Duality and Balance - Let's Talk About Pickles

Duality and balance... these are things that I've always been perceptive of, as a Gemini (the Twins). Sometimes it really seems to be at the forefront of my life events, and lately has been one of those times.


A year ago today, I was living in a tiny downtown studio. Today, I live in a 3 bedroom house with a sprawling garden and 7 chickens. Two years ago almost to the day, I had been in a motorcycle accident and had to have shoulder surgery. On Friday, my husband had been in a motorcycle accident and had to have shoulder surgery. Same injury, his was his left shoulder, mine was my right. He is left-handed, I am right-handed. Spooky, right? Not really duality, but balance. Strangely enough, my husband is a Libra (the Scale). There's your daily hippidippiness quotient! Shifting gears now and putting away my tarot cards and crystals.


I can't really think of a smooth transition so I'm just going to get all blunt with it. We're going to talk about pickles now.


I love pickles. I love everything vinegary or briny – so that being said, I'm very disappointed that at some point in my life I had some sort of life-altering negative experience with olives, because while I should LOVE them, they make me dry heave. Weird.


Anyways, back to pickles. I've always loved the really garlicky, sharp, dilly, gently spicy pickles. Luckily, my mother-in-law is a master of pickling (I think jarring and canning aptitude is genetically predisposed if you're Eastern European), and a few years ago she started teaching me how. I've made several good batches over the years and am only slightly embarrassed to admit that I can eat an entire Mason jar in a single day and I keep the juice and add it to everything – soups, vinaigrettes, eggs, BLOODY MARYS, I can't get enough pickles.


When we made our pickles traditionally, we would go to one of several local farmers and buy some huge bags of pickling cucumbers – about the length of your index finger but nice and fat. Don't slice them unless you're trying to fill some awkward gaps in your Mason jar – the whole ones maintain such an amazing crispiness without the insides getting too soggy, as they would if they were pickled in slices. See, pickling the traditional way involves pouring boiling pickling liquid into jars filled with cucumbers, sealing the jars, and letting them rest for at least a couple months.


A good pickle is so good. And I love them enough that I firmly take the stance that pickles on sandwiches is absolutely blasphemy. Some may disagree, some may be deleting my number from their phone in disgust – but hear me out. The beautiful thing about pickling is that, if properly done, it allows to preserve the crispness of a fresh cucumber, while infusing it with flavor and adding a completely nuanced texture. It's perfection. When you slap it on a sandwich, you make the bread soggy, it's overwhelmed by whatever mayo/mustard/etc is on there, and is serves as a layer of slip-and-slide between the other ingredients that make the sandwich fall apart. I weep – I truly do – for every slice of awesome pickle that died covered in mustard, slipped off a sandwich and fallen to the plate, and thrown out with the last crumbs, never to be enjoyed at all. Give me a minute... I just got the feels.


I felt there was proper balance between the ease of purchasing my pickling cukes from a local farmer rather than growing them myself (not possible in a downtown studio), and the amount of effort and length of time it takes to make great pickles. Once I had an enormous garden, I decided to double-up – what if I could grow my own pickling cukes from seed, THEN pickle them! No need for balance when you kick ass that hard. So I planted a zillion pickling cuke plants – literally dozens of which were destroyed by my cat – and a few more that just didn't take off. I do have several Burpee cucumber plants that took off like crazy – but they are larger and could never be pickled whole.

 I had envisioned a vast bounty – all ripe at precisely the same time, of course – of pickling cukes, and so far instead I have a vast bounty of big-ass not-pickling sized cucumbers which are delicious and beautiful, but more bountiful than I can eat as they ripen. I don't want to slice them and pickle them in the traditional way, which results in mushy pickles in my opinion. I decided to explore quick pickling.


The recipe is simple: 1 cup rice wine vinegar, ¾ cup sugar, 1 cup water, 1 tbspn salt. Boil. Add thinly sliced large cucumber, cover, put in the fridge. Wait a couple hours until it's cooled. My hand quivered as I dumped that much sugar into the pickling liquid, and a nervous tick took over reaching for my garlic and spices. But I was determined to give this a shot. The exact opposite pickle experience than I'm used to – long time preparing the actual cucumber, short time pickling it.

Jesus tap dancing Christ, those pickles were amazing. I say “were” because I ate them all. A completely different texture and flavor than I'm used to, but so delicious. I can affirmatively say that these would be great on a good Cuban sandwich, layered between the pork, or perhaps even on a bahn mi in addition to the pickled daikon. They're just thin enough that they would melt into the sandwich and provide a vinegary and sweet bite, without causing the aformentioned pickle slip-and-slide or bread sogginess. Next weekend – making a bahn mi and a Cuban with a quick-pickled cukes from my garden. I will report back.


My favored spicy, sharp, not-sweet pickles depend on effort and time for myself in preparing them, but no time in acquiring the cukes themselves. I depend on months and months of the care and attention of a farmer somewhere, and I hand a few bucks to them and then the pressure is on me. After some care and patience, in a few months – I'll have delicious pickles.


Then I flipped it. I spent months and months caring for cucumbers from seed, and once they became ripe, I decided to do it quick, easy and dirty to pickle them. The result was so different than what I thought was the only pickle I'd ever love – but equally delicious.

Being receptive to the duality and balance of the universe is pretty neat – and I think it's everywhere if you look. As I've been caring for my recovering husband, we've experienced balance – he's now experiencing an injury that I once did, and in caring for him I know how much he is hurting, and how it feels, and where it hurts, and how the perfect pillow arrangement for maximum comfort looks. He now is understanding everything I went through, and gaining a new empathy for my continued pain. Clearly not a situation to strive towards, but interesting. Scales.


Then on to duality.  I've been adjusting to spending more time attending to my garden and chickens and fresh produce, and less time buying food grown tirelessly by others, from the store, then spending hours and hours on slow-cooking dishes. I've shifted my focus this summer to growing delicious food myself from start-to-finish and then not messing with it so much. Raw, sliced vegetables, salads, quick vegan zucchini soup, and now – quick pickles. Twins.


I think after awhile of tackling challenging recipes, I'm going to keep it simple for the summer now that I have the opportunity to enjoy a simple, easy meal and enjoy all the work I put into growing the ingredients over the last few months. Going back to balance – things just might be getting crazy for me here in the coming months, so tonight I enjoy the simplicity of walking outside, grabbing a handful of lettuce and eating it with my first ripe tomato. More news to follow. In the meantime, here are our chickens enjoying their first watermelon.

Loss and Egg McMuffins

You might have noticed I haven't posted recently – or perhaps you didn't and I'm flattering myself. It's been a crazy few weeks, and my usual therapist (my cookbook) gathered dust.


First, my grandmother Ruthie passed away – and while not unexpected it was hard to swallow as she was a true gem and taught me much of what I know about being a take-no-bullshit Lady, and her sense of style and design forever altered the course of my life and I will miss her forever. Work was tumultuous, my husband was in a motorcycle accident and badly injured his shoulder which will require surgery next week, I got other news that I'll keep to myself (no I'm not pregnant nor do I want to be, I hate that I have to say that so often). My head has been spinning, and while cooking usually calms me, recently it's felt like a burden. I just want to burrito myself into my fuzziest blanket and sleep all the time. I've been having migraines and just really feeling like shit.


This weekend was looking up – I finally had some vegetables to harvest from my garden!! Rejoice after months of coddling seedlings and threatening murder upon my cats who love to take dirt baths in my plots. Of course because I'm always striving for homeostasis, this exciting news necessarily required something shitty to counteract it.


First, I cut my finger badly while walking back from my garden after grabbing some mature cucumbers and zucchinis. I don't know what it is about fingers but they bleed like faucets which I know because my fancy German knives are trying to win me a Darwin Award. This is my third bad cut this year.


Second, and this one hurts more than my finger, Hornswaggle disappeared. We had built her an outdoor enclosure and drilled on a lip around the perimeter to ensure she couldn't climb out. One of our cats had taken a liking to sitting on that lip, and wore it down to the point it was basically an escape ramp for my tortoise. I spent hours, literally, combing our enormous yard and walking the neighborhood. Under the deck, under every bush, in every corner, I searched obsessively. After spending the last 8 years trying to escape to Mars, she was gone. She is gone. My heart is broken.

Pets give us affection and love and make us feel useful when we feed them, but they also provide continuity to our lives. Hornswaggle was the single thread that has followed me through every bump and turn and change over almost the last decade. Her sole mission in life was to not be contained – no matter how vast and luxurious her enclosure was. I have to respect her for that, but I will miss her forever. My little homie, the only source of consistency through almost my entire adulthood. You might laugh because she's “just a turtle”, but she was MY turtle. I miss her.


So after a tumultuous few weeks, I really wanted to cook something to distract myself. I wanted comfort food. I wanted the one thing I crave when I'm sick, mad, happy, hungover, injured, mourning, or having a religious experience.


I wanted a goddamn Egg McMuffin.


I toasted the English muffins in a cast iron pan with butter, then crisped the Canadian bacon in the same butter. I cooked the egg in a perfect little egg pan that I impulsively bought during an Amazon spree which I still do not regret. After adding a slice of Kraft American cheese, it all came together..

I could have gone to a fine French cafe and ordered a croissant, or Eggs Benedict, or a beautifully constructed omelet. That trashy, cheap Tinkerbell of my soul however, insisted on an Egg McMuffin. And I needed to make it myself.a


Loss is a difficult thing. Something that was always there all of a sudden, just... isn't. I think during those times we turn to the things that ARE still there. Our creature comforts. They provide the continuity that we lose when we lose those we love.


So tonight, I went through an obscene amount of effort to make something I could have bought for a dollar. It was not the time to take the easy route. I made myself an Egg McMuffin, and I cried. Just got really ugly with it and mowed through that McMuffin like it was my last meal. And it felt really good. I felt better.

Sometimes life sucks. Seek out those things that make you wiggle in your seat, even if they're sinful or high-calorie or verboten. Sometimes you just need to cry over an Egg McMuffin. And that's okay.