Author: Octopus Gallery

Romancing the Vote

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So politics, huh? Yeah. My cope this year is donation quilted objects to Romancing the Vote which is raising money for voter access rights. Three items that are live now:

giant square quilt with Rainbow gradient columns against a shimmery grey background fabric

two rectangular quilted pillows with a row of triangles all pointing the same direction with rows of golden yellow fabric on the top and bottom

a square quilt of a wreath of multicolored flowers against a black background, with a yellow backing fabric

There will also be a bunch of quilted bookmarks available as Buy It Now items but those aren’t live yet.
rainbow gradient quilted bookmarks with a blue and tropical fruit backing rainbow gradient quilted bookmarks with a peach and rainbow birds backing

I’m shipping worldwide so please take a look!

There are a crapton of advance reader copies, signed and/or annotated books, comics, jewelry, rare finds, zoom chats and consultations with all kinds of experts, and more.

Almost a year

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Penny Dreadful, a small black puppy, sitting next to Meatball, an adult brown pitbull. She's much smaller.
Meatball sitting next to the now much larger Penny Dreadful. She looks very much like the lab mix she is, and is at 3 inches taller than Meatball

We’re coming up on Penny’s birthday. She’ll be 1 at the end of November. We’ve had her for a bit over eight months. She was supposed to be the small dog! Those lab genes are much, much stronger than the Aussie Cattle Dog genes. At least that means while she’s a biting menace, she has a much softer mouth doing that than she could. Now if only we could get the barking to soften…

Cucumber Kimchi [Salad]

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glass mason jar filled with cucumber kimchiI received this recipe from Anna at Seoul Food back when they were still running a food truck. It’s very delicious and I treat it like a refrigerator pickle. I’ve made it with both pickling cukes and English cukes. Whatever I had from the garden. I’ll give you the recipe as I received from her and add my notes to the end.

It depends on how much cucumber you have, but generally I use this recipe on my own.

1.Sea salt enough to salt cucumber

2. For about 2 hrs later( I wait longer because I make large volume), you can rinse them in a colander with cold water.
During waiting period, toss them a couple of time to salt them evenly.

3. After draining them in colander, prepare scallion chopped, pepper flake (if you cant find Korean pepper, use cayenne pepper too, a little bit of vinegar to taste, and a little bit of sugar too.

4. Put all ingredients in a big bowl, and toss them with your hand.

My notes:

1. For enough salt, I tend to use a similar ratio to what you’d find in canning books. It’s easy to be too heavy handed. My go-to recipe for Bread and Butter pickles uses 1/2 pickling salt to 10 cups of sliced cucumbers. I tend to use kosher salt since that’s what I have available in bulk most of the time. My B&B recipe also has you cover the salted cukes with water which is also a thing I do because when I haven’t, I ended up with cucumbers inedible due to saltiness.

2. I like to take samples out and test the saltiness after rinsing at different time points to make sure they’re not oversalted.

3. I got this rec for Korean pepper flake from another kimchi recipe and it’s great. Tae-kyung Korean Red Chili Pepper Flakes Powder. If you can’t find it, I’ve also successfully made this with sambal which seems to be a bit easier to find at grocery stores, at least around here. The vinegar and sugar is totally to taste. For my most recent batch with about 10 c of sliced cucumbers, I used one bunch of green onions/scallions, 1/2 c white vinegar, 2 tbs sugar, and 1 tbs pepper flake powder (it’s got some kick and I’m from the Midwest.)

4. After tossing, I put it in a glass jar in the fridge. Lasts for ages. 10 cups of sliced cucumbers makes about a half a gallon of kimchi. I have no idea if it’s a good idea to try to ferment this. I treat it like a quick pickle.