Dinner Outside: Pesto and Smoked Cheddar on Baguettes, Brisket, and Smoked Potatoes

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Quick Pickles

Home quick cucumber pickles.

These should be kept in the refrigerator. They are a quick pickle recipe that uses vinegar to create the pickles. Dissolve the sugar and salt in the vinegar (you can do this faster by bringing the vinegar to a boil), add the water and other spices. I filled my jars with the cucumbers and placed slices of garlic in the jars at the same time. After tightly filling the jars with your vegetables pour the vinegar-water mixture. Completely over the vegetables. Let the jars, I was using 2 16-ounce mason jars, cool and place them in your refrigerator. You’ll have pickles in a few hours but the flavor improves with age so it’s best to wait.

• 6 mini cucumbers
• 2/3 cups Distilled White Vinegar
• 1 Cup water
• 1 TBSP Kosher Salt
• 2 TBSP Sugar
• 1 tsp Mustard Seeds
• 2 tsp dill weed
• 2 Garlic Cloves, peeled and sliced
• 1 tsp peppercorns

Enough for 1 1-quart jar

Rustic (chunky) Pesto:

Smashing and shushing the ingredients to make the pesto.

There are, like the quick pickles, numerous recipes for making pesto. By far the easiest way to do this is to use a food processor. You certainly will get something much more puree-like. But I like wielding my pestle inside my mortar. We really should have gone much farther than we did and probably used more basil to make it a nice green color but what we made was quite good.

This creates a more nut-heavy pesto. I’ve seen many recipes that use triple or more the amount of basil.

• 4 garlic cloves, peeled
• 1 ounce basil
• 1/4 cup olive oil (a bit less)
• 1/2 cup pecans (toasted)
• 1 ounce parmesan cheese, grated
• Big pinch of salt

This is enough for one typical size baguette.

In the video we doubled, except for the oil which we admittedly uses too little, this recipe.