These sweet and spicy pepitas (pumpkin seeds) are so good and quite addicting! A batch can disappear as quickly as it can be made and that’s fast! These make a great snack, but can also be used in a variety of dishes from salads to soups. Suggestions on different ways to use them are provided in the Kitchen Notes.
If you saw my previous post – Garlic Soup – you’ve gathered that I love garlic. Not only do I put garlic in many, many of my dishes, but I also “feature” garlic in several of them. I love just smashing a roasted garlic clove on a cracker and popping it in my mouth. Thank goodness Bobby likes garlic as much as I do!
I use to roast garlic in a stoneware garlic roaster and it turned out great. Then one day I experimented with a method to make garlic infused oil and ended up with not only a great bottle of oil, but a jar of some of the best roasted garlic I had ever had! The cloves were more “toasted” than traditional roasted garlic cloves which are softer, but toasted is the way I like them. The lime – it steps the flavor up a notch for sure! I hope you give this a try. You’re going to love both the cloves and the oil!
While my mother canned some of the best sweet pickles I’ve ever had, she also made these quick little batches of pickled cucumbers as a condiment for the dinner table or as an afternoon snack. It wasn’t a dish that I helped with (because it’s so easy!), so I never learned how she made them, but I certainly remember how they tasted. I knew the marinade had vinegar and sugar, but what type of vinegar, what other ingredients and at what proportions – I had no idea. So many years ago (pre-internet, if you can imagine such days ever existed), I started playing around, trying to get the marinade just right for that deja vu moment. After a few batches, I had it. I’m not sure if it’s my mom’s recipe, but it sure reminds me of hers. Ever since then, I have been using these little “pickles” in salads, sandwiches, as a snack, and as a side for pot stickers and other dishes.
I make this paste for convenience, but also as a solution for eliminating those little, unusable pieces of dried up ginger root in the cupboard. In working toward this solution I noted that every time I put ginger in a dish, I also add garlic. I keep a tube of garlic paste in the fridge for specific applications, so why not ginger-garlic paste? Using this paste is so much easier than peeling and chopping garlic and grating ginger each time I need it. It also allows me not to waste any of the ginger root.
Recipes with a southwestern, southern flare from a well-seasoned cook. Read my About page to learn more.
