Yes, Sciarrino and I survived pickle maddness 2009, just barely!
Oh my goodness we did so much canning. Here's what happened. Two Wednesday's ago Sciarrino and I were walking the street fair when we saw canning cucumbers, so we decided to get some and try it out. We were going to get three reasonably sized cartons, but the guys said, "I'll give you this bag for the same price." How could we say no? Turns out it was about eight pounds, and we canned that pretty easy, and learned a few things (those are the classic dill, forth from the left, the ones floating - oops!). So when I went back last Wednesday (wearing Tuesday and pulling an old lady shopping cart I brought from home) I told the same guy that I wanted two more of the bags, "like I got last week." Well when he pulled one bag out from under his whole table came crashing down! So I was just like, "put the bags in the cart, it's okay." And not really paying attention. I had this crazy cart laden down with cucumbers, dill and some green beans and I pulled it back to the car while Tuesday bobbed along in the Baby Hawk. When I loaded it into the car it felt pretty heavy, but I wasn't really paying attention, because I had to drop that off and get more stuff (peppers, cauliflower, beans, garlic) and meet my mom. So imagine my shock when I realized I had just saddled us with FORTY POUNDS of cucumbers. So we tried a lot of recipes and had a lot of things going at once. I think they turned out pretty well though:
Especially considering we stayed up until one am the night before we were to be at a wedding, because we are crazy people. And then Sciarrino got up, made more and finished sewing a skirt to wear to said wedding. Because not only are we crazy, we are multitaskers. Oh wait, that's not all:
And I already traded a jar to my neighbor for chutney, score! We figured since we had to wait at least four weeks for the other pickles we should do some we could dig into sooner and tried these two recipes: mixed veggie pickles and dill slices. We can eat them in two weeks. I will be making a salad with the mixed veggies this Wednesday, nothing bad will happen right? Sciarrino figured the worst that could happen would be not as flavorful veggies, right? Oh and AND we still have four pounds to can (because we can't find a product called "surejel" I guess it's actually "ClearJel" we are looking for locally). Plus I got beans to pickle, and more beets... oh and of the beans I lost two baskets full. I hope I left them on the side of the road and they are not like, rotting in my car. Our fridge now looks like this:
That big jar up top is from my mom who made me my favorite birthday dinner and stuck it in my fridge for me while I was away (we stayed up in Portland for the wedding). Isn't that so sweet? So yes, we made it to the wedding, had a blast, and didn't even smell that much like pickles, at least I don't think we did...