Pickles for Passover originally published on Food and Fond Memories on April 19, 2011 by sandyaxelrod 2 Comments (Edit)
Pickles for Passover
Pickled Red Onions
This afternoon I was doing quite a bit of food preparation. Since this is the first day of Passover I made, as usual, my Bubie’s Gefilte Fish and potatoes and a slow cooked brisket. But I was actually thinking ahead for once and decided to make some pickled onions to top bunless habanero cheeseburgers with later in the week. As I was cutting two red onions into paper thin slices I was thinking about just how easy it is to make your own pickles. I remember years ago when we still lived up north I used think this was a dauntingly involved process. I would read recipes, want to make pickles, but never actually do it. Fast forward thirty years and hundreds of cookbooks later and I make pickles regularly. And guess who turned me on to this very easy method? Of course – Bobby Flay! After reading all ten of his cookbooks from cover to cover and cooking multitudes of his recipes the pickles keep me coming back for more. The first ones I tried were Bobby’s Homemade Dill Pickles and they were the best pickles Steve and I ever ate. They were so garlicky and crisp they reminded us of the great Kosher Dills we used to get in the Jewish delis in Philadelphia when we were kids. Each crunchy bite just bursts with flavor. The added bonus was that making the pickles myself I could use the seedless cucumbers for the slices which would mean that Steve could actually eat them. My husband of 42 years suffers from diverticulitis and after a perforated colon that landed him in the hospital for emergency surgery a few years back he is very careful to avoid nuts and seeds. So when I served that first batch of pickles he was so excited that it was all I could do to keep him from eating them all at one sitting. I also pickled green tomatoes in the same brine but Steve can’t enjoy those without seeding them. After the great success of the dills I made the pickled red onion next because it was a component of Bobby’s Green Chile Burger. And wow they were so delicious and added, as Bobby puts it in his recipe headnote, “a level of intrigue that raw onion slices could never do”. But they’re too good to just save for burgers. These pickled onions elevate any ordinary sandwich to a much higher level. And after have such rave reviews on the dills and the onions next up to try are Bobby’s pickled jalapenos. I’ll let you know how they turn out.
