After a wild goose chase to find the required spices (but still missing one), Jutta and I started a batch of homemade garlic dill pickles. We started with cinnamon stick, mustard seeds, black peppercorns, whole cloves, whole allspice, juniper berries, couldn’t find mace so it has been left out, dill seeds, bay leaves, dried ginger, coriander seeds, 4 cloves fresh garlic, and a few sprigs of fresh dill. With our pickling spices ready to go, we mixed white vinegar, water, and sea salt to make a brine, then scrubbed the cucumbers. One-half our spice went into the bottom of the crock, next came the cucumbers, then more spice, and finally the brine. The hardest part of the process was finding something to put inside the crock that would keep the cucumbers below the surface of the brine, once that was found, I filled a plastic bag with more brine to weigh down the plastic lid. In 2 to 3 weeks the cucumbers should have fermented enough to be called pickles.

In my ongoing attempt to wrest control of the products that come into my life so that I should know how things are created, prepared, fashioned, tooled, finished, grown, or otherwise brought to market for my convenience, I am making sauerkraut. Fermented foods have a long history dating back approximately 9,000 years. Sauerkraut or Sour Cabbage, though associated with the Germans (Sour Krauts – hehe), was invented by the Chinese over 2,000 years ago. Gengis Kahn is thought to have brought the fermented dish to Europe a thousand years later.

Our Harsch 10-liter crock is made just for this fermentation job in Germany and costs about $125. I picked up 18 pounds (8kg) of organic cabbage, shredded it on a mandolin, and with about 4 tablespoons (55g) of sea salt, I packed the cabbage tightly into the crock, covered it with the supplied stone weight, put the lid on the crock filling the groove with water to seal and protect the cabbage on its 6-week journey of fermentation before it can be called sauerkraut.

The Amish in Pennsylvania calls them Apple Schnitz, for those of you who may never have heard of them as such these are dried apple rings. If you happen to have an Excalibur Dehydrator laying around, an Oxo Mandolin slicer, and a local you-pick apple farm – then you are in luck. True, you do not need these particular brand items, but Caroline and I have found them to be both efficient and inexpensive, hence my endorsement. After the cored apples are sliced on the mandolin set to a quarter-inch, the slices are dipped into a bowl of 20-25% lemon juice to water, and then placed on dehydrator trays and dehydrated for about 12 hours at 135 degrees F (our dehydrator has four trays).  This morning we woke up to the freshest dried apple rings we could ever hope to eat. The great thing about having a local you-pick farm is choosing the type of apple you want to dry along with the environment they have been grown in such as, organically and just how fresh they are as in, picked by you. We are dehydrating Winesaps and Jonathans and skipping the optional cinnamon on the first batches.