Canning/Pickling Experiment, Part 1

I’m not entirely sure what inspired this, but I got an itch recently to try to do some canning and/or pickling.  It’s one of those cooking/foodie things I’ve been interested in for a while now, and when we were in Iowa about a month ago, my mom gave me her old canning pot– the giant pot and rack you use to boil the jars to preserve them.  And about two weeks ago, I bought both a book on canning and a book on building an “earth oven.” (That’s right, folks– a pizza oven is still a possibility. Stay tuned for details).

So, following a very basic pickling recipe, I tried my hand at a few pickled vegetables. From left to right:

  • Green beans (which I really like pickled a lot, and we have an abundance of them around here and/or from the CSA share from Tantré Farms).
  • Carrots (this was kind of a last-minute thing– I had an extra jar and some extra brine, so I figured what the hell?  I also added onion and a hot pepper to this mix).
  • Green peppers (Annette’s request, based on a recipe from her grandmother).
  • Cucumbers (you know, “pickles”).
  • Beets (I have high hopes for this one because we have gotten a lot of beets from the farm this year).
  • Green peppers and onions (I think…).

Now, I have no idea if any of this is going to turn out and/or if it is not going to kill us when we try to eat it.  That’s why this is “part 1” of the pickling post.   I’m pretty optimistic, and it was surprisingly easy to do, but I am still up in the air about the extent to which it is “worth it.”  It seems to me that if you’ve got a lot of something that is going to go bad otherwise (beets, for example), then it might be worth it.  We’ll see in a couple weeks.

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