girls knead, roll and cut the dough, and fill, fold and crimp the dumplings. Ruth’s daughter, Lauren Marcus Johnson, mans the stove; each burner holds a big pot of boiling water. Ruth’s husband, David, is in charge of packaging: 12 kreplach go into a zip-closed sandwich bag, then the filled sandwich bags go into a gallon-sized freezer bag.

A few small bags will go to friends, but most will be frozen and enjoyed later at the Marcus’ Sabbath and festival dinners. They’ll start eating this year’s batch at Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, in September and finish the last kreplach next spring before Passover, when everything made with flour has to be tossed or locked away.

The secret ingredients

There’s more to kreplach than flour, egg, water, beef, parsley and onion. “What are the secret ingredients?” asks Ruth. “Love!” says Isabel. “And telling the stories.”

The little girls never met Mema, their great-great-grandmother. But they can tell the story about how she came to America from a farm in a little village in Russia. Mema was 8 and her sister was 4. Her father had already left. Her mother hired a wagon to take them to the train, and Mema’s little legs dangled off the back of the wagon. She waved goodbye to her grandmother and grandfather, knowing she would never see them again.

Ruth says the one pound of meat in this recipe will make between 80 and 100 kreplach. “You can stop when you have used up the dough, or you can make another batch of dough. It never comes out even! If you have a little meat left over, shape and cook a hamburger!”

Got pickle questions? Please, just ask us …

August 4, 2013 by 1 Comment

Got questions? Feed The Spirit hopes to help! Here’s an example …

Constant reader and Read the Spirit columnist Debra Darvick had a few questions about making pickles, after reading guest writer Eliezer Finkelman’s recent Feed The Spirit column: Pickles with character! Tips for pickling more than cucumbers. Debra asked about using an enameled metal pot for fermenting and also whether the crock should be covered.

We asked Eli to respond:

It gives me great pleasure to try to help my friend Debra with pickle-related questions.

I do not know the answer about enameled metal. I would worry about whether the iron might react with the brine, if there exist any cracks in the enamel. I would prefer a non-reactive vessel, such as glass or plastic.

You do not want a tight-fitting lid. As the pickles ferment, the brine gives off a gas. As my son discovered in his first attempt at copying his father-in-law’s pickle recipe, if you let it ferment in a sealed vessel, the vessel will explode, and your kitchen will smell of pickles for a substantial time thereafter.

Or you could have a tight-fitting lid, as long as you do not seal it tightly. Covering the vessel as the pickles ferment serves to keep “stuff” out. People usually use cloth. You also might want to cover the cukes and tomatoes with a weighted plate to keep the cukes below the brine level.

(Feed The Spirit host Bobbie Lewis adds: My daughter took one look at my plastic tub of fermenting veggies and said, “You should cover that”—so we put the tub lid on top of the tub slightly askew, and didn’t fasten it.) 

The whitish froth on the top of a batch of fermenting pickles  occurs as a normal part of the process.
You can get peppercorns at supermarkets or groceries without too much trouble, I think. I have not tried pickles w/o peppercorns, but I bet they would work, just tasting a little different. (Bobbie: Look for “whole black pepper” in the spice aisle.)
The pickles ripen faster in hot weather than in cold. Taste them after a few days at room temperature, and you might find half-sours. After a week or two at room temperature, you probably will taste old-fashioned sour pickles. These pickles should look and taste like classic sour pickles.

If you started with large cucumbers, the texture might feel a little different: not as firm.

Good luck, and hearty appetite!

Eliezer
Got questions? Feed The Spirit hopes to help! Add your question as a Comment, below. And, please, share these columns with friends by clicking on the blue-“f” Facebook icon or the envelope-shaped email icon.

Bread and Wine; The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken: Serving up good books … and good recipes!

July 29, 2013 by Leave a Comment

two interesting books about food have caught my eye and I’m happy to recommend them to you. Both include recipes, but they’re not cookbooks.

The first is Bread & Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes, by Shauna Niequist whose website tells more about her life. Bread & Wine is similar in many ways to Feed The Spirit: It’s a collection of essays about family, faith, values–and food!

The second book is The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken: A Search for Food and Family by Laura Schenone. It’s a fascinating tale of the author’s search for her  culinary roots.

I will call these authors by their first names, because after reading their books, I feel I know so much about them and their lives.

Life’s “beautiful and broken moments”

In Bread & Wine, Shauna writes about “the beautiful and broken moments of everyday life–friendship, family, faith, food, marriage, love, babies, books, celebration, heartache, and all the other things that shape us, delight us, and reveal to us the heart of God.”

Each essay is followed by a recipe. Shauna says she likes nothing better than gathering family and friends around her table and feeding them. She’s a devout Christian, and the title refers to the bread and wine used sacramentally in the church as well as the food and spirits that sustain us on a daily basis. Shauna says the moments she feels God’s presence most profoundly take place around a table.

Although she has developed into an excellent cook, she stresses that she didn’t start out that way. She frequently reminds us that the complexity and sophistication of the food have little to do with the quality of the experience of sharing food. “Some of my most sacred meals have been eaten out of travel mugs on camping trips or on benches on the street in Europe,” she says.

Shauna advises anyone unused to cooking for guests to “start where you are.” If entertaining is not something you’re used to, invite people over and serve pizza with a salad and bottled dressing, on paper plates if necessary. As you get comfortable with the idea of being a host or hostess, you can become a little more adventurous and start experimenting.

A search for culinary roots

Award-winning food writer Laura Schenone has a mixed ethnic heritage that includes Croatian, Irish, German and Italian great-grandmothers.

In her early 40s, living in suburban New Jersey with a husband and two young sons, she found herself yearning to be able to cook something that could span generations and tell a story. She wanted, she says, “a recipe I could trace from my family, back into history, further and further back, into an ancient past. Even more importantly – a recipe that could take me to a landscape more beautiful than postindustrial New Jersey….I wanted nothing more and nothing less than an authentic old family recipe.”

She turned to her father’s Italian family to find it. Her Italian great-grandmother, Adalgiza, had come to America – to Hoboken, New Jersey – from Genoa, where ravioli is an essential component of the cuisine. Adalgiza’s ravioli, Laura says, were “the real deal.”

Laura sets out not only to find the “original” recipe but to learn how to make ravioli the old way, rolling and flipping the dough until it is so thin it’s translucent and crimping the filled squares with an ancient ravioli press. It took a lot of practice, often testing the patience of her husband and sons. Armed with Adalgiza’s ravioli recipe – passed down to an aunt, who wrote it out, and then to a cousin – Laura sets off to visit Genoa, on Italy’s Ligurian coast. She also visits Recco, the small mountain town where her great-grandfather was born.

By Ewan Munro from London, UK (La Barca, Waterloo, London Uploaded by tm) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia CommonsShe discovers that Ligurian cuisine is quite different from the southern Italian foods most of us are familiar with. She learns that poverty, more than anything else, drove millions of Italians from their homeland to America in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The mountain folk were so poor that they could rarely afford wheat for pasta and olive oil, now considered staples of Italian cuisine. They were nourished by the chestnut trees that grew around them, using the wood for furniture and the dried nuts to make flour. They flavored their dishes with mushrooms and herbs found in the chestnut forests.

A fancy but not-too-difficult recipe

Laura’s recipes are really complex and look daunting even for an experienced cook like me. But she includes detailed instructions and lots of photos. Shauna’s recipes are less intimidating. Here is one that she adapted from Sally Sampson’s book The $50 Dinner Party. Shauna says it may look difficult because of the long list of ingredients, but it’s mostly just chopping and throwing things into the pot. I recommend mixing up the spices and getting everything chopped before you start cooking.

The recipe says it serves six. Shauna says she often doubles the recipe to serve 10 to 12 and serves it with a simple green salad and pita or naan. And I halved it for my husband and me. Half the recipe made enough for two generous dinners and two lunches. It tastes great left over!

If you think you don’t like Indian food, this might change your mind. It’s spicy-flavorful, not spicy-hot. If you don’t like hot, leave out the cayenne pepper. If you like heat, add a little more.

 

Pickles with character! Tips for pickling more than cucumbers.

July 22, 2013 by 6 Comments

This week’s blog is by Louis (aka Eliezer) Finkelman, a rabbi, scholar, teacher and freelance writer as well as a gardener, cook, home brewer and vintner and assistant to the cheese-maker with whom he shares his Southfield, Michigan home.

UPDATE: Got questions on pickling? Just ask by adding a comment below. Eli already has answered one set of questions here.

Robust cucumber plants in my backyard garden have started to flower, and when that happens, my thoughts return to pickles.  About this time of year, I remember Mr. Fenster’s sour pickles, which contributed significantly to the joy to my childhood.

Barrel pickles by the pound

We bought our pickles at Mr. Fenster’s Appetizing Store under the elevated subway station a few blocks from the New York house where I grew up. We walked to that store about every week; I even worked there one summer. Pickled cucumbers and green tomatoes floated in a huge wooden barrel near the entrance to the store. Like the other customers, we would bring a glass jar, washed since it last held jelly or peanut butter. Other customers might ask for “half sours,” but we would ask for “sours.” While we watched, Mr. Fenster stuffed the jar with the maximum number of pickles, and poured brine, “pickle juice,” over them to fill the jar.

These pickles had character.

When the experts at Consumer Reports rated commercial pickles last year, they were not looking for anything like Mr. Fenster’s sour pickles. Consumer Reports wanted vinegar-cured pickles that have bright colors, crispy skins and crunchy textures. I have no nostalgic feelings for vinegar-cured pickles.

Produced by natural fermentation

Sour pickles get produced by natural fermentation, just like bread, sour cream, yogurt, wine and beer. Microorganisms change the sugar in cucumbers into lactic acid.  If you want to make anything that relies on fermentation, you learn to keep the little microorganisms happy. When they’re happy, they will do nice things to your food.

The trick to sour pickles is having the right amount of salt in your brine. Too much salt and the microorganisms do not thrive, the brine stays clear, and you wind up with something that tastes like a salted cucumber. Too little salt, and who knows what might happen! If you get the right amount,  the microorganisms thrive. After a few days, gas bubbles out of the salt water, which turns greenish and cloudy, giving off a magic aroma. What were once mere cucumbers turn first to half-sours, and then to that triumph of culinary art, the sour pickle.

Keep those microorganisms happy!

So how much salt makes the right little microorganisms happy? Sandor Katz, in his book Wild Fermentation, says between two and three tablespoons per quart of water, yielding a solution between 3.6 and 5.4 percent salt by weight. Jamie Geller, author of the “Joy of Kosher” blog,  recommends one-half cup per gallon, which agrees with Katz’s lower number. Use kosher salt or pickling salt, not iodized table salt.

Some recipes insist on stuffing as many cukes as possible into your fermentation jar. That seems to me like nostalgia for what Mr. Fenster did after the pickles had fermented. You can do this if you want to; it may help keep the cukes below the level of the brine. But the cukes will pickle just as nicely if they swim freely in a tub. The important thing is not to let them above the brine.

The pickles turn sour because the little microorganisms produce lactic acid. The longer you wait, the more intense the sour flavor.  Eat them when they are as sour as you like them.

Add some spices

Besides the salt and water, it’s spices that give the pickles the traditional “kosher pickle” flavor. Do not use a package of pickling spices from the supermarket; it  might include all sorts of spices that belong nowhere near a sour pickle, such as cloves and allspice other items that belong with a vinegar pickle.

For every quart of brine, add a few whole, peeled cloves of garlic, a few peppercorns, a few mustard seeds, and some dill – either dill seeds or feathery dill leaves.  Mr. Fenster also added a few tiny dried hot peppers, and you should too, unless you cannot stand the heat.

Use fresh, small cukes. Keep them whole, but cut off the blossoms.

If you pickle cukes in a glass jar, shake it up a couple of times a day, to make sure that the brine can touch every spot on every cucumber. Be sure there are no air pockets. If you make pickles in a plastic bucket or a crock, swirl it around and make sure that no cucumbers float above the surface. The surface might turn moldy, but the pickles, under the moldy surface, are doing fine.

In Wild Fermentation, Sandor Katz suggests putting a weighted plate on the surface of the brine, to keep the cukes below sea level. You can let keep them in the fridge, or you can let them ferment faster at room temperature, like Mr. Fenster did. (Katz also has a blog with the same name, Wild Fermentation.)

Try this idea to speed things up

I never saw this next idea in a recipe for pickles, but it works for every other fermented product, so I bet it would help with pickles. If you happen to have a jar of fermented pickles – the real thing, not the shelf-stable vinegar pickles – then you can add a splash of the brine from the pickle jar to your pickling brine. This will give a head start to the right kind of microorganisms in your jar or bucket or crock.  Mr. Fenster did not have to do that, because the right kind of microorganisms had been living in his wooden pickle barrel for years.

When the first frost warnings appear this fall, you might have a bucketful of green tomatoes in your garden and no good ideas for what to do with them. Do not despair!  Pickle the tomatoes the same way you pickled the cucumbers, or pickle a mixed barrel of cukes and tomatoes.

How do you know when the pickles are done?  A half-sour looks like a cucumber, maybe a little more translucent, and tastes like a cucumber, but saltier, and with a little sourish snap. A sour pickle looks translucent, is dull olive green in color, and tastes like, well, like one of the joys of my childhood, like a link to my ancestors.

When your pickles are sour, move them to the refrigerator, and keep them in the brine. Serve them with meat sandwiches, or chopped up in potato salad. Or, on a hot day when you have been working in the garden, just eat a whole sour pickle right out of the barrel!

If you need another pickle recipe or two here is one from Cookography and one from the New York Times.

Since making pickles is more of a method than a recipe, today’s recipe is for potato salad that includes a chopped sour pickle.

What foods bring you back to your childhood? Can you share a story and a recipe?