Pickled

Last weekend we thought our deep freeze had died. Almost everything that was stored in it had either thawed or melted and most of what we lost in the thaw was food we weren’t eating anyway.

The good news is that our freezer isn’t actually dead.  It just needed a good defrosting and is back to humming contentedly in our garage.  The better news is that a temporarily non-working freezer forced us to figure out what to do with ten pounds of blueberries that couldn’t be refrozen.

And so we discovered the wonderful world of canning.

I had never canned anything before, but making blueberry jam seemed to be the most efficient way to use up all those berries at once.  My mom had a good recipe for freezer jam, but since I thought our freezer was dead, I decided to seek out a tried and true jam recipe that involved preserving the jars in a boiling pot on the stove.

I’ve always found old family recipes to be the best so I put out a call to my Facebook friends to share their jam recipes.  When that got me nowhere I turned to the one woman I was pretty sure would have what I’d need; the Pioneer Woman herself.

As it turns out, Ree had just posted a canning tutorial on the cooking section of her site, and while hers was a method for canning strawberry jam, I decided it would serve as a good recipe for my ten pounds of  blueberries.

Some of you may recall my lackluster performance making pineapple-jalapeno marmalade earlier this year, and at this point in the post you might be expecting a humorous anecdote about another kitchen experiment gone awry.  I’m happy to say the jam was a success and I now have 18 jars of blueberry jam stored in my pantry and two in the fridge.  And it’s gooood.

Of course starting a canning project with absolutely no canning supplies in the house required a little bit of an investment.  At the start of the jam project we wound up purchasing about $50 of canning supplies to salvage the $18 in blueberries we pulled from the freezer.  Ironic?  Maybe, but I’ve used the canning pot and the utensils over and over again this past week by also canning my favorite pizza sauce and three different variations of pickles.

The pickle project was actually a fluke.  We set out to the farmer’s market yesterday intending to gather ingredients for salsa, but for some reason returned with a whole half-bushel of pickling cucumbers.

Let me save all you other city girls out there a little trouble by saying you had better love pickles if you’re going to bring home a whole half-bushel of cucumbers.  Don’t let the “half” part of that description fool you. That’s a lot of cucumbers and we found ourselves a little overwhelmed with the bounty once we brought them home.

What we wound up doing was canning pickles from three recipes using three different canning methods:

Sun Pickles from Donielle at Raising Peanuts.

A  mother-in-law’s method for canning garlic dill pickles from Yahoo Answers, of all places.

A sweet pickle recipe from MSU Extension.

Each of these recipes are a little different from one another.  Donielle’s recipe calls for no cooking at all, leaving the pickles to ferment in the sun.  They require refrigeration after fermentation, so if you make a lot of them you had better have the room to store them.

The mother-in law method calls for boiling the liquid and letting the jars seal as they cool while the sweet pickle recipe called for boiling the liquid and processing the jars in a boiling bath.

All afternoon the kitchen smelled like garlic, vinegar, cucumbers and dill.  It was heavenly, but man, do we have a  lot of dill left over. We bought two very large bunches that we haven’t even begun to use all of.  Apparently we overestimated (really overestimated) how much we’d need for the pickles. Right now the rest is hanging over our back door to dry and anoints us with herby goodness whenever we let the dog out.

Aside from the delicious results, this whole experience has been very empowering and addicting.  We have a pantry full of goodness that we’ll be eating for months to come.  I’m already making plans to make applesauce this  fall and can’t wait until next year’s harvest season. I may even plant my own garden, though Nathan is convinced we’ll kill anything we plant out there.  I don’t know why he’d think that.

The downside of canning most of these pickles is that we have to wait several weeks before they can be eaten.  While Donielle says her pickles can be enjoyed after three days, the other two recipes say we should let them set 4-6 weeks to get the best flavor.

Tell me how long you could wait before popping this sucker open because it’s killing me just looking at it.