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.

I started with a chipotle aioli - using the basic aioli recipe from long ago, except that I replaced the tablespoon of lemon juice with a tablespoon of lime juice, and the tablespoons of mustard and garlic with a chipotle pepper from a can and a bit of the adobo. I don't know if it's because I omitted the mustard, or because I let the food processor run a bit longer than usual, but it set up very stiff in the fridge. Not bad, but... odd. Eggy.

The big plan was to make my own dill pickle relish. Other than the peppers, I've done very little pickling, and no quick pickling. But it's not difficult, and here's what I ended up with. It produces a very clean, bright pickle that's almost exactly halfway between sour and sweet:

• 1 English cucumber
• 1/2 cup sweet onion
• 5 tbsp water
• 4 tbsp sugar (I used Sugar In The Raw)
• 1/2 cup apple cider vinegar
• 1/2 tsp kosher salt
• 2 tbsp fresh dill

PREP:

Run your knife through the dill a few times to get it nice and fine.

Add the vinegar, the water, the sugar, the salt, and the dill to a medium sealable container (big enough to hold the veg). Cover and shake until everything's dissolved.

Cut the ends off the cucumber, then cut it into two equal cylinders. Cut each of these cylinders in half lengthwise, then in quarters lengthwise, then in eighths lenghtwise. Then slice all these spears into thin chunks.

Mince the sweet onion as finely as you can manage.

Add the cucumber and onion to the liquid in the plastic container. Close it up, and shake to make sure everything is covered. Store in the fridge overnight. Consider turning it upside down halfway through - it'll take a bit for the cucumbers to release enough liquid to make everything 100% covered.

Next, I made a very quick pepper and onion relish. I didn't measure terribly carefully, but it contained:

• 1 Anaheim pepper, finely minced.
• About 1/4 sweet onion, also finely minced. You want half as much minced onion as you do Anaheim pepper.
• About a teaspoon of red wine vinegar.
• Pinch of salt
• 1-2 grinds of black pepper
• Pinch of ground cumin

Just toss it together in a bowl and let it stand on the counter or in the fridge. It gets a bit better over time.

And finally, I made a quick food-processor blend of green garlic, fresh ginger, soy sauce, and rice wine vinegar - just popped it in the mini work bowl, about 3x garlic to 1x ginger, with just enough soy and vinegar for flavor and to get the mixture blending nicely in the bowl. This came out... OK. Nothing special, and an idea I could probably explore and add onto in the future.

I have to say, my favorite combination is the chipotle mayo and the hot pepper relish. I've had a few dogs that way since Monday (small crowd - lots of leftovers), and even with the weirdness of the mayo it was still great stuff.