This brisket is too salty. Keep that in mind. If you use this recipe - and you should, because it came out really good except for the too-salty part, use a bit less salt.

So last Saturday, I had the ideal cooking conditions. Two to three hours, plenty of fresh ingredients, and a clean kitchen. This is a rare and glorious thing, so I spent a few hours just in pure, rampant experimentation.

Too! Many! Fucking! Cucumbers!

I'm trying my best I've had salads. I've made soup (recipe for which will be soon). I've thrown one away and given one away. But the cucumbers keep coming.

This is one of those farm-box inspired recipes. I made it once just to try it out, and then a second time to nail down the amounts and procedure.

Garlic is a magical thing. Everybody knows that.But most people have no idea how magical it is. I didn't know until three years ago, when I got my first garlic scapes out of a farm box.

So. I've got all this fucking kohlrabi.

After doing the roasted kohlrabi thing and finding it passable, I wanted to try a raw application. I started looking in the Epicurious iPad app, which is... OK as a recipe source goes. I always find less than I'm expecting to, but I usually find something.

Monday was gaming night, and on a whim, Monday became hot dog night. 32 Ball Park franks and a corresponding number of buns from Costco covered the main effort, but I decided to be cookly about toppings and make a bunch of different relishes and such.

This is a basic mild salsa, along the lines of a pico de galley gallo (ha ha fuck you iPad autocorrect), that I like to make when the vegetables are fresh and the tomatoes are good. You'll need:

OK, I think I've got something worthy to post about. I've been fucking around with various ground meat mixtures from time to time, making little kebabs or meatballs or whatever, and I've found a result I'm reasonably happy with, at least as a launching point for future experimentation. You'll need:

It's amazing what a relatively new ingredient can do to my motivation to cook.

Yesterday, as part of various errands, I hit up Namaste Plaza, a nice big Indian grocery in St. Louis Park. Being an Indian grocery, they of course carry vast swaths of frozen products from the fine people at Swad, including weird vegetables.