I made pickles.

There's something satisfying about a kitchen project.

Instead of racing to the next place we have to be, or sitting hunched at the computer completing another assignment, or trying to figure out what to have for dinner in ten minutes, a big project forces us to slow down. Focus. Be there.

All that work can be a sweet release.

I especially like when a kitchen project produces pickles at the end of it.



I've always loved pickles. A few weeks ago, I waxed lyrical about why I love them. Read that, if you haven't. Today, I want to talk about the pickles themselves.

We bought these cucumbers from the older couple on the island who run a farm stand in the middle of town. Every week, they bring in fresh produce from Yakima (the other side of the mountain from here), where the sun scorches sooner than it does in western Washington. And so, pickling cucumbers sat in a cardboard box on the sidewalk in the middle of June. When I spied their bumpy lovely selves, I had to buy some.

Time to make pickles.



You see, I had never made pickles, at least not by myself. We made some for our family day-before-the-wedding party, but Danny really did it. I helped by pouring vinegar into the mix. And standing in awe of it, taking pictures. Without this, we wouldn't have a website.

But sometimes, it's too easy for me to defer to Danny on this, to let him do all the cooking, especially after Little Bean arrived. When it comes to big projects, he's five times as fast and he needs to do this. Working with food, inventing something new, is like breathing to him, like writing for me. But if I let him do all the cooking, I miss it: standing in the kitchen, humming under my breath, the dishwasher chugging along, music playing in the back. I miss that focused place of being, the moments beneath my hands.

So we split the cooking around here now. Imperfect as my meals can be, they make Danny happy. A couple of weeks ago, I wanted to make pickles, without him. Danny was gone for the day and the baby was in her bouncy chair in the doorway behind me, so I started toasting spices for the pickling spice.



You probably have your own recipe for pickling spice. Each of us has a different taste. So I'm not going to tell you that this is the only recipe you should use.

I just think that its mix of warmth and heat, slight sweetness and puckery flavors mean that it's the only recipe for this house, right now.

(I love that this jar once held our friend Nina's superb blackberry jam, then became a water glass, and then held chicken stock — chix is Danny's shortcut for chicken stock — and now holds pickling spice. I don't know what it will be next.)



Slowing down means I see more. That's probably part of the reason I like cooking, as well as taking photographs, and writing. Just after I had stuffed the cucumber slices in the jars, the sun flitted out from behind the clouds. While the light darted back and forth between flat grey and illumined, I stood there, waiting. And then I took this shot.



Little Bean giggled when I tickled her under her chin. With a board book propped up in front of her, she was engrossed. This gave me time to survey the scene and really begin.

There was something so satisfying about being systematic here. Dill on the bottom of the jars, cucumbers stuffed in, picking spice sprinkled, more dill on top. I was building pickles.

I felt like dancing.

That light helped.



I like any recipe that requires you to stuff food into jars, pell mell, without worrying if it looks pretty.



With the brine poured in, the cucumber slices looked even more green. (I always think of Kermit.) All I had to do was put the lids on loosely, slide the jars to a dark corner of the kitchen, and wait.

Oh, the waiting. It's the waiting that makes the pickles.

And yesterday, we ate the pickles for the first time. A crunch, a crisp layer, a bit of heat from the red pepper flakes, a sour fermented taste that works great in pickles (but not so much in milk). They tasted like thin slivers of the pickles I used to suck on when I was a kid at Disneyland.

Yeah.

I'm so happy I made pickles. After we've eaten these, I'm going to put up quarts of them this summer, to be able to crunch down on them all winter long.

I know, of course, that people have been making pickles for generations. But I like how so many of us are starting to learn these old traditions, of pickling, preserving, and canning.

Are you starting to grow food for yourself? Have you pickled anything for the first time? Made jam? I'd love to know what your latest kitchen project is.



Dill Pickles, adapted from David Lebovitz, who adapted them from Arthur Schwartz

Pickling is a community event, even though I was standing in the kitchen with only a baby to keep me company when I made these. Reading this question and answer with Eugenia Bone started me thinking about pickling and preserving in earnest. Visiting Food in Jars almost obsessively, looking for new ideas, compelled me to stop talking and start chopping. (And Marisa just linked to this piece on preserving cherries that has me thinking about the weekend.) Then I ordered The Joy of Pickling and Well-Preserved and The Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving from the library. I could pickle and preserve all summer and still not be done.

For this pickle recipe, I studied Tea's recipe for refrigerator pickles and the beautiful narrative recipe that Margaret Roach transcribed from a railway conductor and organic gardener from Long Island. They both called to me, of course. But in the end, I went with a recipe that David Lebovitz adapted from Arthur Schwartz's Jewish Home Cooking: Yiddish Recipes Revisited. Mostly because I trust David. And also, this recipe doesn't require vinegar. Danny grows persnickety about the way food looks. Adding vinegar can make green foods a little grey. And so, here it is, only slightly adapted. But that's what we do, right? Pass foods from one to the other.

Have a pickle.

8 pint jars with lids
4 quarts water
6 tablespoons kosher or pickling salt
8 cloves fresh spring garlic, peeled (you can also use storage garlic)
2 tablespoons pickling spice (see above)
8 fresh bay leaves (or dried if you don't have fresh)
1 large bunch fresh dill

Run the jars and lids through the dishwasher to sterilize them. Or, you can put them in a 250° oven and keep them warm until you are ready to work with them.

Slice the cucumbers into the size of pickle spears you want.

Heat 1 quart of the water with the salt. When the salt has dissolved, add the remaining water. Bring to a simmer and then turn off the heat.

Put a generous clump of dill on the bottom of each of the jars. Stuff the jars with cucumbers, tightly. (Don't stuff them so high that the tops will stick up above the brine when you are done.)

Divide the garlic cloves, pickling spices, and remaining dill into the jars.

Pour the salted water (brine) into the jars so the cucumbers are completely covered. Put the lids on loosely. (Or, you can use cheesecloth and rubber bands.) Shove the jars into a dark part of the kitchen and wait.

You can check the fermenting pickles three days after you make the pickles. Taste. Want them more sour and fermented? Wait. We liked our pickles after six days of fermenting.

Like your pickles? Screw the lids on tightly and put the pickles into the refrigerator. Eat to your delight. You should probably eat them all within the month. You will.

Yields 8 pints of dill pickles.

raspberries

Golden and red raspberries, tumbling off the bush when our fingers touch. Our skin warm. Our hands blushing pink and red. Lovely silence.

We feel lucky to have found this home. There's a cool quiet in the middle of the afternoon. We have a spacious kitchen, with a gas stove and a bay window where we chop our food for dinner and look out at green. There's the open space that allows us all to be in one room, separate but together. And we are surrounded by trees.

These days, though, I am grateful for the gardening efforts of our landlords, who planted a bounty around us. This week, the raspberry canes are offering dots of red and vivid orange among the leaves.

We've been picking raspberries every morning, Little Bean in her bouncer, singing to herself, as we stand side by side and feed each other berries as we go. And her too, of course. She opens her mouth like a baby bird, wanting more.

They are wonderful raspberries, smaller than commercial berries, mis-shapen at times, pure sweetness. They remind me of longed-for summer vacation. They taste of still afternoons with nothing to do but listen to birds and smell the grass grow hot in the sun. They smell like pie and flavored bubble gum and honeyed perfume.

They are the best raspberries I have ever eaten.

Yesterday, we had friends over for a party. Blue skied day, in the 70s. Who needed to be inside? We lounged on the grass and watched the mass of little kids attack the swing, climb the cherry tree, and descend en masse on the strawberry patch. Reina made a salad from the foraged foods she found in our garden: endive and lettuce, the few remaining red currants, strawberries plucked from beneath the bushes. All garnished with daisies. (Danny added the lemon slice, for her vinaigrette.)

We loved that she relished the garden so much.

But we weren't sad this morning to go out into the garden and find that she (and the rest of the kids) had left us a few more raspberries at least.

What are you going to do with this summer's crop of raspberries? We'd love hear your ideas.

early summer vegetable love

Danny's at the kitchen counter, chopping and humming, the sunlight flooding in. Little Bean is standing at her wooden stove, just behind him in her room, banging out a rhythm with a wooden spoon. I'm bustling around them, rinsing the dishes or putting something on Twitter or opening the refrigerator to see what I can make for dessert. Our living room and kitchen are one big space, which flows into her room, so we are all together.

And then something shifts. Danny looks down at the food beneath his hands. He looks up at me, his eyes wide. He says, "This is going to be good."

I look over to see a new salad he's created, a melange of snap peas, English peas, green beans, corn kernels, and the fava beans he has blanched and skinned. The feathery pile of fresh dill on the cutting board has disappeared, chopped into fine pieces, mingling with the vegetables. I can smell the fresh lemon zest meandering through the room. And the jar of buttermilk ranch dressing we made a few days before is empty now.

Of course I move toward him, for a kiss, and then a bite of food. He has cut all the vegetables into the same size pieces. Even though I'm experiencing a new combination with each chew, it feels right. The salad tastes of early summer: long days, eating late, light lingering into the evening. The first real farmers' market of the season, suddenly more choices than kale and radishes, again. The garden packed with full heads of lettuce, instead of stared-at dirt, willed to grow, dammit. Our skin warm from the sun, finally.

I had never eaten this salad before. After two bites, I thought, "Why haven't I eaten this every summer of my life?"

That first bite happens as the golden light arrives.
"Will you read Bean that book she loves right now?"
He moves toward her, smiling.
I find the camera and race outside to grab the last scraps of sunlight.

When I return inside with a dozen photographs to choose from, I give the salad to Danny. It's time for Bean's bath, soon. But first, I turn to the computer and ask him to tell me exactly how he made it. Within a few moments, the recipe is saved, the photographs are downloaded, and the salad is growing cold and crisp in the refrigerator.

Someday, when she's older, we'll explain to Little Bean that not every family photographs its meals and writes down the steps before they eat.




Early Summer Vegetable Salad

This salad only appeared on our plates because we were trying to use up all the vegetables we had bought at the farmers' market a few days before. This time of year, we go a little crazy at the market: beans! peas! arugula! spinach! And then the crisper drawer in the refrigerator bulges with too much green.

The lovely Kim O'Donnel, who writes A Mighty Appetite for the Washington Post, has been hosting the Eat Down the Fridge challenge again this week. It's such a great idea. We're often too tempted by the allure of a new recipe, an idea for dinner that requires another trip to the store. It's a slippery slope around here — food is what we do. And then we are shocked, again, by how much we spend on groceries every month.

We're trying to save, just a bit, and appreciate what we have, instead of always yearning for a new ingredient. And what we have discovered lately shouldn't come as a surprise, since this happened when I had to cut out gluten. A little deprivation breeds creativity. Without the determination to use what we had, this salad would not have been born.

1 cup fava beans
1 cup English peas
1 cup green beans, sliced into 1/2-inch pieces
1 cup snap peas, topped and tailed, sliced into 1/2-inch pieces
2 ears corn, roasted and kernels cut off
sea salt and cracked black pepper
2 tablespoons fresh dill
zest 1 lemon

Blanching the beans. Set a pot of water, with a pinch of salt, to boil. Put a bowl of ice water in the sink. As the water is coming to a boil, shuck the fava beans. Snap the shell and extract the 3 or 4 beans per pod. Shell the English peas as well.

When the water has come to a boil, plop all the shucked fava beans and English peas into the pan and let them bob in the boiling water for 30 seconds. Immediately drain the pot of water and plunge the beans in the ice water. After a moment, take them out and let them chill in the refrigerator for a few moments.

Composing the salad. Combine the fava beans, English peas, green beans, snap peas, and corn. Season with the salt and pepper. Toss in the fresh dill. Stir. Zest the lemon over the salad. Stir.

Toss the salad with the dressing of your choice. We enjoyed this with the buttermilk ranch dressing we have been eating all spring. I think it might also be delightful with this creamy lemon chive dressing. A simple vinaigrette might do the trick, as long as you don't use a big-tasting vinegar like balsamic.

Feeds 4.

Good Bite

For months I've been keeping a little secret, something I have been wanting to share. But we had to keep quiet, my fellow food bloggers and I. Until today.

I'm happy (and honored) to announce that I'm part of the new Good Bite team.

Good Bite is a new web-based video show, with a team full of food bloggers passionate about food who are willing to film themselves with small cameras and have their faces spread around the web. (Have you ever seen Momversation? This show is produced by the same team that makes that happen.) We're talking about food, in roundtable discussions and recipe explanations. As the tagline of the show says, it's about "...delicious made easy."

See, the thing is, whenever people who love food are put together in a room, we generally don't talk about baseball. Instead, we're comparing notes on cast-iron skillets, favorite pulled pork recipes, and the best place to buy strawberries in June. That's what this show is — people gathering together (in separate rooms, bound by video) to talk about their food passions.

Here's a preview of the contributors. And, if you're watching closely, you'll see me there, in the middle.



It's quite the crew. My goodness.

Matt Armendariz from Matt Bites
Elise Bauer from simplyrecipes.com
Diane Cu and Todd Porter from whiteonricecouple.com
Jaden Hair from steamykitchen.com
Jeanne Kelley from jeannekelleykitchen.com
David Lebovitz from davidlebovitz.com
Catherine McCord from weelicious.com
Deb Perelman from smittenkitchen.com
Julie Van Rosendaal from dinnerwithjulie.com

I'm honored to be among this group, people whose ideas on food are already important to me.

And I have to tell you this — I'm especially excited to be on the show as a gluten-free blogger. It would have been easy for the production company to dismiss my presence because I can't eat a certain food. Or because they believe I would only talk about sorghum flour and substitute muffin recipes. Nope. I'm just talking about great food. And I'm doing it for all of you, too.

Here's the first video I shot, with Elise and Julie, talking about lazy dinners. What food do you make when you're tired and in a hurry, but you still want to eat well?



If you go to the Good Bite website, you can see an LA chef, Aarti Sequeira, make my chickpea and wilted spinach dish for you. (I had to laugh that she put a piece of bread to the side of the chickpeas.)

That's one of the things I love about this project — it's a collaboration with people who really love food. It will be filled with videos and recipes from the bloggers, as well as links to great recipes from hundreds of food writers and bloggers across the internet. (Many of them will be gluten-free.)

Good Bite hopes to inspire people to step back into the kitchen and start cooking. And that is something I'm happy to be a part of any day.

corn

Saturday night, Danny was up late with a teething baby, walking the hallway and singing. So, of course, he put a head of fresh spring garlic into the oven. (like you do.) By the time she was ready to curl up to sleep again, the garlic had grown soft as stewed prunes. He put her down, then pulled the baking tray out of the oven and left it out to cool. When he crawled back into bed, I lifted my head and sniffed the sweet, pungent smell of roasted garlic.

And then went back to sleep.

In the morning, he kneaded the garlic into soft butter, squeezed a lemon, stirred a smattering of smoked paprika, and seasoned with salt and pepper. Into the refrigerator.

We spent the morning reminiscing, looking at the present I made for him — pictures from the last 11 months — while Little Bean bounced on the balls of her feet between us, reaching up to pat the window. We teared up, talking about this year, the most dramatic, laughter-filled, action-packed year of our lives.

A din of voices, laughing and clambering over each other, talking fast and telling stories. The entire family gathered at our house, to celebrate. At one point, my father sat on the rocking chair, his knees filled with grandchildren, his arms around them both. His smile could have lit the island.

As we ate, however, there was silence. Contented, chewing silence. Danny loves several sounds, deeply. The sound of Little Bean chattering in the morning. The startle of thunder rumbling over our house. And the silence people make when they eat his food.

We had a feast: a big bowl of coleslaw; potato salad with homemade mayonnaise and fresh dill; a green salad made with lettuce from my brother's garden; salmon on the grill, brushed with Danny's barbeque sauce (recipe in my book). But best of all, corn on the cob, with a bowl of the roasted garlic/smoked paprika butter on the side.

Little Bean smells the meals before us and demands to eat too. So I fed her first, of course. But while she ate, I kept thinking about that corn. The corn he had grilled in their husks, a few kernels tinged with black, the rest softened and waiting.

I remembered the corn on the cob I ate as a kid, around another table with my parents, the little plastic holders shaped like corn stabbed into the ends. Then, we ate corn on the cob with margarine and iodized salt. And I loved that corn. Craved it. Every summer.

By the time I finally had the chance to eat, I reached first for the cobs. The taste of the corn I imagined while I gazed at it on the table paled in comparison to the thing itself. How would you describe the taste of good corn on the cob? I find I can't quite do it today. Sweet. Entangled in the teeth. Robust. Ephemeral. They don't quite cut it, do they?

Somehow, that corn tasted like the perfect way to celebrate Father's Day, the first one for my husband and Little Bean's papa, the darling man who makes the food on his day because he insists, because that's his favorite way to celebrate — feeding the rest of us.

And you? What did you eat for Fathers' Day? And how are you going to eat corn this summer?