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Oh, Pickles!

September 8, 2013 by admin

IMG_1770The summer harvest is heavily upon us.  If you’re lucky, you may find yourself under a mountain of fresh veggies!  Between our own small garden plot, and the overflowing abundance in gardens of some of our friends, we find our home has a constantly growing pile of fresh tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, and other vegetable delights.

So what are we to do with all of it?

Well, some we have given away.  And that’s a great thing to do.  But we also want to keep and use as much of it as we can.

So when a friend bestowed upon us a great bag of fresh garden cucumbers, we decided to make a try at refrigerator pickles.

We’ve never made pickles before, so we were a bit out to sea on this one.  We’d heard from enough people that making pickles was easy, and that you didn’t need a lot of special equipment, so we were game.  We looked up a few recipes to try to get a handle on what to do.  The recipes we found included a few ingredients we didn’t have on hand, so we had to improvise a bit.

Our pickles turned out delicious, and were indeed, very easy to make.

Here’s how we made Bread and Butter Pickles:

1.  Bring to a boil 4 cups of water, 1/2 cup kosher salt (The internet crowd says regular salt will make your pickles turn a weird color, but they are otherwise OK.) 1/3 cup Cider Vinegar.  (You can use white vinegar, that works too). 1/3 cup sugar.

2.  While waiting for the water to boil, fill a quart canning jar (we used an old jar from store-bought pickles) with slices of cucumbers (we composted the ends).  Peel two cloves of garlic for each jar.  Layer the pickles up to about an inch from the top of the jar.

3.  Add to the jar:  1/2 T dill weed (fresh is best,but dried works, too) and 1/4 T crushed red pepper flakes.

4.  When the water boils, pour the water/vinegar mixture into the jars, stopping when the cucumbers are covered (Leaving about half an inch or so of space at the top of jar.  Call this ‘headspace’ to sound like a pro).

5.  Put the lids on the jars, and move them into the fridge. Remember: you just filled the jars with boiling water, so they are super hot. Be careful.

6. After two or three hours, you can sample your homemade fridge pickles!

Yum!


1 Comment

  1. […] gardeners have harvested squash, melons, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, cilantro, parsley, basil, thyme, carrots, sunflowers, as well as numerous variety or ornamental […]

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