A Percussionist's Notebook

 People who grew up in Southwestern Pennsylvania know about Shorty's, or more properly Shorty's Lunch. First opened in the 1930's, Shorty's was and still is the only place to eat lunch in Washington, PA. Like so many Washingtonians, I grew up eating Shorty's hamburgers and hotdogs. Just to clarify, it's the hotdogs that are most famous but when I was about 8 or 9 I ate too many of his hotdogs and got sick. This had nothing to do with their quality but rather to the size of my eyes compared to the size of my stomach.  "Four with everything". That's all you would have to say and you would get 4 hotdogs with mustard (yellow), onion and sauce. Their sauce of course was a family secret consisting of ground hotdog, chili and  those special other things .  Like so many expatriates, I would go to Shorty's whenever I returned home to visit family and friends. But living 1,400 miles from Shorty's limits my visits. So I have been trying to make my own...

 After last year's catastrophic attempt at my chokecherry shrub I decided for some jelly this year. My plan was to give the cherries that I picked and give them to my neighbor. Since I am not set up to do canning myself this was a good choice. Unfortunately our neighbor went on an extended camping trip the day before I did the picking so that didn't work. But.... a friend mentioned that she was using her grandmother's stuff to do her canning. Two bags of cleaned and washed cherries went to her house and 3 jars of jelly returned. I would include a pic of the jelly but you can Google a pic of home made jelly and look at it...they all look the same. This jelly retained enough of the chokecherry tartness with the perfect amount of sweetness. Thank you Marsha! Good bye shrub experiment I have found my jelly source from now on.

We have finally grown more zucchini this year so we started looking for recipes other than our traditional zucchini bread, batter fried or sauteed.  Since the larger ones look like eggplant when sliced, we thought about replacing the eggplant with zucchini to make zucchini parmesan. It worked! Zucchini isn't bitter like eggplant can be and it doesn't need to have excess moisture removed. It's also not a Nightshade plant (I've read that some people have issues with Nightshades). We just followed an eggplant parmesan recipe and used the zucchini instead. We also had a lot of choke cherries from our small 8' tree (bush?) About 10 years ago I read about making 'shrubs'. Before soft drinks were commercially available, people would make a shrub from cherries, berries and other fruit. It's basically a concentrated syrup that can be added to water, sparkling water, gin, vodka or whatever. We got enough choke cherries to make 2 quarts.