Getting My Pioneer On

I mentioned in the spring that we were planning on joining a CSA this year. We did, in fact, go ahead and do that and, by and large, we’ve been quite happy with the experience. There was perhaps a tad too much kale at the very beginning of the season (I don’t mind a little kale. But when it’s huge bags of kale for four weeks running, I start to run out of things to do with kale. Handily, the hubby has some vegetarian co-workers who were happy to take the kale off our hands.)

And then the cucumber and zucchini deluge began. We ate a lot of the zukes, but even I was starting to get a little tired of them. And so, easy peasy, zucchini bread. Freezes well and doesn’t take long to make. But the cucumbers had me doing some poking around. ‘Cause it seems like it’s either eat them raw or pickle them. Turns out, that’s exactly the two options you have.

I’ve never made pickles before. Or done any real canning/preserving. (My grandmother used to  make all kinds of jam and we loved getting our annual shipment of grandma’s jams and jellies. But…that was the extent of my experience with homemade preserved food.) So I figured refrigerator pickles were the way to go.

And so, after some dithering, I settled on this recipe for garlic dills (because really, who doesn’t love garlic dills?) and this one for bread and butter pickles. They were very easy to make, so I’m calling that a win. Handily the bread and butter pickles don’t take as long to steep, so I’ve already had the opportunity to munch a few of them and Oh. Yum. The littlest loves them also, the big one doesn’t like pickles, so that’s his loss. Hubby keeps trying to hide the jar, which suggests they might be a win on his end as well.

Anyway, I posted a picture of the various pickles in progress on my instagram feed, so if you follow me there, you’ve seen them.

It’s been fun to tuck away some of the produce for time to come. If we do the CSA again next year (we’re leaning toward doing just that), I might even try some zucchini pickles.

Do you can/preserve anything?