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Category Archives: cooking

I make! Radish refrigerator pickles edition

Duck sometimes brings small sandwiches with him to work.  His sandwiches often include radishes.  This made me really crave radishes.  It’s weird.  I really wanted to put radishes in my sandwiches and stuff just because I saw him do it.  So I bought a great deal of radishes (by the bunch, so I sautéed the radish tops with some garlic since it seemed wasteful to throw away all the radish tops).  Now then, I only eat so many sandwiches and I had too many radishes for the amount of sandwiches I would normally eat.  So I decided to pickle the rest of them.

My mother made these really delicious, tangy radish (quick) pickles once.  Unfortunately, I don’t know what she pickled them with.  I mean, I know she used vinegar and sugar, but I didn’t know what kind of vinegar or how much sugar.  So in the end, I just made it up.  I opted for red wine vinegar, since I had that on hand, I was out of white wine vinegar, and I didn’t want the acridness of white vinegar (and balsamic is too dark).

I sliced all my extra radishes about 1/8″ thick and stuffed them in a mason jar.  Then I heated some red wine vinegar and sugar together (about 3:1, and I estimated the amount I would need to cover all the radishes) until the sugar was completed dissolved and the mixture was just starting the boil.  I poured the vinegar mixture over the radishes and let it cool to room temp.  Then I covered and stuffed it in the fridge.

I had pickles with sandwiches, after I ran out of fresh radishes, with hot dogs, because I was craving a hot dog one day, and sometimes just by themselves.  They were a little sweeter than I would have liked so I might go for a 4:1 ratio of vinegar and sugar next time, but otherwise they were quite good.  I think I might try making fermented radish pickles next time instead of make a quick fridge pickle.

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Yes, the whites of the radishes do turn red as they as they soak in the pickling liquid.

I make! A bunch of cookie dough edition

Sometimes I like to do things.  Sometimes I like to do things obsessively.  Like the time when I decided I wanted to make cookies and then made 192837912873 dozen.  Ok, so not really that many cookies.  And I often do make large batches of things, like cookies, but it’s normally because I received a request to provide cookies for a large group of people or something.  The other weekend, I made a lot of cookies for no other reason than I felt like making cookies.  So I made cookies.  I made a lot of cookies.  I made four different types of cookies.

The thing with making a lot of cookies is that you have to somehow get rid of a lot of cookies.  I didn’t have a large event in which to foist off all these cookies.  So I ended up making the cookie dough, baking only a portion of the cookies, and then portioning out the rest of the dough and freezing it.  That means I can have fresh baked cookies quickly now.  And I can do things like bake only six cookies because all I wanted was six cookies.  Of different types.

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Anyway, I ended up making peanut butter chocolate chip chocolate peanut butter chip cookies (partly because I just really like saying that), the coffee-cinnamon-fudge cookies, oatmeal pecan chocolate chip cookies, and oatmeal pecan cranberry cookies.  I’m only realizing now that I’ve never posted about the oatmeal related cookies before.  Which is strange.  As the oatmeal pecan (or walnut) cranberry cookies are probably the ones I’m requested to make the most.  I guess I’ll post about them some time.

I probably made 2-3 dozen of each type and froze the majority of the dough.  I like to pre-portion the cookie dough so you can just stick the balls (or discs, discs are better really) on a cookie sheet and put them straight into the oven.  I know some people roll them and slice (I used to) and some people just put a whole tub of dough in the freezer.  I think pre-portioning makes the most sense because a big reason for freezing the dough is so you can have cookies quickly at a later date.  If you freeze a tub of dough, you have to defrost it before doing anything with it.

I do recommend that you flatten the dough into discs before freezing so as to have quicker and even baking from frozen.  The peanut butter chocolate chip chocolate peanut butter chip cookie will puff more on the peanut butter side than on the chocolate side if you leave the dough as a frozen ball rather than a frozen disc.  Both sides will cook through, but you’ll have a lopsided cookie if that’s of concern to you.

Baking from frozen may require a few extra minutes at the normal oven temp.  Also, when freezing, lay the discs out in a single layer on a sheet pan or something and leave overnight.  The next morning you can gather all of the frozen discs into a Ziploc for storage and not worry about chipping away at a huge block of dough later.