Tuesday, August 21, 2012

pickles

My gosh this was one busy weekend. There was an anniversary dinner, sports bra shopping, Sherlock Holmes watching, yarn sale shopping, impromptu stop at the market, trip to the ice cream parlour, running a 5k race and pickles.

My girl JB and I decided to stop at the market on our way back from the yarn store tent sale. Which led to a conversation about canning and salsa and pickles and red pepper jelly. And before I knew it...

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Sunday afternoon found me in her kitchen scrubbing a lot of cucumbers. A lot. I've never actually made pickles before, but have always wanted to. This was my first time canning with a friend. I highly recommend this. Split the work, split the cost and split the reward. Win, win, win.

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The hardest part about making pickles was stuffing the jars. The jars were hot, which made handling them tough , not to mention all those pickles are different sizes. The nerve. The bottom row was easy, but it was a bit of a puzzle to get the top half of the jar packed in just as tight.

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We went the easy route and made the pickles that you pack in the jars, pour the brine over top and then process in a water bath. We were very excited when they came out of the bath looking like pickles. In the picture you can see in the one jar the cukes are still very green, that's a jar we hadn't processed yet. The rest of the jars had just come out of the pot.

So, would I make pickles again.... short answer is yes. Long answer, likely. We haven't actually tasted them yet, so as long as they aren't awful, I would absolutely make pickles again. Now on to salsa!

Do/have you ever done any canning.

1 comment:

Chantal said...

before I had kids I canned quite often. jellies and pickles mostly. But I haven't in a really long time. I even sold my stock of jars during a clutter purge a few years ago. Some day I will again.