Gothic Granola

It’s squash season, or as I say it in my head, “skvosh.” When I can use my mom’s or my grandmother’s food processors, I jump on it. I like my squash grated.

Quick Cucumber Mint Pickle This was my third-place recipe for Wednesday's Foodie Call at ARL WFM. The ingredient was mint and the challenge was to come up with a recipe, make the recipe and get set up in two hours, and "demo" it--serve it in tiny bites with an attractive display--for another two hours. While I've watched cooking challenge shows for years, this took the cake--or the cuke. Since I'm customer service, I could use any ingredient from the entire store to cook. Being vegan and gluten-free, and it being summer (tomorrow), I gravitated towards produce.

This recipe is ridiculously simple. I had beet stems leftover from buying beets in November. Instead of chewing through them raw or using them in juice, I decided to tenderize them in a quick “refrigerator pickle” with sauerkraut.   For fun, I threw in some raw apple cider vinegar, caraway seeds, and German mustard.   So that the beets and acidic juices wouldn’t turn a container pink, I used a glass container.   I stuck it in the back of the fridge and forgot about it for a few hours. When I took it out, the beet stems had become slightly less chewy and the sour, salty sauerkraut had balanced their natural sweetness.   Success! Similarly, I made stinky raw daikon more palatable by grating it on a mandolin cutter and combining it with sweet crushed pineapple for a slaw of sorts. Then I ran these recipes together and made daikon kraut slaw.