Showing posts with label pickles. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pickles. Show all posts

Sunday, September 6, 2009

Pickling peppers and cucumbers

The sharp smell of white vinegar fills my kitchen as I prepped the hungarian yellow peppers and cucumbers for their briny baths.  

3 small 'bush pickle' cucumber plants with cardboard-stiff 5" leaves produced 10 pints of dill pickles in the first harvest- 3 pints packed with the salty sweet broth of the peppers. These pickles, all packed with a head of dill from the garden and most with a bay leaf, rosemary sprig, mustard and black pepper seed, will need to age for 6 weeks before eating.

A flat of hungarian yellow peppers (36 starts) cost $22 from the nursery this spring and produced a dramatic display of peppers-- stubborn to refute gravity and the poor soil. I brined them for 24 hrs and then pickled a dozen pints in vinegar, garlic, and sugar. No rest period for these; they're damn tasty. hot, too. And at least another harvest before the first frost.