Cucumber abundance –> dill pickles

Our garden has produced a lot of courgettes / zucchini this year, but it produced even more cucumbers. We didn't know what to do with them all. Cold cucumber-yogurt soup was good, as was sliced cucumber salad in either a yogurt or vinaigrette dressing.

Pickled cucumber spears in vinegar with spices and herbs

But the cukes kept coming. Actually, we had a plan. We wanted to make American-style dill pickles. We had even planted some dill out in the garden for that purpose. So I looked for recipes and came up with several for dill pickle spears. Our cukes grew large, so splitting them into either spears or disks seemed to make the most sense.

The first step in making pickles is to salt the cukes down for 24 hours or so to let them disgorge some of the water they contain. I hope I put in the right amount of salt, and I think I did because I tasted the cukes after their salt cure and they were good.

The cukes after their salt cure, waiting to be packed into jars

Then I boiled up a sufficient quantity of vinegar with different spices and herbs — mustard and coriander seeds, dried dill leaves, allspice berries, black peppercorns, bay leaves, etc. — improvising all the way. When that liquid cooled, I tasted it too, to decide if it was right. It seemed pretty good.

We ended up making nine — count'em, 9 — liters (quarts) of dill pickles. In one batch, I just used distilled vinegar (vinaigre blanc in France) and spices. In the other batch, I added white wine to the vinegar to soften and sweeten it slightly. I read about doing that somewhere, and it said to use about one measure of wine for two measures of vinegar to cut the acidity of the liquid. Some people would put sugar in the pickling liquid, but I didn't.

The salt-cured spears before I poured hot vinegar over them to fill the jars

We hope these are going to be good pickles. On the advice of a friend in Illinois who has a lot more experience with pickle-making and canning than I have (thanks, Harriett), I processed the filled jars in a boiling-water bath for 10 minutes to sterilize and seal them. We haven't opened a jar to taste them yet. The recipes said to wait a month or even two before opening the first jar, and that time is now approaching. The proof of the pickle will be in the October eating.

Pizza aux pommes de terre

It's not often that I can show you beforehand what we are having for lunch today, but today I can because the pizza in the photo below is one we made on August 20. Today's will be a repeat performance. Each of us eats one pizza and then a salad. Walt makes the crust, which is a no-knead bread dough that cooks up just crispy enough but not crackery.

In France, another name for this kind of potato pizza might be « pizza campagnarde » — country-style pizza. In our version, there's no tomato. It's basically cream, potatoes, and cheese. The potatoes are pre-cooked and then sliced for the pizza.

Well, there are a couple of other ingredients. Meat is one; either bacon, sausage, chicken, or turkey, cut into small pieces. And hot peppers in one form or another spice it up a little. We have banana peppers that we grew and pickled in vinegar last year. One of those chopped up and put on the pizza under the potatoes perks the whole thing up. The cheese can be Cantal, Comté, Emmenthal, Cheddar, or Mozzarella — whatever you like.

De la ratatouille

According to the Grand Robert dictionary, the French dictionary of reference, « ratatouille » in its modern, everyday sense means:

Mod., cour. Plat d'origine niçoise, mélange de courgettes, de tomates, d'aubergines, etc. cuites ensemble à l'huile.

It's a vegetable dish that originated in the Nice area in southeastern France, and it's a mixture of zucchini, tomatoes, eggplant, and other summer vegetables cooked together in oil. Olive oil, of course. Other vegetables that go into ratatouille are red and/or green bell peppers, onions, and garlic.

Ratatouille niçoise in the early stages of cooking

Pronounce ratatouille this way: [rah-tah-TOO-yuh], with the stress on the third syllable. It's easier to make than to say, maybe. Slice or dice an onion or two. Roughly chop some fresh ripe tomatoes. Seed and cut up some bell peppers. Peel (or don't bother to peel) some zucchini and eggplant, and then slice or chop those up. Add a couple of cloves of garlic.

Cook everything in a big pot with olive oil, thyme, salt, and pepper. Let it cook until the vegetables are soft. Some recipes say you can mash everything together. Others say you want to be able to detect the individual pieces all the vegetables. Eat the ratatouille hot or cold, depending on the weather and what you're having with it.

Plum tart

I didn't make this one. I just took the pictures. Walt cooked a plum tart yesterday — and it was beautiful as usual.

 The plum tart — la tarte aux prunes — ready to serve

The greenish yellow plums came from a tree out on the edge of the vineyard. It's the second pie-type thing we've made with them. The other was my creation, a plum cobbler (using Elise's Simply Recipes method). It was really good but not nearly as photogenic.

The tart ready for its final baking and glazing

Walt always blind-bakes his pie crust. In the pre-cooked crust, he put a layer of almond powder on the bottom to absorb excess moisture and then covered that with a half-inch layer of apple sauce, which he had made from apples off our trees. Then he pitted the plums, cut them into quarters, and arranged them on top. He glazed the tart with strained apricot jam.