Food Friday – Homemade Pickles!

I love cookbooks. (I love cooking shows too, but no TV means no cooking shows, boo). I can browse them for hours. Yet, we are really pick about the cookbooks that are allowed to live on our shelves. We have a select few. Which, for us, that means 12 cookbooks. All of them are well loved and used often. We don’t always follow recipe’s all that closely, but they’re great jumping off points.

One of those cookbooks is Lukas Volger’s Veggie Burgers Every Which Way. This book changed the way we eat. We stopped buying veggie burgers from the frozen section at the grocery store and started making them. Amazing ‘burgers.’ And more importantly, those frozen patties are expensive. This cookbook made veggie burgers accessible to us again.

But this book doesn’t just have veggie burger recipes, it also includes, toppings, sides and bun recipes. He also labels all recipe’s for other special diets, namely vegan and gluten free. And for the record I wasn’t paid to review this book, I just love it that much to gush on and on about it.

Ok, onto the pickles! We were fortunate enough to score a giant grocery bag of little pickles at farmer’s market last weekend for an amazing price. We used a lot for cooking, and salads, and snacks, but we reserved some for these awesome pickles we love to make. The best part was, Lorelei was able to help on Monday, as part of us beginning to establish a rhythm to the week!

The thing about this recipe is it’s really quick (like 20 minutes WITH a preschooler helping!!), but the catch is it requires prep the night before.

The night before you want pickles:

Cut your cucumbers. Wash them first, of course. We used a mandolin to cut the longer pickles into round cuts (they’re in the two large mason jars) and we hand cut the short pickles in half to make spears (they’re in the 3 small mason jars).
- We had a lot of pickles so we made a double recipe, which is 2 quarts, however, I’ll give you the recipe for 1 quart.
Make your overnight soak: (or I suppose you could do this first thing in the am, and then make the pickles at night, but I’m a night person, so I wouldn’t typically have the energy to make these first thing in the morning, aka, before coffee)
- Add and then stir/whisk/shake until all the ingredients are dissolved.
  - 2 cups of water
  - 1/2 cup apple cider vinegar
  - 2 tablespoons of salt
  - 2 tablespoons of sugar
- Add cucumbers, making sure they’re all covered in the soak (if not add more water)
- Cover for 12 hour

Now it’s time to make pickles! – And time for three year old help!

Take all the cucumbers out of the soak (brine). But SAVE THE SOAK (brine)!!
Rinse all the cucumbers in cold water. — Lorelei was able to toss the cucumbers around and make sure they were all rinsed. (I made sure she had clean hands before we touched any food)

Divide up cucumbers and add them into the jars you’ll use for storing them. 1 quart fits nicely into 2 pint jars (see the two ‘large’ jars above). –Lorelei divided them for us! Separating out the spears from the circles.
Divide your spices. (2 jars = divide your spices in half)
- Spices: 3 garlic cloves (peeled & crushed) or use jarred garlic like we did, 1 teaspoon of black peppercorns, 1 teaspoon of mustard seeds.

Add everything into the jars. Cucumbers, Spices, and top with brine (overnight soak). Make sure all the cucumbers are submerged in brine (if not add water).