A-Squared: How To Pickle...Anything

My father is very difficult to buy for. Unless he needs a new shirt, I'm out of luck. Whenever he wants something, he buys it, making it difficult to get gifts for him. Somehow, I remembered the Pickle Sisters. They've since gone out of business, but you used to be able to purchase picked everything: asparagus, garlic, carrots, peppers, garlic stuffed olives. I mean everything. Since I've become crafty, I decided that I could make some. I discussed the possibilities with Al, and we settled on dill pickles, dill green beans, hot peppers, carrots, onions, and pickles with celery and onions. I've made pickles before...once. So, I was in for it.

The Saturday before Father's Day was the big day. I spent most of the rainy morning trying to find the recipes for the brine I wanted to use. Here's what I found: refrigerator pickles, carrots, dill green beans, and hot peppers. When the sun came out, Al headed outside to put up fence posts, and I got to pickling.

I worked with one veggie at a time. It would have been too chaotic for me to do more than that. I started with the recipe for the refrigerator pickles. I followed it to a T, except I subbed celery for the green peppers. My first batch turned out awesome, so I immediately got started on the next batch. Yeah, well, I shouldn't toot my own horn because the next batch turned into a syrup. Suck! I threw it out, washed the pot and started over. The next batch was for dill pickles. I used the same brine for refrigerator pickles, added dill, and left out onions and green peppers. Perfect! I think by then, I was through my first movie.

Onto the second movie, I made a jar of carrots and dills green beans using the recipes above. I only adjusted the measurements so I didn't have gallons of brine. On the third movie, I moved onto the hot peppers. The adjustments here are the measurements, not pre-cooking or broiling of the peppers, and the peppers I used: one red pepper, two jalapenos, one anaheim, one hungarian, and one cubano. After those were finished, I ended with the onions. I used the refrigerator pickles recipe and used one red onion and one white onion. Ah! Third movie done and veggies pickled!