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:
- foods I love
- foods that are within my feeble powers to master (I hope!)
- 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.