Thursday, August 11, 2011

Peeper Packs a Pint of Pickles

I made pickles!

Sort of.

The cucumbers have been coming in like crazy, I've already had to compost several of them that were too far gone, and I had another ten or so waiting to be eaten. That's just not going to happen before they rot, so I figured they needed to be preserved, at least for a while.

After a bit of googling, the first thing that I determined was that canning sounded really complicated and hard and like it required special equipment and lots of boiling water and hot glass around my toddler, so I nixed that idea.

Then I read about refrigerator pickles, which don't have to be canned-canned, and while you can't stock them down in the basement for years, they will keep in the fridge for a few months.

I found a few different recipes and figured out what the common denominator ingredients were, and Peeper and I were off to the grocery store. I found all the spices, and then when I was looking for pickling salt (who knew that we had about a half an aisle of canning supplies?!) I found Ball Picking Mix - which includes salt, spices and instructions for both canned and refrigerator pickles.

Now we're talking!

All I needed, besides the mix, was vinegar (I used apple cider, because I'd read that you can, and it's yummy.) and sugar (I used Splenda, much to the chagrin of some of my crunchier Facebook friends.) and cucumbers.


Well, I also added some purple onion and red bell pepper, because I'd also read about that.



The hardest part was peeling and chopping the cukes. The rest was easy-peasy. Just boil the vinegar, Splenda and pickle mix, pour it over the veggies and wait for it to cool.

Then put it in jars - so easy a two-year-old can do it! - and that's that.


Seriously, she scooped them into the jars. She wanted to and I figured it was a recipe for disaster, so I was going to give her a whole lot of help, but it turned out that she did a great job. I just held the jar over the bowl, to catch any spillage, but most of it went right in the jar!

The finished product!

They are ready to eat immediately, but "for best flavor, wait about three weeks." They were pretty good when I tested a few. They aren't the best pickles I've ever eaten, but the certainly aren't the worst either - and they are definitely the best pickles I've ever made!

2 comments:

  1. Looks yummy. And since you put peppers in it, we can say Peeper packed a pint of pickles 'n peppers.

    lk

    ReplyDelete
  2. And the onions were PURPLE!

    ReplyDelete

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