Oh dear, where has the time gone? If I were Catholic, I feel as though I’d be starting this blog post with a “It’s been months since I’ve written a recipe post … ” before launching into the virtues of pickled corn chow chow.
Instead, I’ll just be pleading mea culpa for putting recipes on the back burner as I wrote upcoming articles for Alive magazine about healthy Oktoberfest recipes and a plant-based winter holiday menu (yes, the magazine works that far in advance, so I was eating vegan turkey stuffing all last week and spent July up to my knees in vegan bratwurst). I was also writing a bit for the Toronto Star and Montreal Gazette (I have two upcoming articles for the Gazette and my most recent for the Toronto Star came out a month ago on Quebec destination dining).
Then was was my auditory appearance as a guest on a food and travel podcast, my TV appearance as a guest on a cooking show in Barbados (I stayed in Montreal), and I’ve been editing a million recipe articles for Mashed.com, in addition to the Mashed listicles and other articles I was writing back in the spring. Hyperbole on the million, yes, but hundreds would be accurate. I now dream in Oxford commas, which is funny because Mashed is one of only two publications where I use them, the result being that I now spend a lot of time thinking about pandas.
Yes, pandas: “Eats, shoots, and leaves” versus “Eats, shoots and leaves” versus “Eats shoots and leaves” … copy-editing humour; cracks me up every time.
And finally, I’ve been doing some content writing for Alvéole and Moka (bees and online financial tools, respectively) and fact-checking and translation for ELLE Canada (the most recent Annie Murphy fact check for ELLE Canada was fun, mostly because I was a huge fan of her in Schitt’s Creek). Plus their press releases.
Busy bee, I know. Fortunately, I’m able to travel more than 5 km in any direction (fun bee fact), so I’ve managed to get up north to (finally) open a new climbing route this year, and I hope to open another before the end of the season. If I don’t, though, it’s okay; the rock will still be there later.
The Recipes
You didn’t click on this article to read about why I haven’t been writing recipe articles, though, did you? You probably came because of the pickled corn, hazelnut dukkah and dehydrated currants.
The pickled corn is a recipe from The Preservation Kitchen. It’s an elegant canning and preserving cookbook with recipes for a lot of the pickles, but I never make the dishes. I’ve only ever made the preserves, which are lovely.
They generally call for a lot of Champagne vinegar, which is too rich for my blood, but apple cider vinegar and rice wine vinegar have ye to lead me too far astray, or at least I don’t know any better (preservation ignorance is bliss?). I used market-fresh Quebec corn, enough sugar and spices, and skipped the sweet pepper in favour of my garden cherry tomatoes. It changed the colour of the recipe when the tomatoes popped in the brine, but boy was the end result tasty. It’s now stocked away for next winter, while I eat ear after ear of fresh corn while the season lasts.
Then there’s the dukkah, which I made to top green beans from my garden. Dukkah is as varied as garam masala in that no home cook is going to make it quite the same. I combined hazelnuts, sesame seeds, coriander seeds, black pepper, cumin and a heap of other seeds with a tiny bit of cayenne and enough salt to make me want to sprinkle this on everything from my gluten-free sourdough experiments to adzuki beans to, yes, fresh corn. Turns out the salt and heat are the perfect offset to the corn’s sweetness, kind of like lime, salt and chili pepper in Mexico, but without the acidity. Except then I ate the corn with guacamole, too, because I’m a world traveler from my own home like that.
And then the dehydrated red currants. When a neighbour in my community garden went out of town jsut as her giant currant bush was in full harvest mode, I ended up with heaps of berries.
I love the little guys, sour and sweet as they are, but after making jelly and crackers and freezing a bunch, I decided to dehydrate the rest to make sour little dried berries like barberries, which are heaven in Middle Eastern rice dishes. I did absolutely nothing to them before dehydrating them on a dehydrator rack. They took awhile to dry, but they’re little acidic treats. I recently popped a bunch of them into a trial batch of that stuffing. They won out over cranberries, which always come sweetened with sugar, maple or apple juice concentrate.
I can’t leave you without a recipe, can I?
I varied the Chow Chow recipe from The Preservation Kitchen so much that I’ll at least give the ingredients I used here:
Corn and Cherry Tomato Chow Chow Pickle, adapted from The Preservation Kitchen
8 cups of corn kernels, cut from 8 ears of corn
1 cup whole cherry tomatoes
1/2 cup chopped green onions
1/4 cup demerara sugar
4 tsp salt
2 tsp yellow mustard seeds
1 tsp black mustard seeds
2 tsp smoked paprika
1 1/2 tsp ground black pepper
3 cups water
1 3/4 cups apple cider vinegar
- Sterilize 5 pint-sized mason jars (or some half pint jars). Combine all the ingredients in a large pot. Stir it, bring it to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer it for just a minute or two.
- Divide the pickled vegetables between the mason jars and top with the simmering liquid. Immediately process the jars in a water bath canner for 15 minutes for pints or 10 minutes for half pints. Start the timer when the water comes to a boil. Or skip the water bath and just stick the jars in the fridge. They’ll be good for months and months. Eat them within a month or so once you pop the top, though.
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