Pickled Eggs - Page 210

The thing we argued about on this recipe was why poke the big end of the eggs.  My sister and wife said it was to make them easier to peel.  I thought it was to make the boiled egg fill the shell and have a perfect shape.  I can tell you for certain that it didn't make the f**ken eggs easier to peel.  As anyone with chickens knows, really fresh eggs are a b**ch to peel.  These eggs had been inside a chicken somewhere between 2 and 48 hours before, so they were awesome - but crap to peel.

Other than peeling the eggs, this was an easy recipe, though complicated by a kitchen making dinner and not cleaned up from cosmetic production - don't ask.  At one point my wife dumped onions for the soup into the elderberry liquid which required quick action, and one of my sister's 57 colanders, to recover.  But we got the job done.

This recipe does require juicing, and I recommend the juicer below, which is a steal compared to other juicers:




After 7 days, this is what we had.  Not quite ready, but delicious nonetheless.  By the way, take a look at that yolk!  You can't get that color in the supermarket.  Get chickens, or find a friend with chickens, or find a farmer willing to give you the freshest eggs.  There really is no comparison.  In addition, organic chickens may not be as good.  I find the best eggs from yard running, scrap fed, bug eating chickens.  Just try it.  THIS is a good blog post from my old defunct food blog about eggs.

More pictures to follow...
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Pickled Elderberries - Page 223

If you're wondering about the lack of posts, it's because I spend the summer in Vermont, while Ox stays in Charleston.  This is bad news for the quality of food I can produce, and the frequency of Heritagecooking and blog posts, but good news for other reasons.

One of the good reasons is that I get to visit my sister.  This is especially good when cooking from the Heritage Cookbook as some of the ingredients can be a little hard to find.  When visiting my sister, you often hear things like this: "Do you have any Eucalyptus leaves?  Sure do.  How 'bout elderberries?  In the freezer."  Life is good.

Assuming you have the ingredients, these are simple to make.  You just boil everything except the elderberries and lemon juice, and then pour the boiled liquid over the lemon juice and elderberries in canning jars.  Since this is a refrigerator pickle, there's no special jar decontamination needed.  We spread these out between smaller jars to facilitate sharing, and we ended up with what seemed like more liquid than necessary.  So we left some jars proportioned per the recipe, and added elderberries to other jars to see what happens.  We'll let you know...

Pictures will apparently have to come later, since I must have used a different camera (obviously I have fixed that now).  This blog post is being done in a laundromat with WiFi in Castleton, VT.  We have neither cable, nor internet at our house in Vermont.  Great for enjoying life - bad for blogging.