#snackcrafting

[martinebitchards]

So, I'm going to be honest. I never actually call this "super-savory party spread" -- I call it vegan pâté.

[martinebitchards]

A lot of pickled tomato recipes call for green tomatoes, because pickling is a great way to preserve the last of your tomatoes that you know won't ripen before the plant is killed by frost. They're also tougher than their ripened sisters, so they stand up a little bit better to heat processing.

[martinebitchards]

It's hot outside. And I'm tryna figure out how to stay cool aside from spending my entire summer lounging on my sofa with the A/C blasting.

[martinebitchards]

I'm so tired of winter. It was snowing last weekend. Snowing . I mean, flurrying, whatever. That shit is not cool.

[martinebitchards]

A few years ago, my partner and I took a vacation to Boston. In February. One of our more brilliant ideas, I know, though somehow it was actually snowing more in Baltimore that year. We had planned to visit some family, see the city, and eat some food. We didn't make any reservations, figuring we'd walk around and see what seemed good. We had forgotten that Sunday was Valentine's Day. The first place we found that actually had a table was a little hole-in-the-wall North African restaurant called Baraka Café in Cambridge. I've forgotten what I ate for dinner that night, but the pitcher of lemonade that we drank alongside it, what the menu called cherbat—well, I've never stopped thinking about it.

[martinebitchards]

Mustard is used in various forms in Indian cuisine; the seeds, brown or yellow, are ground into masalas or fried in tarka, and super-pungent mustard oil is used for frying vegetables or poured over fermented pickles. But with all of the ubiquity of mustard in Indian cuisine, a paste primarily consisting of ground mustard seeds doesn't seem to make the cut. The closest thing I've found is Bengali kasundi, a chutney incorporating mustard seeds but relying heavily on tomato and onion.

[martinebitchards]

The past half-dozen times I've gone to the Safeway on 25th Street, I've been taunted by an incredible selection of adorable miniature pears. Seckels and Forelles? In stock for weeks upon weeks at a time? What kind of black magic is this? (If the black-magic spell is broken by my saying something about it, I'm sorry. You can usually find little pears this time of year at H-Mart in Catonsville as well.) I resisted the temptation so many times, but let's be real, I'm weak-willed. One minute I was putting spinach and potatoes in my cart with which to make a reasonable dinner; the next thing I knew my cart contained a very big bag of very little pears.

[martinebitchards]

Snackcrafting is a blog series about culinary creativity with a dash of arts-and-crafts panache. Fill your pantry, fridge, and freezer with homemade goodies to eat and share.