Category: Salads and Stuff

Candied Dill Strips

Like most country kids, I was in a 4-H club.  Ours was called the Busy Beavers, and we met at Mrs. Carlson’s, about a ten minute bike ride from my home.  I became the club secretary and dutifully submitted a short news item to The Sawyer County Record after every meeting.

The meetings did not offer many opportunities for dramatic reporting, but I did my best.  I remember that one time a chicken got loose in the kitchen where we were having our meeting, but Mom didn’t let me put that news into my report.  Dull or not, I was still excited to see my name in print, and Mom sent clippings to aunts and uncles who lived far away.

I suppose that I might have had a chicken project myself, but my heart was set on raising watermelons.  Thus I registered a kitchen garden project, and Dad let me have a sizable part of our garden plot which I staked off, manured and planted with the different seeds listed in the project guidelines.  Besides carrots, radishes, peas, beans and lettuce, there were cucumbers and the whole reason for the project–watermelons.

The watermelon seed packet showed round dark green melons developed for shorter growing seasons.  Dad suggested that I plant the seeds in mid May rather than waiting until the recommended dates for northern Wisconsin and be careful to cover the hills after the plants came up until the frost danger was past.  That would give my plants a few extra days before the first killing frost and if I were lucky I might get some melons.

Alas it was not to be.  It was a hot dry summer, so I hauled buckets of water in my wagon.  I weeded, hoed and talked nice to my plants, as Mom suggested.  Everything looked pretty good, and I was proud of my radishes and peas.  There were lots of little cucumbers, and my watermelon vines had a respectable number of melons getting bigger every day under the hot August sun.  Some already looked like big smooth green muskmelons when a hard frost killed even my covered plants.

I did get a white ribbon for my cucumbers.

Most of my cucumbers ended up as pickles.  One kind I really like are sweet or candied dill pickles. I don’t have Mom’s recipe, and candied dill strips are hard to find in the stores nowadays, but here is a version I adapted from one I found years ago on the web.  Since you start with commercial dill pickles, it takes just a few minutes to make them.

INGREDIENTS:

2 quart jars of non-kosher dill pickles
3 cups white sugar
2 cups cider vinegar
1 cup pickle brine
1.5 T pickling spices
1/2 tsp. dill weed
1/2 tsp. dill seed
1” piece of cinnamon stick, broken in half
Fresh dill (optional)

PROCEDURE:

Empty the two jars of pickles into a colander over a bowl.  Reserve one cup of the brine and rinse the pickles under cold tap water.

Put the vinegar, brine and sugar into a stainless steel or enameled pan.  Tie the pickling spices, dill weed and dill seed into a piece of cheesecloth and put the bundle into the liquid.  Bring it to a boil and simmer for 15 minutes.  Let cool about 15 minutes.

While the liquid is boiling, cut the pickles into strips.  I cut small ones into quarters and larger ones into sixths.  Put the strips back into the jars.  Top with a half inch stick of cinnamon and a sprig of fresh dill in each jar and fill them with the warm liquid.

Seal the jars and store them in the refrigerator, turning them over every other day for a week or so to make sure that all strips are immersed in the  liquid. Store the pickles at least one month before eating.

NOTES:  Buy the least expensive dill pickles you can find, but use real apple cider vinegar.

Sour Cream Blue Cheese Dressing

In 1971 food was more important than cookbooks in the Rang family.  Fortunately we received two or three good ones as wedding presents, and Jerri’s trusty Dinner for Two Cook Book was still usable, even though we had a third mouth to feed by that time.

Maybe it was just the excitement of having some new recipes, but whatever the reason, we still treasure one of the cookbooks we acquired around that time.  Carol Truax’s The Art of Salad Making was half of a FREE “2 IN 1” Cookbook given away by a cigarette company which explains why we could afford it.

Older folks may remember these cookbooks:  At first glance they seemed to be an ordinary paperback book.  However, if you tipped them upside down, you had another book, in our case The Art of Barbecue and Outdoor Cooking by the Tested Recipe Institute.  I never got very excited about the recipes in that book, though the “Filled Bologna Roll” stuffed with pickle relish and cheddar cheese and roasted on a spit would have been within our means.

Inside the cover of The Art of Salad Making Jerri has written “Blue Cheese Dr p. 189.” and on that page below the recipe is a single word: “Good!”  We still agree with her judgment from many years ago.  This recipe uses sour cream instead of mayonnaise, so the dressing has a refreshing light flavor, less fat and fewer calories.

INGREDIENTS:

1 cup sour cream
1/4 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. dry mustard
1/2 tsp. minced onion
1/4 cup blue cheese

PROCEDURE:

Mix the first four ingredients together in a small bowl.  Crumble the blue cheese and stir it into the sour cream.  Let stand for at least 15 minutes before serving.

NOTES:  You can use any variety of blue cheese.  Gorgonzola works well.  Resist the temptation to thin this dressing as it may then turn watery in a day or so.  Even if it does, the dressing still tastes perfectly fine.