Grandma's refrigerator pickles

I've been holding out on you guys. I've been meaning to share my grandma's refrigerator pickle recipe, but kept putting it off.

This is my go-to recipe when the cucumbers are plentiful in my garden. My grandma shared it with me after I just graduated from college and was learning to cook on my own. She used the giant cucumbers that my grandpa grew from an old hog lot he turned into a garden. Old hog manure turned out to be excellent fertilizer!

Here's the recipe, if you want to give it a try. Enjoy!

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Grandma's refrigerator pickles

4 cups sugar

4 cups vinegar

1/2 cups salt

1-1/3 tsp. mustard seed

3 onions, sliced

Cucumbers to fill a gallon jar

Mix all ingredients together. This syrup is cold. Keep in refrigerator for five days, then they are ready to eat.

Odds & Ends: August 2012

Wow! Summer has gone by way too fast. The trees are already turning color in my neighborhood, another byproduct of this summer's drought.  The Iowa State Fair always seems to be the last fun getaway for the summer. My sister and I had way too much fun with all the photo cutouts at the State Fair this year ;)

I actually have to work at the state fair at least one day each year, and last weekend, we closed up the booth for the night right when a storm blew through the fairgrounds.  That's right, a storm. In the middle of a drought.  Talk about bad timing on my part!

Even though it was pouring rain, I couldn't leave the fairgrounds without my favorite chocolate chip cookie dough milk shake from the Dairy Barn.  I stood under an awning and enjoyed my shake in the rain!

The really weird thins about the rainstorm was that it was the second time I got caught in a heavy downpour in the last week. And yes, we're still in a drought!

The weekend before, I ran a 5K race at the State Capitol. When I hit the 2 mile mark, the clouds got dark, and a thunderstorm rolled in.  We all scattered for shelter under these tiny tents.  Did I mention there was lightening going off over our heads?  I haven't been that scared in a long time. Glad I wasn't up on the gold dome!

In other big news (at least for me), I partnered up with a team on TriMatchup.com to ride the cycling leg of the Hy-Vee Triathlon on Labor Day weekend.  I took my bike to the Neal Smith Trail along Saylorville Lake to test out how well I'd do at the race's 25 mile distance.  But I had no idea how hilly the trail was.  My poor legs and bike barely made it up all those hills!  I hope the Hy-Vee Tri course is a lot less hilly.  I don't have a fast bike, so I'm getting a little worried that I'm going to get in the way of all the other racers!

Now that we've got a little rain, my garden is starting to perk up.  Can you see what I found in my garden the other day?  At least it seemed to be nibbling on the weeds and not the flowers.

And after months of waiting, we finally have cucumbers!  My husband put up a cattle panel to use as a cucumber trellis.  Now our backyard looks like an edible jungle.  I love it!

After a terrible growing season for cucumbers last year, I'm so happy to finally have enough cucumbers to make pickles again.  I've been relying on a shortcut this year -- the Mrs. Wage's pickle mixes -- for canning pickles.  I've had mixed luck at making my own pickle mix from scratch, so I'm hoping the already-prepared mix will work out well.  I'll let you know how it turns out.

So how are you enjoying the last few days of summer?  Have you been canning any garden produce?  As much as I love the summer, I'm looking forward to the fall apple season so I can make pies :)

Watermelon Rind Pickles

My husband practically begs me to make watermelon rind pickles for him every summer.  It's a favorite that his grandma used to make.  She would typically serve watermelon pickles for Christmas.  She would use food coloring to tint the pickles in pink and green holiday colors.

I had never heard of or tried watermelon rind pickles before I met my husband.  I wasn't convinced that I would like them.  After all, why would you eat the rind?  But I gave it a try for my husband.  And what do you know, I actually like watermelon rind pickles quite a bit -- although not as much as my husband, who will eat half a jar in one night!

I went to the North Grand Farmers Market in Ames to find the watermelons.  Most of the watermelons at the the grocery store are the seedless variety nowadays, and we find that seedless watermelons don't have very thick rinds.  And when you're making watermelon rind pickles, you want a lot of rind to work with.

To my surprise, the vendor at the farmers market gave me two overripe watermelon for free (!) when I told him I was making watermelon rind pickles.  I brought them home and asked my hubby to cut up the rinds for me, since his knife skills are better than mine.

He came up with a ingenious way to get the most rind from the watermelon.  He used our Oxo potato peeler to strip away the green part of the rind.  He even took a picture for my blog to demonstrate.

 

Many watermelon rind pickle recipes use white sugar and food coloring to tint the pickles.  My favorite recipe uses brown sugar and no food coloring.  The pickles aren't as pretty, but they taste like caramel candy, with a nice sourness from the vinegar.  Yes, they taste way better than they look!

Below is my favorite watermelon rind pickle recipe, from the "Joy of Pickling."  The pickles are are a little time consuming to make, but will definitely impress your friends and family when served on a holiday relish tray.  Enjoy!

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Watermelon Rind Pickles

Adapted from "The Joy of Pickling"

• 7 C. prepared watermelon rind (cut away the pink flesh and green skin, then cut into 1/2 to 3/4-inch pieces)
• 6 C. cold water
• 1 quart cider vinegar or distilled white vinegar (I use white)
• 5 C. firmly packed dark brown sugar
• Two 3-inch cinnamon sticks,, browken
• 1 Tbl. whole cloves

Put the watermelon rind into a pot and cover with cold water. Bring the water to a boil, and boil the rind until it is just translucent; don't let it get soft.

In another pot, bring to a boil the vinegar and sugar, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Tie the spices in a spice bag or scrap of cheesecloth, and add them to the syrup. Drain the rind and add it to the syrup, too. Bring the contents to a simmer. Simmer them for 1-1/2 hours, until the syrup is dark and thick.

Remove the spice bag. Ladle the rind and syrup into pint or half-pint mason jars, leaving 1/2 headspace, and close the jars with 2-piece caps. Process the jars for 10 minutes in a boiling-water bath.

Store the jars in a cool, dry, dark place.

Pickled! Again!

I'm very pleased to report that the Mrs. Pickler cucumbers I planted in early June have grown wonderfully in my little backyard garden. I've been busy the last few weekends picking my home-grown cucumbers to make dill pickles.

I decided to try the Best-Ever Dill Pickle recipe in the July issue of Better Homes and Gardens.  My only alteration was that I used fresh dill from my garden instead of dill seeds.  I also added a garlic bulb to a few of the jars, just to see how it would taste.

My new secret ingredient this year is Pickle Crisp, which I learned helps keep the cucumbers crunchy.  All the pickles I canned last year ended up mushy, so I'm hoping the Pickle Crisp helps.  I couldn't find it in my local grocery store, so I ordered Pickle Crisp from the Amazon.com website.

I'm really proud of how beautiful the jars turned out.  We'll see if they taste just as good.

Don't know when to stop

I still had a ton of zucchini left after making the cake, so I ended up making three loaves of zucchini bread, plus one loaf of chocolate zucchini bread. Boy, did I make a mess in the kitchen! But they turned out great, and I've got a freezer full of bread for breakfast now. I love to eat something sweet in the morning.

I also bought about 10 pounds of pickling cucumbers from the folks at Black's Heritage Farm in Ames. They helped start the nearby Slater farmers' market on Wednesday night. I can just call head, and they'll have the cucumbers(or whatever veggies I want) waiting for me after work.

Since my garden dill is starting to wilt, I decided to try bread & butter pickles. Unfortunately, in what has become an all-too-common pattern of mine, I failed to read the recipe ahead of time. When I decided to start canning on Saturday night, I realized I needed to soak the cucumbers in ice water for four hours first. So I delayed the canning until Sunday.

After the four-hour soak, I read through the rest of the recipe and realized I forgot to add the pickling salt. So I added it to the water last minute. Hope it doesn't make a difference in the long run...

I have to admit, it took forever to pickle and can all those darn pickles. It took more than eight hours, from start to finish, including four hours of boiling the pickling liquid and processing the jars. My canner can only process six pint-size jars at once, and I ended up with 18 jars of pickles. And the smell of the hot cider vinegar was overwhelming. I completely lost my appetite for the rest of the night.

But when I finished the last jar at 8:30 p.m., Josh and my sister told me the pickles looked great. I hope they taste better than they smelled. I may never get the smell of vinegar out of my mind. My pickling days are officially over (at least for the summer).

Just one more picture to show the potency of the pickling liquid: The yellow tumeric spice in the pickling solution stained my old countertop. But Josh insists that it will come out over time. We'll see...

Pickled!

My husband brought home a sack full of cucumbers from a nearby farmers' market last night. So I decided to spend the evening making pickles from the fresh bounty.

I have a few picklebush cucumbers growing in my own backyard garden. But to be honest, they've been disappointing so far. The plants are almost too compact, and they haven't produced enough cucumbers to make a single jar.

But my husband did pick off this giant cucumber from the plants. Seriously, it's almost bigger than the actual plant. Amazing!


Anyhow, I ended up canning more than a dozen jars of cucumbers last night. It was nearly a three-hour endeavor. But I love using the fresh dill from the garden and the garlic I received in my CSA box last week. I used the sweet dill recipe from the "Complete Book of Small Batch Preserving." It's a super easy recipe. So far, the pickles I've made taste great, but they are soft. Next year, I need to plant a cucumber variety that is great for making crisp pickles.

In a Pickle

In my continuing adventures in home canning, I've started experimenting with the pickle. I'm crazy about pickles and have been known to eat almost an entire jar by myself. My husband always gives me a bad time about it, complaining that we never have any pickles in the fridge for sandwiches because I've gotten to the jar first.

I bought the home-canning kit specifically because I wanted to learn how to make pickles. But it's been a little trickier to learn than I thought it would be. First, you have to find the right cucumbers. The cucumbers at the grocery store won't work, because they are usually coated in a wax that makes pickling impossible (or so I've read).

I've been buying cucumbers at the farmers' market, but I haven't been able to find the gherkin-size cucumbers that my recipes call for. So I've been slicing the cucumbers up to get them to fit in the jar.

I'm lucky to have a "wild" dill patch growing in my garden. It's wild because I planted dill in these spots about two to three years ago, and the dill just keeps coming back each year with a vengeance. I later learned that dill can take over a garden if you're not careful, so it's best to plant it in a container. But it's too late for me now. I just keep pulling out the new dill shoots before they get too big. Here's what the dill looks like once it's seeded:


According to the recipe, I placed one sprig of dill in each jar, along with one garlic clove and a slice of jalapeno (at my husband's request). Overall, it was a pretty simple recipe: Just boil 2 c. water, 2. cups vinegar, 2 Tbls. pickling salt and 1 Tbl. sugar, then add the liquid to the jars stuffed with cucumbers. Here's the end result:

Unfortunately, I have to wait two weeks before I can dig into them, so I don't know if the recipe is a keeper or not. And I'll keep looking for little cucumbers, since my own pickle bush cucumbers aren't growing so well in our garden.