Food Friends: Home Cooking Made Easy · Episode 205 · August 21, 2025 · 16 min

A weeknight pasta that makes the most of eggplant, and how to make a half-sour pickle at home! Our Best Home Cooking Bites of the Week

Have you ever wanted to make a deli-style pickle at home, but are too intimidated to try?  In this bite-sized episode, we share delicious moments about the best things we ate this week to inspire each other – and you! By the end of this episode, you’ll learn how easy it is to turn a bevy of cucumbers + salt into homemade pickles – with no fancy equipment or complicated ingredients required! You’ll also discover a vegetarian Italian pasta dish that uses up all the gorgeous eggplant at the farmers’ market right now.  Tune in for a quick dose of home cooking inspiration! *** Links: One of our favorite recipes for lacto-fermented (sour) pickles is from The Gefilteria.  They use 2 Tablespoons of kosher salt to 4 cups of water. For half-sour pickles, ferment for a shorter amount of time.  A more exact and very helpful guide to making lacto-fermented pickles at home from Farmhouse on Boone! A simple guide to lacto-fermentation from Noma Pasta alla Norma by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt for Serious Eats , similar to how Kari made hers, and David Lebovitz’s Pasta alla Norma that uses roasted eggplant   *** Got a cooking question? Leave us a message on our hotline at: 323-452-9084 We love hearing from you — follow us on Instagram @ foodfriendspod , or drop us a line at [email protected] ! For more recipes and cooking inspiration, sign up for our Substack here . You can also now find us on YouTube.  Book a farmers’ market tour with Sonya in Portland, OR!