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the life and times of J T Frey
For about a decade now I've been making barbecue: the real-deal, low-and-slow, smoked over wood sort of stuff. Every pit master needs a few recipes for sauce and sides. Baked beans is a classic.
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.