Pickle Day in Paradise

Okay, not really Paradise, and only a small batch of pickles, so not really pickle day, but there’s more alliteration in that than anything else I can think of.

Yup. As I was suddenly in the last chaotic stretch of getting ready to open One Moment by Norm Foster, someone came by to thank Darrell for web help with a bag of garden goods, including some cukes. Then he went to the store and came home with another bag of cucumbers. And some mark down dill seed. And I could see the writing on the wall.
(He claims he had no such organized thoughts, but…)

Anyway, the show has opened. I had a recovery day. I had a start of housecleaning day. I had a day of thinking about food because we were having surprise (to me) dinner guests. (Okay, not a total surprise, I did find out on the weekend.)
I had a useless day. And then I had a day back down to the city to turn in all my expense paperwork, do an alteration, and have a look at the new-to-be wardrobe space, and help unload some stuff into it.

So, today was pickle day. Just my usual small batch of dill pickles. Though I will do another batch later, in modern jars, so I have some giftie pickles. It really is such an amazingly simple (and usually) successful recipe. [Posted back on September 21, 2005] And yes, it did turn out that was the version of recipe I’d been trying to locate. I now store it here in my recipe files on the computer so I can find it again and again.

The nice thing is, that being so simple, it’s easy enough to make them up any time some cucumbers cross your path. And I’ve found that I can reheat the brine when I finish a jar and add another cuke’s worth of slices, and turn them into a refrigerator pickle that tastes almost as good. So a small batch goes fairly far.

This year I’m also experimenting with using “Pickle Crisp”, which is a calcium carbonate additive that theoretically keeps the pickles crisp. And I’m only trying it because (I think) I had one jar last year where the cuke slices got a bit soft, and often tore when getting them out of the jar. But maybe it wasn’t even those pickles. I don’t remember. Anyway, let’s try it once and see.
Oh, and this year, the leftover brine is going to some carrots, but I think we’re just going to eat them with dinner.

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