What do bowling and cooking have in common?

True, they are both loud and noisy.
And they both include throwing large, heavy objects.
And the deft handling of knives.
And pungent odors.
And unattractive rental shoes.

But there's something more.

Oh yes! It's my new island top!

 

Haven't I mentioned that my husband is a visionary?

When we moved here I found that with the large kitchen and limited countertop, an island was very helpful. So at first we used a piece of furniture that used to be in our dining room and topped it with an oiled 2' x 4' piece of birch plywood. That sufficed for some time. And then we got a lead on picking up fancy KitchenMaid cabinets at rock bottom prices. So we went to a crazy warehouse sale and picked out bases to use as an island. We came home, put them in the kitchen and I again topped them with that piece of birch board. Completely functional. I loved my new cabinets and the board, though it sometimes tended to want to slide around a bit, worked out ok. But the island was still evolving and we had talked many times about butcher block style wooden countertops. That's when my outside-the-box thinking husband saw an add on Craigslist for bowling lane sections. With some clever remodelling he made me a fantastic island top! Solid maple strips create a beautiful and functional workspace.

 

There's even an overhang so one can sit and enjoy a snack, write a recipe or just visit.

 

 

Such pretty woodgrain and colors

And so much workspace!

 

So I christened the island with something sweet for my guy!

Cooking just got even more fun. And I don't actually throw things or wear rented shoes to make cookies.

Though I might get a bit noisy from time to time.

We're in a Pickle

-ing state of mind around here. Oh, did you think I meant something else? While we've made the decision to cut back on canning this year in the event that we end up moving sooner than later, there are a few "staples" we don't want to be without this winter. One of those is kosher-style dill pickles. This year, we added a little extra garlic, extra peppers and lots of fun. Kent helped me with the canning. We stopped by Heinies Market on Wednesday and they had beautiful pickling cucumbers. So we bought two 20# boxes along with a couple bundles of fresh dill. The car smelled heavenly on the way home. Especially when you throw a bag of ripe plums in the mix.


If you live in the Denver vicinity, I can't say enough about Heinies cucumbers. Forty pounds of cukes and not a bad one in the bunch. Not even a bad spot. I was impressed again this year. Here I am at the sink trimming and cutting cucumbers into spears. Here's a tip, make sure you cut off the blossom end of the cucumber as not doing so can make them turn out soft. And if you know the science behind this, I'd love to know.


We cut them into spears for the kosher dills. I'm opposed to pickling whole cucumbers only because you do not get as much cucumber in each jar.


And another trick is to use more firepower when working with large canning pots. Here we have set the gas stove we bought for power outage emergencies on the marble topped baking table. We opened all the windows for ventilation and this made the difference between water boiling in 10 minutes or 50 minutes. Plus, two super-sized pots fit on it at once. This also let us reserve the stove burners for the lids and bands and the pickling liquid.


We used the cold pack method, using hot jars, room temperature veggies and then a hot water bath. Every single jar sealed and the next six weeks will seem like a long wait to taste this years batch. Aren't they pretty!?


We used 29 of the 40 pounds and the yield was 27 quarts and 1 pint. At that point we had used all of the fresh dill. It worked out great.


But what of the 11 remaining pounds? We thought we should try some spicy sweet pickles. This was a new one for us. We'd had some store-bought we liked called Famous Daves. We found a recipe for sweet pickles and then added dried hot peppers, one to each pint. It's an experiment. And just to be different, we cut these into slices.


Kent manned the liquid portion of the packing. He did such a great job with filling to the proper level, wiping rims clean and tightening just right that every single jar sealed up beautifully.


We got 17 pints out of the remaining 11 pounds of cucumber. We had exactly enough slices to fill 17 pints and that was also exactly how many pints would fit into our two canners at one time. I love it when a plan comes together. (Has anyone seen the A-Team movie, BTW?)


Yum!

Sunday in the Kitchen

Sadly, Friday night and Saturday wore me plum out. I didn't set an alarm and overslept on Sunday morning making it impossible to get to church. My whole morning was slow. I couldn't believe how tired I was. But in the afternoon I got inspired to head to the kitchen. I had a good bit of cream in the fridge that I'd skimmed from my raw milk for the past couple weeks. I turned that into butter. And I had some cherries and of course, as a by-product of butter making, I had buttermilk. If these ingredients aren't enough to get a cook excited, I don't know what would do it. Here is the butter, ready to be slapped silly to get the remainder of the buttermilk out. I ended up with over a pound of delicious, sweet, creamy butter.


I also whipped up a favorite meatloaf recipe and some broccoli salad for Kent's dinner. And while I was making bread, I decided to try turning some of that dough into sandwich rolls. They turned out great if I do say so myself.

A Typical Fourth of July Celebration

I saw from my sister Kathy's blog that I was supposed to comment about our holiday. Well, we spent it doing what most people probably did... we visited and ate and played dominoes.


And what did we eat? Your usual July 4th fare. Biscuit-Topped Lemon Chicken. Cheddar biscuits baked over creamy lemon-pepper sauce chicken. And Kathy made fabulous Almond Green Beans. I was glad there were some left to enjoy later.


And then, of course, we finished up with an ice cream sundae bar. Blackberry Dark Chocolate, Strawberry Creme, Mint Chocolate Chip and Extreme Chocolate Moosetracks ice creams with your choices of caramel, strawberry or chocolate sauces with peanuts, walnuts, M&M's and Oreos.

All enjoyed by me, Kent, Stephanie, Kathy, and Sam, Jessie and Tristan Mazurek. We had a great day!