Celery

My wife requested I make this last night on Christmas Eve to go with our traditional supper of lobster. With me unemployed this year we could have never afforded to buy lobster, but fortunately my wife had 4 of them in the freezer from when she'd found them dirt-cheap and prefrozen back when I was among the employed.

I am not a big fan at all of the potato salad we all know so well from family picnics - drenched in mayonaise as it is. But German Potato Salad on the other hand is heaven on earth! It is a completely different thing altogether, with tart malt vinegar, bacon bits, celery and more. And it goes together surprisingly easy with a mini chopper food processor.

If you are vegetarian, I'm sure this may still be worthwhile, but to me the bacon really makes the recipe. Especially since I used my home made bacon this time around.

This year we were looking for a bit of a change in how to use up Zucchini, and a bit of googling hit upon this recipe for relish. A quick read and it sure sounded yummy - and now that it is in the jars I can verify that indeed it is! It is one of those recipes you have to prepare a day in advance since the veggies soak in brine overnight - somewhat counterintuitively so as to be able to get much of the water out of them. Of course, a fruit press like this one that my wife bought me for Christmas a few years ago helps in that goal too, but you can do it the old fashioned way by squeezing handfuls of the mixture.

For chopping the veggies I used a manual food processor with a crank handle on top. We hadn't used it in years mainly because it had gotten put away somewhere out of view, but when my wife was going to sell it at a yard sale in the spring I set it aside because I knew I'd use it again. It made fairly quick work of the veggies as long as I only about half filled it. The zucchini alone was literally about the size of my leg from the knee down! I did a double batch of this recipe.