Easy fridge pickles

This recipe works for just about any vegetable that you have going to waste in the back of the refrigerator. We did it with baby red peppers and string beans, and they turned out really delicious. We'll definitely be doing this with other veggies in the future, too!

Ingredients

[Makes enough to fill 3 quart-sized Ball jars]

~ 3 lbs. string beans, peppers, and/or whatever other veggies you want to pickle

3 cups vinegar

3 cups water

4.5 Tbsp. pickling salt

6 cloves garlic

6 Tbsp. dill seed

Procedure

Clean the jars in boiling water to disinfect. Put the garlic and fennel seeds into the bottoms of the jars.

To make the brine, combine the vinegar, water, and salt in a large pot until the mix comes to a roiling boil. While that's heating, put the veggies into the jars on top of the spices. Try to pack them in pretty tight. You may need to trim the beans if you're using pint jars or the veggies are particularly long, but I didn't find this to be an issue in the quart jars.

Pour the brine over the veggies, leaving about a 1/2 inch at the top. Stir a little bit to remove any air bubbles, put on the lids, and stick the pickles in the fridge for about a week (for full flavor). That's it!

Storage

These will last for a while (at least several weeks) in the fridge.

If you've canned stuff (like jam, or "real" pickles, or tomatoes) in your life, you probably know that there are more particular steps to be followed. One thing that's so great about this recipe is how easy it is, because the pickles last for a long enough time in the refrigerator to render serious canning unnecessary. But if you do decide to can them, this recipe will still be perfectly fine---you're just on your own for the canning procedure. This is what happened when we tried to do it:

And no. This is not our first attempt at canning. Maybe some people just aren't meant to be able to make pickles that can be stored indefinitely at room temperature. 

Variations

You can add red chili flakes for a bit of a kick, but as our household average spice-wussiness level is quite high, we haven't tried. 

Grilled BBQ Tostadas

Yeah, these aren't tostadas. But I couldn't come up with a better name. "Left-over Pulled Pork Delivery Mechanism" wasn't as catchy. So here we go.

Ingredients

• Pulled pork (we make it in the oven using the dry rub from Tyler Florence's recipe)
• 1/3 can baked beans
• 1 handful baby spinach
• 2 small cucumbers
• 1/3 cup cheese, grated
• 4 small flour tortillas

Procedure

Put stuff onto a tortilla. 

Put the other tortilla on top. Fire up the grill and put the not-a-tostada on it. 

 Close the lid. Wait.

Get distracted for about 5 minutes setting up a hammock. 

Come back and find the bottom tortilla is burned. Oh well. Take it off the grill & eat!

Bagel French Toast

Let me begin with two important facts. One, my freezer doesn't work. Two, this weekend my parents came for a visit from New Jersey which, among many other wonderful things, means that there are about a dozen bagels too many in my house. New Jersey bagels. In New England. I mean, it doesn't really matter how not hungry you are -- when that treasure finds its way to within eating distance, you eat. And let's face it, the freshest bagel ever made outside of the NJ/NY area doesn't hold a candle even to a two-week-old Jersey bagel from the freezer. But subtract the freezer from the equation, add two days, and all you have are tough, stale bagels that could have come from anywhere. And there's only one way to feel about that:

OK, so what do we do? French toastify! Soak the bagels in eggy milk for a few minutes and it's like they never gave you reason to wear that adorable long face.

Ingredients

[Makes about 3-4 servings depending on how hungry your servees are.]

2 old bagels, cut into rounds or wedges or slices

1/2 cup milk

2 medium eggs

cinnamon (optional)

cooking oil

chocolate chips (optional)

powdered sugar (optional)

maple syrup (optional)

Procedure

Whisk together eggs and milk (and cinnamon, if you're using it) in a wide-bottom bowl. Place bagels in a single layer in the mixture, and let them sit for a few minutes. Meanwhile, heat a pan over low/medium heat. Back to the bagels: flip them over and let them sit for a few minutes on this side as well. Shove chocolate chips, if using, into the now mushy bagel -- the deeper you shove them in the better, so they don't burn on the pan. Place the bagels chocolate chip side down (I tried it both ways and found that this way actually burned the chips much less). Cook on each side about two minutes, or until golden brown. If they're burning, lower the heat.

When ready to serve, sift some powdered sugar over everything and/or pour on maple syrup. Personally, I love the combination of sharp cheddar with sweet stuff and am not big on maple syrup, so my perfect bite includes some extra chocolate chips, a slice of cheese, and a sugared little bagel round.

Bagel crisis averted! (Well, more accurately, I've turned my bagel crisis into a french toast crisis, but it wouldn't be so bad if I weren't home alone and trying to consume way too much french toast for brunch.)

Mini Meat Pies

Following our Game of Thrones themed birthday party, we had an insane amount of leftovers. The small amount of lamb still leftover two weeks later was easily dispatched by our dogs (they liked it almost as much as when they got to devour blue cheese filet mignon last week -- yeah, these dogs are ridiculously spoiled). The only thing left was a bit of rabbit stew. Super delicious and made by my mom -- who will perhaps post a recipe here one day?!

So today I finally got off my butt and decided to use our leftovers for good! And hence rabbit muffins. Or... Stew scone? Bunny bread? Carcass cupcake? Yeesh, okay, I'll stick with mini meat pies.


Ingredients
Leftovers
Pie crust

Pie Crust
[For 12 mini pies.]
2 cups flour
2/3 cup shortening
1 tsp salt
~1/2 cup cold water

Procedure

Mix flour, salt, and shortening together using a pastry blender until you have a fairly homogenous crumbly mixture. Add in water, a little bit at a time, and stir with a wooden spoon until the dough forms a ball. Roll it out (depending on your work surface, you may want to roll out half of it at a time) pretty thin line the bottoms of a greased muffin tin. Spoon in your leftover filling (any thick stew would work, as would anything that's not too runny).

 Cover the filling with another layer of dough, crimp the edges with a fork, and glaze with a bit of egg wash. Bake at 425F for about 15-20 minutes, or until the pie is slightly golden on top.

When you're splitting up the dough into the muffin cups, neatness is not very important. Just rip out a portion roughly large enough to go into the cup and stick out a over the sides. Same for the top. All that matters is you can crimp the edges to seal in the meaty goodness.

* Dog approved!

(Taken with a pie held over the camera. Don't feel bad, he got to eat it after.)

Storage/Leftovers
These will not be great re-heated, so only make the amount you plan to eat. Remaining uncooked dough can be frozen.

Pasties (also: an easy puff pastry recipe)

Another experiment brought about because of River Cottage Every Day, even though all we used of that book here was the recipe for cheaty puff pastry. Cheaty because it isn't as complicated as "real" puff pastry, but I couldn't tell the difference between this and any other puff pastry I've tried, especially on those pasties in which the dough wasn't rolled out too thinly.

Puff pastry 
[Makes 6-7 pasties]
2 cups flour
pinch salt
2/3 cup butter, chilled and chopped into small cubes
ice water

[I would recommend adding more salt!]

Procedure
Sift the flour and salt together in a large bowl. Throw in the cold chopped up butter and toss until all the butter chunks are covered with flour. I found it easiest to do this with my hands. Add the water a couple of tablespoons at a time, mixing it in with a wooden spoon, until you have just enough liquid to make a firm dough. The butter is still in chunks at this point.

Shape the dough roughly into a rectangular prism with your hands and put it on a well-floured surface. Flour a rolling pin and roll the dough out in just one direction (away from you is easiest) until it makes a long, flat rectangle -- about 3/8" thick. Fold the top third down and the bottom third up over that (like a letter) so that you have a rectangle that's three layers thick. Rotate 90 degrees and repeat the process. Roll out, fold, and rotate a total of six times. Then cover the dough with plastic wrap and put it in the fridge to rest for at least 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, prep the fillings (see below for some examples). When ready, preheat the oven to 375F and pull out the chilled dough and roll it out so that it's about 1/8" thick. Use a plate or pot lid to cut out circles (I used a smaller pot lid, which gave me 6-7 pasties from each rectangle of dough). Spoon the dough just off center, and fold the dough circle in half. Brush the edges of the pastry just a little bit with water and crimp them tightly, making sure the filling is sealed in. I think the more you can fit inside, the better it'll taste, but that's up to you. Brush the tops with an egg wash (use 1 egg beaten together with 1 tablespoon of milk), lay on a greased, foil-lined baking sheet, and bake for about 25 minutes or until golden brown.

Fillings 

In this first and unreasonably ambitious experiment, we made four savory and one sweet type of pastie. This is a great medium for shoving it full of whatever leftovers or random ideas you have, so the following filling descriptions are pretty vague -- no exact amounts or instructions. You can figure them out yourself. :) 

1. Mushroom & Barley
   barley
   chopped mushrooms
   cooked spinach
   onions
   salt
   black pepper
2. Chickpeas & Curry
   chickpeas
   boiled chicken
   red pepper
   green beans
   potatoes
   curry
3. Butternut Squash & Chicken
   boiled chicken
   boiled butternut squash, pureed
   potatoes
   raisins (optional)
   onions
4. Keema Matar
   
   I made keema last night with this recipe and used the leftovers for this pasty. :)
5. Butternut Squash, Ricotta, & Raisins
   
   boiled butternut squash, pureed
   ricotta
   brown sugar
   raisins

Two kinds of dog treats

The Obscenely Healthy Dog Treats

We're out of dog treats and we're going on vacation next week so we have to use up a bunch of stuff... hence, healthy dog treats. They look kinda gross, but they're healthy and (at least our) dogs go nuts for them. One of our dogs stole two treats before I even got them in the oven, though he also steals whole bags of hot dog buns, so that rave review is kind of irrelevant. We tried them ourselves and they're actually human-tasty, too. They're also pretty easy to make, given that you have a bunch of veggies and some meat lying around. You can replace the ingredients with anything dog-friendly (the ASPCA has a list of foods to avoid, and you can find others online/ask your vet) that has roughly the same texture. Here's what we did.

Ingredients
(Makes about 50 small treats)

• 1 cup ground meat (we used leftover kotleti, which is very roughly something like this, but that's neither here nor there; any meat will do, including uncooked ground meat)
• 2 medium carrots, shredded
• 2 stalks celery, finely diced
• 1/2 cup spinach, steamed and drained
• 1-2 tsp. dried parsley (or 1-2 Tbsp fresh parsley, minced)
• 2 tsp. turmeric
• 1 egg
• ~1 cup flour (add as necessary) -- gluten free flour can easily be subsituted if your dog has a wheat intolerance

Procedure

Preheat oven to 350F. Line a baking sheet with foil and spray with cooking spray (or otherwise grease it up). 

Mix all ingredients together except for flour. Add flour and keep mixing to see how much you need. Mixture shouldn't be so sticky that it's hard to work with, but it shouldn't be nearly as dry as a cookie dough, either. 

If things aren't forming into balls (or whatever cookie shape you desire) then you may want to add a second egg. Once that's all sorted out, shape the mush into whatever shape you like. I made little flattened balls, something like a stack of 3-4 half-dollars in size. 

Place the treats onto the baking sheet and bake for about 15-20 minutes. Let cool completely before feeding to pooches. 

The Far Less Obscenely Healthy Dog Treats

OK, these are pretty good too. I swear I'm not eating my dogs' treats.

Ingredients

(Makes 130-140 small cookies)

• 2 cups flour
• 1 cup rolled oats
• 1/4 cup peanut butter
• 1 cup chicken broth

Procedure

Preheat oven to 350F and line a baking sheet with foil.

Mix the first three ingredients together in a bowl. Add as much broth as it takes to get to dough-like consistency. Knead the dough on a floured surface until it's thoroughly mixed. Roll it out to the desired thickness (I made cookies roughly 2 coins thick) and use a cookie cutter that's to your liking. I used the top of a pill case because I wanted small biscuits that could be used for training without having to be broken in half. 

With that size of cookie, bake for about 20 minutes -- adjust time according to size. Let cool completely.