The Runaway Cook

So the other night, I was just innocently grabbing a pickle out of my fridge and something incredible happened. As I hoisted the jar out of the lowest corner of the door, the loner pickle bobbed back and forth in his swampy juice. Dang! He was the last little sucker in the jar! Extremely saddened by the thought of no more pickles, I said to myself, “Gee, so many people love pickle juice- I think that they love sweet pickle juice though...”

“Daa focus Elizabeth! Where are you going with this?”

“OK! ok. Well, I wonder if this dill and garlic pickle juice tastes as good as these pickles I love so much.”

Sure enough a sip proved that hypothesis correct. The instant that briny solution washed over my tongue, I had an epiphany!!! DIRTY PICKLE MARTINI!! I thought for sure I had just come up with the next new fad! I mean if people drink martinis with jarred onions, why not pickles? Unfortunately, I was just a bit late figuring this out. Yes, if you google “dirty pickle martini” there are 863,000 results. Apparently somebody else had the same idea just a few years earlier.

Nevertheless, I shall press on and continue tasting things out of curiosity and desperation. I mean isn’t that how most good things came about. Take ice wine, or Eiswein its original name, some farmer was probably cussing up a storm in German (which sounds a lot worse than cussing in English!) about this early freeze that was killing his perfectly ripe grapes. What the !beep! was the poor guy to do? Dang it, he decided he was gonna press those frozen grapes and salvage what he could. What happened? A thick rich syrup the flowed from the ice filled presses.

Ok hold it! Think back to when you were a little kid. Ok, now it’s a hot summer day and you have a popsicle in hand. Mmmmm! It’s cold and sweet and delicious and . . MELTING! Quickly you slurp up the drips, latch on to a spot, and suck out the juice. When your lips leave the frozen treat, the edge is nothing but white ice. BINGO!! That syrup you sucked out of the popsicle is the just like the syrup used to make ice wine.

The wine that comes from this grape syrup is sweet, acidic, and full of juicy fruit flavors rather than the dried fruit flavors exhibited by most dessert wines. Today, this is some of the most sought after wine, with whole festivals dedicated to it. Ha! To think that it all came from some pissed German winemaker. That’s just nuts!

Hmmmmmmmm, maybe tonight I’ll run out of something else that makes me try a new and odd combination. I do have the lettuce in the fridge. Fudge! I’m out of vinegar. (Lightbulb!) Dill pickle vinaigrette!