Potato Chip Review – Old Dutch – Salt & Vinegar Kettle Chips

I guess that everything old is new again, because the first thing that I thought of when I tired these chips was Lay’s Dill Pickle flavored chips. But when you think about it, talk about a brilliant piece of marketing on the part of potato chip companies. Salt and Vinegar chips are a down in the dumps flavor, almost a throwback flavor in these current times. But guess what, you add a little dash of dill flavoring and presto! You were able to recycle a flavor that no one was buying into something cutting edge.

As a side note, for some strange reason Salt & Vinegar flavored chips always make me think of the UK and fish and chips. Maybe it was because of the baby blue color on both the Lay’s Salt & Vinegar chips as well as these Old Dutch chips. Did I somehow miss the memo that baby blue = salt & vinegar?

But in any case, I thought that these Kettle Cooked Old Dutch chips were pretty good, and judging by my consumption of half a 8.5 oz bag in one sitting, that means a pretty solid thumbs up from me. Maybe I’m currently experiencing a salt & malt vinegar deficiency that needed to be quenched. But these salt & vinegar really hit the spot. And mixed with a little bit of beer from a free keg of BL (15.5 gallons isn’t going to drink itself away) in the kegerator it made for a nice, though unhealthy late night snack.

Canning a batch of Pickled Jalapenos – v2 – Oct 2009

After I made the first batch of jalapeno rings, I started to think that I might want to try and make the jalapeno rings a totally different way. In case I run into any issues with the first batch (such as the rings being too salty). Don’t ask me how, but somehow I ended up on the website for  Backwoods Home Magazine, and they had an article about canning peaches. Well within that page they had a link to “The USDA Complete Guide to Home Canning” on the Penn State University web site. Continue reading

Canning Aji Limo or Aji Limon Peppers

Oh mother were these some hot peppers. When I got a bag of these aji limo peppers from my farmer neighbor. I tried one in the yard, and they packed some heat, which at the time I thought was around the same level as a jalapeno (they are actually about 3 to 10 times hotter then jalapenos.) So after 24 hours in a brine solution, they turned down right radioactive. Continue reading

Canning Tomatoes – Fall 2009

I like tomatoes, but there is no way that I can eat all the fresh tomatoes that I have, so it’s time to test out some more of my canning skills.

I put off canning the tomatoes from the garden for a while now. Since I had a very tough time finding citric acid. But after a little bit of searching on the net, I found out that a lot of homebrew websites carry citric acid. I swung by my local homebrew shop and sure enough they had 1 lb bags of citric acid in stock. So I was back in business. Continue reading

Canning a batch of Pickled Jalapenos

For some reason this year, I’ve grown all these jalapenos, but I’m not really in the mood it eat multiple pounds of jalapeno poppers. So instead of making jalapeno poppers I’m going to cut the jalapenos into rings and try to pickle and can them.

There is just something about canning/pickling that really interests me. Maybe it has something to do with preserving and enjoying the bounty of the harvest year round. Plus if I’m going to grow some of my own food, I don’t have the heart to toss any of it on the compost pile. Yeah I leave some of the harvest on the vine for nature to take their share, but that doesn’t mean that they have full reign of the garden. Continue reading

Making Pita Bread

I’ve got a whole container full of hummus, and I’m out of pita bread and pita chips. So its time to try and make pita bread again. In the past, I’ve basically used a dough recipe that was just for “pita bread”, they of course turned out nothing like pita bread, but more like a pita puck. Continue reading