I love pickles. Not the rubbery ones you buy room temperature from the grocery shelf, the cold, crunchy ones that snap when you bite into them.
One day, I had a craving for a cold crunchy treat and when I went to the fridge for my jar of pickles, it was gone. Now I was in a pickle! Fortunately, I had several cucumbers in the crisper, so an hour later, I had another fresh jar of pickles in the fridge!
There are too many prepared food items on our grocery shelves today designed for our convenience. If you took the time to set aside a few minutes of your meal preparation time, you could prepare many of them on your own. Not only could those few minutes of prep time be a lot of fun, quite often the end result is cheaper doing it yourself.
For example, have you ever checked out the price of a jar of roasted red peppers at the grocery store? I did a price comparison between the stores by my house and on average, a jar of roasted peppers is anywhere from $6.00 to $8.00 a jar. Roasting your own fresh peppers is half that amount, plus, you know what ingredients you are using – just the peppers and not any of the preservatives used in the liquid of the jarred version.
Summer has arrived, which means an over abundance of fresh produce is beginning to show up in farm stands and grocery stores across the country.
Next to naturally sun-ripened tomatoes, my second favorite thing about living in the Mid-west is fresh picked from the stalk sweet corn. Depending on the farmer that you live near and the success of their crop, you can buy a dozen ears for just a few dollars!
As good as corn tastes, it’s not always fun to clean. One of the biggest frustrations for me had always been the amount of time it took to pick out all the silk between the rows of kernels. I have a touch of OCD so getting every piece of silk from the cob became an obsession. Now multiply that times a dozen ears of corn. Yeah, pretty scary and very frustrating. That is until I discovered this nifty little trick.
Every once in a while, I have to hunt down an ingredient that I cannot find locally in St. Louis. When I happen to post a recipe with one of those ingredients, I’ll try to let you know where I find it, just in case you’re not able to find it where you live either.
The recipe for the ‘Mucho Mushroom Fettuccine with Tarragon and Goat Cheese Sauce,’ would be a perfect example. The dish can be made with the regular wheat fettuccine, but I would strongly recommend you try a mushroom-infused fettuccine instead. It really adds a depth of flavor to the dish that regular pasta simply cannot do.