A Pickling Sort of a Day

Today was dedicated to pickles---sweet spicy bread and butter pickles and sour spicy salt pickles.

I would love to tell you that I grew all these cucumbers, but alas, my cucumbers are in serious crop failure this year. I was planning this summer to be a big pickle summer and in antipation, planted lots of dill and garlic and about 20 cucumber plants. In a normal year, I would be swamped with cucumbers. But this summer I am getting only a few everyday and those I saved for my bread and butter and pickles plus some for salads. And just for the record, I wasn't the one who bought these cucumbers--this was my husband's daughter's idea. I'm glad she suggested it, otherwise I would have ended up with just a few jars of pickles this summer.

I started the day with bread and butter pickles. I have this neat old book with lots of unusal recipes in it.Terry and I both love the this very simple bread and butter pickle recipe. (Click on the picture for a larger image.)It lends itself very well to being tweaked to allow you to use what vegetables you have on hand at the moment. I used one big bowl of cucumbers, four green peppers, and 3 big onions. I also only put in 2 1/2 cups of sugar. Somehow I can't quite quite justify using 5 cups of sugar in one recipe (unless of course I am making pecan toffee bars, but that is a recipe for another post).

Here are the cucumbers, onions, and peppers after they have been salted and ready to be packed into jars and covered with brine.

And here they are, all ten pints of the them ready for be stored for eating later. In the background you can see the cucumbers soaking in salt water for the salt pickles.

When I was done with the sweet pickles, Becky came over and we got down to the serious business of turning all those cucumbers in the first picture into salt pickles. The recipe we used is a secret Trombley family recipe and since I cannot claim to be a Trombley, I will not share it here. However, it did contain lots of garlic (homegrown, course)...

and dill....

and jalapeno peppers.
And of course lots of salt. If you are a Trombley, you need your salt, especially when it comes to pickles!

We peeled garlic, chopped peppers, and sliced cucumbers, and filled jars for what seemed like forever...and ended up with 31 quarts of salt pickles. Here we are, tired and hot, but almost done!

Becky's little son Finn couldn't wait for the cucumbers to be turned into pickles and had to eat one right away. In fact I''m pretty sure he ate at least two or three.

He also though that sitting in the canning pot was a lot of fun. It is a good thing he doesn't resemble a pickle!

When the pickles where completed, husband came in and insisted that we open a jar. My personal opinion was that the pickles needed to sit in the brine a while...say a week or two to soak up all the goodness from my home grown dill and garlic and the flavor from the spices. But I'm not a Trombley, so I defer their wished when it comes to salt pickles. Terry opened a jar, that was still warm and proceeded to eat half the jar. It appears that these pickles at least have the received the Trombley stamp of approval.