Pickling and such

My incredibly talented husband has planted quite the garden in our backyard and it has produced lots and lots of produce.  We planted green beans, tomatoes, peppers, Jalapeno, Zucchini, Squash, and cucumbers.  I’ve tried to be very creative in preparing meals to include the vegetables that we have harvested. Im really good at sautéing

 squash and frying it.  We’ve had countless tomato sandwiches, lots of salads, and have even resorted to making hearty stews... HOWEVER, there are just way too many to eat!  So I’ve taken to canning.  Its actually really fun.  If you enjoy baking or cooking I think you would also enjoy canning.  Last night I had the pleasure of making my own pickles out of the cucumbers.  Other than pickles and cucumber sandwiches, and salads I have no other ideas for their use!

One days take from the garden!  We had several days like this :-)

I cut them in spears first. The recipe said to cut them in half, but some of these suckers were huge!  Some of them were so fat and I cut them into 6 pieces instead of 4.  Ball has a recipe for Kosher Dill pickles, however it called for Red Pepper and mustard seed, but I didn’t have that so I just added Dill sprigs, a Clove of Garlic and a bay leaf to each Quart- I ended up making 8 Quarts.

I’ll have to wait about a month before I know if I totally screwed them up.  BUT they look great to me and my kids and I cant wait to try them!

In all, I think I worked on them for two hours,(chopping takes some time and I could have been multi tasking by boiling the jars while I chopped)  but now I have 8 quarts of pickles to enjoy.  I hope we have another harvest of cucumbers so I can do another batch!  If not, I’ll just have to wait till next years harvest.  I’ve been bitten by the pickling bug.  :-)