I’ve been working on half-sour pickles over the summer, having grown cucumbers for the first time against a sunny wall on the South face of our house.

But now it’s time to take on another challenge, and I’ve decided to try for coleslaw.

There’s a theme here.  Both half-sour pickles and coleslaw are:

1. foods I love
2. foods that are within my feeble powers to master (I hope!)
3. foods that give pleasure to Debbie and others

So that’s where I’m going.

I’m not a fan of yuppie coleslaw.  I don’t like hincty ingredients: cabbage and carrot are fine, thank you very much.  And I don’t like too-sour or too-herbal or too-uncreamy coleslaw.

Now I don’t like coleslaw that’s a mayonnaise bath either, so there are some limits in the other direction.

For openers, I decided to make Bobby Flay’s  coleslaw recipe from Food Network.

I like Bobby Flay’s sensibility generally, as Food Network chefs go.  He’s not a total glutton, but he’s not a weird gourmet either.

I don’t (yet?) have the power to read a recipe and know how it’ll taste, but his recipe read as if it might taste pretty much as I like.  Or at least a good first approximation.

The fact that he calls the recipe “Creamy Coleslaw” gave me a little pause (like I said, I don’t want a bath of mayonnaise), but I think it’ll be a good start for my adventures.

He calls for sour cream, a couple of tablespoons.  I think that’ll sit OK with me.

So the first order of business will be to learn how to make homemade mayonnaise, and then we’ll start on the coleslaw caper.