I can't wait to make all sorts of pickle flavors and can them. I told Jay today I felt all "homestead" and I liked it. It gives me the canning fever, I want to can everything and have a nice stockpile to get us through to next harvest season. Our tomatoes are finally starting to turn red, they've been slow to ripen this summer. I've heard it was because we had a hotter than normal summer and it kind of slowed them down. I'm still an amateur gardener so take that for what's it worth. haha!
Back to pickles. Today I tackled refrigerator bread & butter pickles, I used McCormick's Bread & Butter recipe in my maiden voyage. I can't attest to the flavor for a few weeks, they recommend letting them sit in the fridge for 3 weeks, shaking the can every 3-4 days to redistribute the flavors. Duck pulled up a stool and helped me pickle today. He & Goose have been watching Next Food Network Star with me on Food Network, Duck insisted on me filming him today too, while he explained what we were making and how we made it. It was adorable.
The recipe was super simple to follow along with, these are only refrigerator pickles so we're not doing the canning with this batch. I plan to can all of the rest of our pickles moving forward, this will be my first canning episode solo as well. My mother-in-law helped me two years ago to can all of the tomatoes we had in our garden and I remember it being fairly simple. I'm hoping my memory serves me right. haha!
We made four pint jars full of bread & butter. Both of our moms called dibs on a jar, and my brother-in-law will get one as well since we grow our vegetable garden in his yard. He has a fence, we don't. The deer would love to have a salad bar at their disposal but we're not that nice. We have two cherry tomato plants growing on our deck, where the deer can't reach them, because our boys eat cherry tomatoes like they're candy. Duck went out there today to check on them and brought the first ripe one inside to show me before popping it into his mouth. Anything I can do to encourage them to eat healthy food as snacks, I'm all for.
Have any of you done any pickling before? What have you done and how did it turn out for you? Any tried and true recipes you want to share? I still have a lot of cucumbers to pickle!
