Getting Down To The Essentials

Saturday morning's ice and essentials

Every once in a while, it's a good idea to clean the refrigerator -- get rid of the frozen food that you abandoned on the bottom, make sure that your meat and condiments haven't passed their expiration date.

This isn't my favorite way to do it.

We're still without power.  We're fine -- running water, gas stove, nice neighbors, cool basement, really friendly local firemen.

Vegs while still blackening peppers

Firemen?  Well, I got bored on Saturday late afternoon.  I'd bought cucumbers and hot peppers Thursday to try a few recipes from a pickling cookbook that I'd bought at Sweet Elizabeth Jane on Main Street.  You don't need power to can, so I fired up the burners, boiled a pot of water, and made two different brines for dill pickles, peppers, and a bag of snow peas from Gorman Produce Farm.

The problem was probably that I blackened the peppers indoors.  The grill was available.  But I was working inside, so I charred them on a cast iron pan.  A little smoke, a bunch of bubbling vinegar, an hour of high-flame gas under all those pots.  Then, the chicken sausage.

Because of the fire lieutenant's later comments about fat from the sausages, I want to emphasize that these were low-fat chicken sausages.  Very good.  (Not local.)  Either way, they were almost done when the carbon monoxide detector went off.

Bottom line, we tried to let the first floor clear out for an hour or so.  But the detector triggered again, and carbon monoxide demands you take it seriously.  We were sitting on the front steps when the fire engine rumbled up and lit the house with flood lights.  They were wonderful.  They used a professional detector.  They tracked the CO back to the stove.  It was dissipating and fine.

Hope that you're comfortable even if you're not powered at home.  Tonight, we'll eat the last of our supplies and fire up the grill for s'mores.  Tomorrow, I'll be officially tired of this.

Do you have any tales from your power-outage eating?  Just for the record, the dill pickles look delicious.  I still say canning makes complete sense -- and certainly looks better now than the peaches that I froze last year.  I need to figure out when pickles will be ready to eat.  The other stuff will be put away for winter.