Pickling Adventures, Part 1

We’re Gonna (try to) Make Pickles!

(Part 2 of the great Pickling Adventures is now online!)

With summer comes fresh vegetables, and when you have friends and coworkers who grow their own food in their own gardens, the surplus tends to runneth over. They don’t want their hard-earned vegetables to go to waste. So they dump all sorts of good stuff on us!

This year so far we’ve gotten some juicy tomatoes, some gnarly-looking but delicious carrots, as well as green and white cucumbers. The cucumbers were of the greatest interest. Our oldest son loves pickles (almost to the point of excess. Okay, WAY PAST the point of excess, he’ll eat a whole jar of them by himself.) So when he found out that we were acquiring cucumbers he got extremely excited and decided he wanted to help make pickles out of them. Which is good, because that’s the only way he’ll eat cucumbers.

So we are beginning our first real foray into the process of pickling cucumbers!

The first step is to acquire some Mason or Ball jars to do the pickling in. Walmart should do the trick, they generally have 9 or 12-packs of those things. They’ll need to be big enough to accommodate these cucumbers, the cukes are pretty big. If we have to we’ll just cut them in various creative ways and cram them in.

The next step is to find a good recipe for pickling. Most of the kids prefer the kosher dill flavor rather than the bread and butter pickle flavor, as do I. I believe Bon Appetit’s YouTube channel may have a good recipe for half-sour pickles that we will want to use.

Their channel is fantastic, lots of good recipes and funny kitchen antics. Some day we’ll do a review of their channel. Their ingredients lists are perhaps a little pricier than we’d like, but the cooks on the channel are a hoot. Who knew? Cooking shows don’t have to be stilted, serious affairs like they used to be!