Pickles!!!

I have had a great harvest of cucumbers and tomatoes so far this year, for which I am very grateful. But I was getting kind of tired of eating cucumber and tomato salad. So, I decided I would try to make pickles, of the bread and butter variety. I am not especially fond of dill pickles, Tom doesn't like any type of pickle, and I love sweet pickles but never buy them, so i thought perfect opportunity to make sweet pickles.

My cucumbers are lemon cucumbers. They look very different from your standard cucumber, but taste very similar. I love yellow and think they are cheerful.I searched the internet for a recipe that used ingredients I already had and came up with a fun recipe. It called for salting the cucumbers, chilling them, rinsing them, making a vinegar-sugar-spice syrup, boiling the cukes and canning them. Click here for the original recipe.


Many of the recipes I was finding used "pickling lime" to help make the pickles crispy. Next time, I may try it, but I was happy with the crispness of my pickles just using kosher salt (I didn't have pickling salt, but the recipe said subbing kosher salt is fine). I didn't use all the spices the recipe called for because I didn't have them all. I did use cloves, allspice, mustard seed, red pepper flakes, cinnamon, and then I threw in pickling spice to make up for the ones I was missing. I one and halved the original recipe and got 5 pints.

I am excited that I finally made pickles and may even make another batch with my next big harvest.