I want to acknowledge some other cool gifts I got for my birthday before the window passes.

My in-laws sent me some really cool plant stuff. The hand painted turtle planter will contain some sort of plant I bring indoors today. (Even though it has been in the 70s this week, it is starting to get down to the 40s at night.)

They also sent me some awesome mushroom-shaped garden stakes. I can never keep track of where I planted things, so the stakes will be attractive and useful.

Ty got me a gift certificate for the yarn store in Fort Smith. I bought some pretty cool stuff. I had to buy sparkly sock yarn from Turkey. I also found a project in the Vogue Knitting Winter 2009 issue. A short-sleeved sweater will be very handy to have here!

We’ve already made bread from it once, and I’ve pieced out the starter to several friends. I’ve never made kneaded bread before, but it turned out great! I’m using this site for the care and feeding of my starter. The recipe creates a very large loaf. I had to give half of it away before it went stale. I suggest halving the recipe for a household of 2.

If you read a lot of blogs, you know about the cake blog, cake wrecks. I once received my weekly dose of funny from Bob Saget and America’s Funniest Home Videos. I only go to cake wrecks every two weeks or so, but they’ve definitely taken up residence in my heart where Bob Saget used to live.

The website has all sorts of cakes that turn out horrible, but they also have pictures of the most amazing cakes in the world. One of the cakes I think should be featured on the site is the gar cake my friends Robin and Eric made. Robin’s husband Mark appeared on the Discovery Channel show River Monsters as what I like to call “The Gar Whisperer”.

Robin also made me a little fish for my birthday.

I’m wondering if Robin has got a novel in her about zombie fish? Maybe a book about zombie crafts? Possibly a zombie pumpkin cake with toffee survival cookbook?

A few people have asked for my pickle recipe, here it is for a 1 gal glass container:

6 C water
2 C white vinegar
1/2 C canning salt
1/2 t alum
4 large bunches of dill (1/4 lb)
1 large onion, quartered
2 whole cloves of garlic
2 t chopped garlic

optional for heat: 1 t red pepper flakes

Make sure you get the canning salt, otherwise your pickles may become discolored in an unsavory way.

Now for what to pickle, this solution will handle 2-3 large cucumbers quartered, or 4-6 medium ones. We love to add fresh green beans, small peppers, quartered beets, green tomatoes that have fallen off the vine, but are too young to fry up (not shiny yet), leeks, bunching onions (scallions). We’ve wanted to try cabbage, but we just haven’t done that yet. If we had carrots and cauliflower, we would have added that. In the last batch we put quite a few hot peppers, and they did not heat up the rest of the pickles. We also added cooked red beet root, and it made all of the pickles pink!

Ok, now for the pickling procedure. In a large pot combine the water, vinegar, salt and alum. Bring to a boil for 2 minutes. Add the rest of the recipe ingredients and all of the vegetables to the pot. Remove from heat. Let stand covered for 4 hours. Transfer glass container that fits in the fridge. Let sit in the fridge for 3 days. After that the pickles are ready for consumption. Safe recipes say you can eat them for a month, but if you keep a safe eye out for mold and keep your dirty paws out of the jar, it may even last longer.

We have ours in a 2 gallon glass container. Alton Brown uses a plastic container for his Hurry Curry Pickles, which I’m going to try next.

I asked my Facebook friends what I should do with the blackberries. One friend said I should make a telephone with them, hardy har Carlin.

The most mouthwatering answer was from my friend Anne Hepburn, “puff pastry crust + mascarpone & whipped cream + blackberries= best dessert ever.” I’ve got whipped cream, but no mascarpone or puff pastry. Maybe I’ll do that one tomorrow. I do have bread dough though!

The beauty bread book I keep referring to is that it has you make enough dough for 2-8 loaves depending on the size of the loaf. The dough stores in the fridge for up to 2 weeks, and we’ve never had a problem with the dough lasting that long. Most of the fruity/sweet bread recipes in the book use the challah/brioche dough, except for the cinnamon rolls. My intuition told me that the regular bread dough would be good for a rustic tart also.

Here’s the recipe for the Rustic Blackberry Tart:
1 grapefruit sized ball of the European Peasant Loaf dough
3 T melted butter
2 T granulated sugar
1 t cinnamon
1/4 t salt
1 C fresh blackberries

topping
3 T ap flour
2 T granulated sugar
2 T brown sugar
1 t vegetable oil
whipped cream

Take a grapefruit-sized piece of dough, flour it and make a gluten cloak around it (so the dough is not sticky). Flatten the dough a 9 inch silicone round cake pan. Pour the melted butter over the dough, covering all of it. Sprinkle the sugar, cinnamon, and salt over the butter. Turn the edges of the dough over to create a 1/2 inch crust. I liked the idea of putting the butter/sugar on first so it would get captured in the crust. The crust creates a wall to enclose the blackberries and topping. This also meant I didn’t have any butter left over for the topping. Next time I’ll use butter instead of oil.

Once the crust is formed space the blackberries out over the tart. Mix the topping ingredients together and sprinkle over the blackberries. Bake for 30 minutes at 425F. Top with fresh whipped cream.

Finally a rant for this post. In high school, we created a cookbook for a yearbook fundraiser. The sponsors of that feat decided to use T for tablespoon and t for teaspoon, mostly because it saved space, but it also saved ink! I’ve read so many recipes where I’ve missed the “b” in the “Tbsp” vs “Tsp”. I encourage you to implement this shorter hand abbreviation in the recipes you create or type in for a fundraiser or email to your friends.