Pickled Watermelon Rind

Pickled Watermelon Rind

This reminds me of a lot of many of the pickled dishes I grew up with, and which I miss eating.

Brad’s coworker Amelia recently wrote a post where she mentioned pickling being a lost art, and particularly the sad waste of throwing watermelon rinds away. And somewhere in there, I recollected an Asian pickled dish I’d eaten in summers past. This is one I particularly enjoy because the light sweetness of watermelon harmonizes so well with the vinegar and salt.

From Lily’s Hearth and Home blog:

Ingredients:

Watermelon rind (skin removed)

Salt

Sugar

Sambal Olek

Vinegar

Method:

Cut watermelon rind into 1 inch length and 1/4 inch thick pieces

Sprinkle salt and leave aside for 30 minutes.

Wash away salt.

Add vinegar, sambal olek and sugar (adjust to your taste)

Leave to marinate for at least 1 hour before serving.

Some Jelly Roll Ideas.

After talking with Brittany, I thought about how I really wanted rolls that would truly stand out. Also, per my last experiment, I realized that the usual jelly roll with jam was going to yield incredibly small jelly rolls. I’m thinking, however, that it might be good to increase the amount of filling in the middle to kind of flesh it out a bit. This beautiful jelly roll is a good example of what I mean:

Also, in reading some of the recipes, I’ve discovered that frosting commonly comes with butter, but that an acceptable alternative could be more cream cheese (beaten until smooth). So I found several recipes that sound pretty neat and worth trying out, but with some minor edits to the overall recipe:

Pumpkin Roll with Cream Cheese filling :  my edits would be to add the nuts to the cream rather than to the cake.

Chocolate/Espresso jelly roll with green tea and matcha filling :  my edits would be to turn it into a jelly roll… make a pan of it, then add the matcha on top, and the green tea frosting on top of that.

Red Wine Cake and Cream Cheese :  my edit would be using white wine (sauvignon blanc) with a chocolate cream frosting (from here).

Vanilla Cream Roll :  provides the baseline for all the recipes

Carrot Cake and Cream Cheese :  for the kids!

Strawberry Jelly Roll :  there isn’t anything fancy about this, except that perhaps we could flavor the filling with mango/kiwi instead?

Key Lime Jelly Roll :  Maybe I can do a lime one with sweet jasmine-flavored cream. Will have to find jasmine syrup though.

What about strawberry cake with black sesame frosting? Might be something to look into.

More to come; some good places to look might be in the paste sections, food pairings, and jellies.

Swiss Roll.

This was our second attempt at making a jelly roll. Brad and I came back with some great jellies from a farmer’s market in Charlotte. We ended up using half a pint of boysenberry jelly for a 15″ x 10.5″ pan of cake bread.

I used this recipe, which was okay, but honestly it lacked a bit of aesthetic points (although it would have been nice just as a homemade product). I also sprinkled some confectioner’s sugar at the end, which played well with the tart boysenberry. However, our next attempt would be better served if we had used whipping cream with the jelly, partly because we had a hard time spreading it, but also because it seeped into the bread and made it all purple. Further, I think the jelly would have benefited with a creamier/smoother texture to offset the grainy bread one.

Finally, I would like to try something that looks a bit more like the Taiwanese jelly roll cakes that I’m more familiar with eating. Something like from this blog or this one…

Cake Recipes…

Raspberry Jelly (Swiss) Roll

Lemon Blackberry Cake

Lemon Cornmeal Cake with Lemon Glaze and Crushed Blueberry Sauce

Added extra: tips for making jelly roll cakes successfully.

Rosemary-Lemon Jelly Roll!

Carrot-Banana Cake.

Ingredients (in the order of appearance):

• 3-ish super ripe bananas
• 6 oz of oil (8oz, of course, is a regular-sized cup in the US, so that’s 0.75 of a cup)
• 1 cup sugar
• 3 eggs
• 1.5 cups flour (I made flour by blending oatmeal in the blender; it worked wonderfully)
• 1 tsp of salt
• 1.5 tsp of baking soda
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• grated carrots: between 0.75 to 1.5-ish cups <– Usually grated while waiting for the oven to preheat to 350.
• poppy seeds (optional)
• dried cranberries/raisins/whatever (optional)

1. In a mixing bowl, pour the oil over the bananas and sugar and mash until they’re acceptably unchunky-ish. (I don’t have an electric mixer, so I get a little lazy and leave some small banana chunks. The resulting bread tastes fine.)
2. Add the eggs and mash that in too.
3. Stir in the flour, salt, and baking soda, and stir in until the clumps are gone. Adding flour a little at a time while stirring the mixture makes the process go a little faster.
4. Add the cinnamon and stir into the mixture. This is a separate step and not part of step 3 only because you might enjoy seeing the cinnamon swirl around in the mixture. Or not. I am easily amused.
5. Add those grated carrots and mix it up some more.
6. Add the poppy seeds and cranberries if you like.
7. Bake at 350 for, like, 40-ish minutes or so, until you poke a hole in the center of the bread with a chopstick and it comes out clean. (I use a chopstick… what do families in non-chopstick households use?)

Korean Bulgogi marinade.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup of sugar
• 1 cup of soy sauce
• 0.5 cup lemon-lime soda <– acid softens meat, sweetness makes it taste good.
• 0.75 cups cooking wine
• 0.75 cups water
• 1 tb sesame seeds, if you like that stuff
• 1 tb red pepper flakes
• 1 tb sesame oil!
• a kiwi
• 1 chopped up onion
• lots and lots of chopped up garlic

Mix. Marinate. It’s not that hard. I’m told the marinating process could take two days, although I suspect if you left it overnight or prepped it before going to work, that should work as well.