smitten with pickles

After our cool, wet spring our summer has really been heating up and my garden is starting to produce one of my all time favorite things... cucumbers!  I grow pickling, lemon, english and plain ol' regulars.  Of course, the pickling being the smallest are the first to be ready and this weekend I had enough to make a batch of pickles.

I have made both traditional canned pickles and quick refrigerator pickles and hands down my favorite are the refrigerator pickles.  I also like that a recipe can be tweaked a bit and since these pickles are usually a short shelf life in the fridge I don't worry about the safety kinds of issues you have with actual canning.

I've tried a number of recipes over the years, both dill and "bread & butter" style, this recipe was found on Smitten Kitchen and looked right up my alley to try.  I even used this opportunity to finally use my mandolin and it was so quick to slice up this little pile of cukes!

Salt, vinegar, cukes and dill from my garden was all the recipe called for... well and a bit of time too.

Easiest Fridge Dill Pickles - Smitten Kitchen
8 larger or 10 smaller, firm,  kirby cucumbers (depending on size) sliced thinly 1/8 inch or so
3 teaspoons pickling, coarse or Kosher salt
1 - 2 tablespoons chopped fresh dill
1 large head of dill (this is my tweak to the recipe)
1/2 cup white vinegar

Place all ingredients in 1 liter, lidded jar and shake a few times (I actually shook a bit more, until salt dissolved).  Place in refrigerator.  For next few hours shake jar a few more times.  After 6 to 8 hours you have fabulous and easy pickles!  But if you're like me you didn't wait that long, they're pretty good at 1 or 2 hours as well!

These pickles will keep in refrigerator for up to 3 weeks, just be sure cucumbers are covered by pickling brine/liquid.

Here they are ready to go into the fridge, you can see that the liquid doesn't cover the cucumbers or pickles to be...

But here they are after just a couple of hours of sitting and shaking.  You can see that the recipe was correct in that the liquid from the cucumbers releases and adds to the liquid in the jar... or do the cucumbers shrink? or both?  Either way, they are now submerged.

I hope you give these a try if you have some extra cucumbers with a need to use... or try this slightly sweet version of pickles from FPFG (now Shannan Martin Writes) from a few years ago... it's quite tasty too.  I have a "bread and butter" pickle that is called Ice Cream Pail Pickles, because you use a 1 gallon sized container that I will have to share, it's the recipe that made me actually like the sweeter pickles AND you can use any vegetable in it!

As you may have noticed, I haven't posted here in a bit... almost a whole year actually.  I'm not quite sure how a break ended up being so long and if you're like me, you wonder what happens when someone just sort of disappears... I've been active on Instagram but intend to try and resuscitate the blogging too!

One thing that has changed is my little grand babies have grown by leaps and bounds.  Miss Bee is three and the Little Bug has turned one!  They grow up sooo very fast.

And I'm pretty smitten with these two, that's for sure.

Hope summer is treating you well,
Chris at Red Gate Farm