A simple pickle recipe that's great for pickling broccoli, cauliflower, radishes, onions, cucumbers, and more!
I love cookbooks and I hoard them pretty obsessively. Although, I’ll admit, I have a hard time following recipes from start to finish. Which is why I love the premise of Kate Payne’s new book, The Hip Girls Guide to the Kitchen. It’s a “hit the ground running approach, seeing as you need to eat three times daily whether you’ve mastered your kitchen or not.”
It’s full of, really, everything you need to know to be pretty successful in your kitchen – from how to set up your pantry to how to put meals together intuitively and economically. (Also she’s gluten free, so she includes tons of dietary options). She offers suggestions for what to buy in bulk, (and what not to), tips for buying kitchen tools from second hand stores, plus tons of clever “hip tricks” along the way. (For example: did you know you can buy a refurbished Vitamix blender for a fraction of the cost? …me neither).
She’s truly your friend in the kitchen and her writing is charming, witty, and just fun to read. Some of my favorite sections are:
Equip your Ship: Setting up your kitchen without winning the lottery
Methodology & Madd Skills: Learning how to cook without books or your laptop
Kitchen Kick-Ass: Tapping into your inner depression-era granny
Using Stuff Up: Preserving projects any beginner can handle
Since I’m clearly a beginner at preserving projects, I instantly gravitated to her recipe for Any Vegetable Vinegar Pickles. Any recipe that has “any vegetable” in the title, is my kind of recipe. I chose cauliflower, broccoli, red onions, radishes, and cucumbers along with a few various spices. Her brine recipe was quick and easy to make. The hardest part is the waiting – she suggest stashing them in the back of your fridge and not touching them for at least a week, although she says 2-3 is the best. (We’ll see if I can hold out that long!)
Click here to go buy her book!
Also, be sure to check out Kate’s blog, as well as these fine fellow bloggers who have also written posts about the book: Food in Jars, Healthy Green Kitchen, Local Kitchen Blog, Autumn Makes and Does, Punk Domestics, Spinach Tiger, and Local Savour.
the giveaway is now closed, a winner has been notified
any vegetable vinegar pickles
- any vegetables you like (I used cucumbers, broccoli, cauliflower, onions and radishes)
- fresh or dried spices (I used peppercorns, cumin, coriander, mustard seeds, & caraway)
- 1 cup any kind of vinegar (I used white wine vinegar)
- 1 cup filtered water
- 1 tablespoon kosher or any non-iodized salt
- optional: 1 teaspoon sugar
- Wash and cut up your vegetables and pack them into a clean jar.
- Add between ¼ - ½ teaspoon of whole dried spices.
- Combine vinegar, filtered water and salt in a medium saucepan and bring to a boil.
- Put your just boiled brine over the vegetables in the jar.
- Wipe any vinegar spills from the rim with a clean towel and put on the lid.
- Hide the jar in the back of the friedge for at least a week. Two weeks is better, three is best.
- Keep them in the fridge for up to 6 months.
I used these Ball jars (and also the smaller version).
recipe published with permission from Harper Collins.
Best tip is to make less than you think you need for parties. Took me a while to learn that it’s less stress and waste and more energy for socializing.
What pretty pickles! I am new to canning as well. These look like the perfect place to start. I’ll check out Kate’s book for sure!
I love using applesauce in place of oil in baked goods!
I try to freeze as much as possible. Cooking for 1 can be incredibly inefficient. Making larger recipes that I can freeze is much more economical. Plus keeping your freezer full makes it less expensive to run! Double Whammy!
I don’t know if everyone has this problem, but I work in the wine business, so I often have leftover wine. A couple things I do is freeze it in ice cube trays (as stated earlier) as well as make a simple red wine reduction “syrup” by adding 1.5 tbsp of brown sugar to about a half a bottle of red wine and reduce by half. Its a great sauce over steak, ice cream or just about anything! If you want to take it further, I use a simple bottle cutter to cut my old wine bottles in half and after smoothing them I use them for storage of spatulas, spoons, etc. on my countertop. Cheap, cuts waste and they look beautiful!
This looks like such an adorable and brilliant book!
Mise en place. It’s an oldie, but a goodie. That, and read the recipe all the way through before beginning!
Once a bought a cookie scoop, I solved so many plating and cooking issues (not just for cookies!) This book looks fun and like it would be a great gift.
What a great tutorial! I’ll have to try this sometime this summer. 🙂
These pickles sound delightful! Such a good way to make the most of the garden. My best kitchen trick is making labneh — Middle Eastern yogurt cheese — by draining plain whole-milk yogurt in a fine sieve. Voila: a soft, spreadable, tangy cheese! Super easy and versatile. Thanks for the giveaway opportunity!
Freeze leftover wine. Particularly helpful after dinner parties when there may be a few open bottles sitting around. My wine ice cube trays always come in handy when a meal calls for a small amount of wine and I don’t want to have to open a new bottle. Red wine can also be poured directly into container that stays in the freezer until it’s mulled wine weather.
Well, perhaps not the best kitchen tip, but it’s one of my favorites. I think a potato ricer is an unsung multi-tasker. Here are four uses: ricing potatoes (duh), squeezing shredded potatoes for hashbrowns, squeezing extra moisture from spinach/other greens to make spanikopita, breaking down raspberries for making jam.
My favorite kitchen tip is when you want to take the kernels off of fresh corn cobs, place your cob pointy side down in the hole of a bundt pan (preferably a cheap bundt pan used only for this). Hold the cob with one hand and carefully slice the kernels using a large knife with your other hand. The kernels will fall into the “bowl” part and you will have more stability using this method. It makes using fresh corn so easy and I don’t strain my muscles as much 🙂
My best tip is use your freezer! Freeze sauces, pesto, blanched veggies, single servings of soups and pastas, pie crust or pizza dough ready to bake. It can be such a time saver to pull things half made or completely made from the freezer.
Make preserved meyer lemons to enjoy year round.
Ohhh we love pickling at our house…best kitchen tip or trick? Find a husband who LOVES to cook. What a blessing that has been to us, its a family affair that way!
Something I’ve done recently is to make the inside of my refrigerator pretty. I put fruit in a colorful bowl on one of the shelves, put cheese sticks in an empty coffee mug, lemons & limes in a ceramic berry box. We have lots of room in our fridge so it’s nice to open it and see organization. 🙂
My best type/trick in the kitchen is preparation. If I don’t give myself at least 24 hours to wrap my mind around what I’ll be cooking, I’m a lost pup. And, then the chinese take-out becomes my knight in shining armor. So, prepping is key for me!
I bought a beautiful bunch of radishes at the farmers market yesterday without a plan for them, maybe pickles need to be made! My favorite, and incredibly lazy, kitchen trick is to also use a waffle iron to make grilled cheese. Also freezing bunches of fresh herbs, they crumble beautifully if you use them right out of the freezer without letting them thaw.
If I don’t have butterilk on hand for a recipe, the next best thing is to sour the milk with a dash of lemon juice or cider vinegar!