freySite
the life and times of J T Frey
I love pickles. Sweet, spicy, salty, or sour, I'm a fan of them all. My daughters and wife — not so much. But I have found that my daughters will eat Claussen refrigerated pickles: the brine is more salty and sour, and the flavor is a rounded mélange containing garlic and onion over the usual dill. What follows is my own pickling brine recipe that mimics the Claussen flavor pretty closely.
I love Crosse and Blackwell seafood cocktail sauce. For the longest time every recipe I used for that kind of sauce has required lots of lemon juice. Yet when I read the label for C&B, lemon juice was not explicitly mentioned (unless it qualifies as "spices"). This recipe uses no lemon juice and tastes very much like ye olde C&B variety.
Adapted from a recipe I found online (source: Ted's Bulletin, an upscale comfort food diner in Washington). My daughters love tomato soup, but aren't excited for any deviation from basic tomato flavor — I once added some ginger and was chastised for making the soup "too spicy." This recipe elicits high marks from the kids and the adults.
This recipe is a mashup of several salad recipes we found online and in cookbooks. The roasted squash, pumpkin seeds, and smoky gouda are meant to evoke a feeling of fall. We happened to have a bottle of grenadine on hand (Juliet had a thing for Shirley Temple sodas at one point) and the sweet pomegranate dressing went perfectly against all the other flavors.
Serves ~ 6 people.
Juliet was browsing a crock pot cookbook one day and came across a recipe for Indian-spiced lamb meatballs. Being a big fan of lamb curry, she voted it into our menu for the week. We're all glad she did. This variant of the original recipe tailors the flavor to our tastes and scaled-back to enough for our family of four.