Fermented pickles

Again with the pickles. What am I on some kind of pickle kick?

Yes. I am.

The thing is, Yelp sent me an email suggesting a class offered at a pickling place nearby my apartment before this one, and I've been thinking about pickles ever since.

And the thing I keep thinking is why does dill have the lockdown on pickles?

I'd rather have sweet ones than those stupid old sour dill one. At the grocery dill style gets huge shelf space and sweet style gets hardly any attention at all.

Why doesn't anyone use ginger? That would be the perfect flavor with sweetness. That's what I want my pickles to be. Citrus flavored pickles would be worth a try. Pineapple-flavored pickles would be worth an experiment. I'd like to pickle daikon radish and see what happens.

Things that I learned tonight through other videos.

* Cucumbers ferment in four days. Other people let it go longer.

* Cucumbers have an enzyme at their tip that cause them to go mushy so their seeds germinate inside them.

* People use sea salt or kosher salt because they don't want iodine put in table salt.

* Chlorine in water is harmful to the process

* It's a lot easier and faster than I thought.

* You don't have to be fussy about sterilizing jars and lids and equipment.

* Everything wonderful involving yeast and organisms, fermentation, germination, and the like,  beer, bread, sourdough, kimchi, yogurt, cheese, and  Chia pets, pickles were probably invented by mistake, discovered by careless accident, and by sloven habits, by an attitude of "let's eat it anyway. We're starving."

Being human means being a complete mess. It means being part of the environment, even microscopically, and the environment being part of you. You are the environment.

This is so difficult for my spiritual self to accept.

Our physical reality is we are literally creatures risen up from the mud and the reason why we have so much difficulty with viruses and germs and invasive creatures is because fundamentally we are so much alike.

Fermented pickles are acceptance of our reality.

Four videos said that bay leaf has tannin that keeps pickles crisp. A few videos named other leaves that have it too, grape leaves and oak leaves.

All the videos I watched use the same flavor ingredients. Received wisdom. They're stuck. We should look to other cultures and see how they flavor things. India would be a great place to start. Talk about mistakes, careless accidents and sloven living, India is lousy with it and they do have extensive experience with spices and favors, and things that happen to food in hot climate.

Nobody flavored with vanilla. Nobody I watched fermented corn.

I bet soy sause, another fermented product, would work well with pickle flavors. I wonder why nobody tried sake or Madera, or vermouth.

I'm not sure if I've ever had fermented pickles. I wonder what they are like.

I'm going to do this. What the heck.

Change of subject right here.
I'm jack'n my own post.

We pop-up constructor types create problems for people as well as bring joy.

And I really should get in the habit of checking my mail even when I'm not expecting anything. The mailman has been bringing them up to my door. I thought he was showing a special interest in me on account of me being so doggone special, but now I think that's not the case. I think we get so many packages that the oversize package compartments get filled leaving him no place to put them. So, if there are no excessive packages then my mail builds up in my mailbox. Such was the case.

Ew, Lordy, colorful envelopes that are puffy. That means people are sending me pop-up birthday cards. But only because I sent them pop-up cards for years so now they think I'm obsessed.

Look. You cannot match my pop-up cards with ones that you buy. You just can't. So don't even try.

Still, they're awfully cute. And I love them so. I love the thought behind them. I'll bet they're expensive compared to non-pop-upable cards. I must say, don't support the card industry. They're no better at this sentiment expression than you are. Just put something together and mail it. A picture you draw yourself, buttons glued on, strings, pieces of metal arranged in design, combinations of ink and materials. Experiment with your innate creativy-tah, be bold, try different things, make mistakes, express some uniquely personal sentiment, and mail it.

But I was wrong.

One of the colorful envelopes contained a regular card, a very nice personal note acknowledging tribulation and trial, and wonder of being alive, and two $100.00 Amazon gift cards. That's what made the envelop puffy. Not one. Two.

Wowza!

I was not expecting that.

Got me.

Real good with that one.

The thing is, uncharacteristically, I don't have any immediate use for them. I just bought a boatload of stuff to get stupid shoes that I can fit my Alley-Oop feet into and shorts that I'm too embarrassed to wear in public, and short-sleeved shirts that altogether make me feel quite stupid wearing. How do men have a mature style sense in hot weather, without looking like a boy? All the men that I see on the street look like they have Peter Pan syndrome. They're ridiculous old men dressed as boys. I don't want to be that. I have to get it together with light fabric shirts and pants and light shoes that will fit, and that don't look like they come straight from the ballpark.

It's a problem.

Along with IKEA catalog, there was another one from Vermont shop where I bought vintage candy to send to the boys. Page after page of women's summer clothing on sale, page after page of skin lotions, and tonics, things for the face, for the body, for the feet, to keep insects away, for hair, for eyes, for lips, for elbows, page after page of summer dresses, page after page of summer shoes and slippers for women, page after page after page after page, it's a rather boring catalog targeting women, page after page, flip, flip, flip, how long is this going to go on? Flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, dresses, scarves, jewelry, flip, flip, flip, makeup, flip, flip, makeup remover, flip, flip, flip, more scarves, more slippers, more summer shoes, purses, pocketbooks, flip, flip, flip, AHA! One tiny square, "Our plaid shirts for men are wardrobe must-haves."

Fuck you.

We get one little square on a page of women's things. Smaller than all of the other ad squares.

Maybe I had just go around bare-ass naked except for an ordinary boring plaid shirt.

"But Officer, I was following the suggestion of Vermont Shop catalog."

Two hundred bucks could get me a couple pair of summer weight pants.

Of the shirts, I looked at hundreds if not thousands on Amazon and on Needless Markup, I meant to say  Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, and elsewhere. On Zappos (also owned by Amazon) the Dockers shirts in plaid are modeled by one man whose image stays the same as the shirts change on him like a paper doll. He has a handyman look to him, thick black hair, scraggly 5:00 beard, hard working, hard playing kind of dude, but there he is modeling. I'll find the page for you so you can see.

Okay, here he is.

If you click on any shirt, then the same array of shirts displays below your selection. If you click through his shirt changes while his posture is static. Every single light colored pastel shirt makes the man look like a pussywhipped pussy-hat wearing little pussy. With cats. Except the black shirt makes him look like a big honking stud. It's a very good way to compare. (The black short-sleeved shirt no longer displays)

It's actually dark blue, not black. And it has a tiny dense red pattern in it that doesn't show in small thumbnail. It's a nice looking shirt especially for its low cost. I bought one and it instantly became my favorite summer shirt. It's very nice material, good buttons, extra buttons inside, very well sewn, great fit, and a very good proper look to it. I like it. When it arrived it was carefully packaged, as a significant shirt. It's much better than all of the others.

So I went to buy another for myself and one more for a friend. They're out. Bummer! Like I got the last one. I bought my friend a different one, different dark color and different pattern. He's a wealthy man and the shirts that he buys for himself cost at least 4X what this did, if not more. But he flipped right the f out. I told I didn't care what he did with it, use it for dusting of wiping his car oil dipstick, I don't care. Give to Goodwill. I don't care. But instead he kept repeating what a great shirt it is. He was tickled to have a gift delivered like that. He argued against my diminishing it.  It's unlike what he would buy for himself. And it works. Score!

I was going to use my new cash to buy a pickle related book on Amazon, but the YouTube videos tell me all that a book would. I don't think a book would be any more useful than direct demonstration. Who knows? Maybe the books have better ideas. Maybe a book would suggest ginger or vanilla, or citrus, exotic or alcohol flavors.

The videos prove that pickles are way WAY WAY overpriced.