Thursday, September 17, 2009

Bread and Butter Pickles


I started cultivating a plot of vegetables at my neighborhood community garden a year ago. I'm enjoying the experience of producing my own food, but it's a venture rife with uncertainties. Sometimes the seeds won't germinate. Or the birds will wipe out the seedlings. Perhaps the tomatoes will thrive, but the eggplant will refuse to set fruit.

I was fortunate to get a good crop of cucumbers. To utlilize the abundance, I put up a few quarts of bread and butter pickles using Elise's recipe. Here are the cucumbers coming up to boil with onions (also from my garden), vinegar, sugar, and spices. (A special thanks to my friend, Suzanne, for giving me the mandoline with the fancy crinkle-cut blade!)


In addition to the Blenheim apricot jam from my previous post, I've also home-crafted Santa Rosa plum jam, Black Tartarian cherry jam, August Flame peach jam, Mark Bittman's tomato jam, pickled green beans, and tomato sauce with garlic and basil this season.