Pickles==good

After eight long days of waiting, I pulled out the Drifltless pickling cucumbers from the crock today. This is the first cucumber pickling run for my new crock, and I was curious to see how they would turn out.



Delicious is how I would say they turned out. I put in mustard seed, black peppercorns, bay leaves, dried red pepper, cloves, cinnamon stick, and some fresh dill from the back yard. I totally winged the spice amounts, and went a little heavy on the cloves, but all around a good flavor.

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Curry and pickles?

But not together, not this time.



We had a bunch of veggies hogging up our fridge, and decided to show them who was boss. A can of coconut milk was lurking in the back of the cupboard, and some red curry paste was hanging about, so some kind of Thai style curry would be the end for this loafing produce. CSA Yellow squash, zucchini, onion and red bell pepper all joined in to make things simple and delicious. Good job, if I do say so myself. And I do.



Next on the agenda was more pickles. Dill and pickling cukes were in the CSA, and I wanted to see what kind of pickle those would make on short notice. After deciding to do this without any cooking, I again went the simple salt pickle route. Along with the salt, dill and cucumbers, I threw in some dried chili peppers, mustard seed, sliced garlic and peppercorns.



I let that stand in the pickle press for 24 hours, and then switched it to the refrigerator for another 24. They had a nice mild flavor, and were excellent with a little japanese soy sauce (Koikuchi) and rice.



One last thing. Check out how awesome that CSA heirloom tomato is.



And it was even better to eat.

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Sweet Pickles!

No, not those sweet pickles, the delicious kind you use to stuff your face!

Anyway, with the arrival of those cute pickling cucumbers in last week's box, pickles of some sort were in order. I have been experimenting with tsukemono recipes lately, and decided to try out a recipe for sweet pickles from a tsukemono cookbook I picked up.



The recipe called for normal salt pickles to start. Basically, you slice the cucumbers in half, mix them up with 5% of their weight worth of salt, and put pressure on them for about 24 hours. The salt should draw out the water, thereby picking. I also added a little salted water because I had so few cucumbers, and was concerned that there would not be enough liquid to immerse the vegetables. I have a cool little press for the pressure duty, called a tsukemonoki (similar to this one; mine was from United Noodles) but a bowl, plate and weight of some sort should work as well.



After 24 hours, I washed the pickles off, and set them aside to dry.



I then set out to make the marinade to sweeten them up. I mixed

1 1/2 cups rice vinegar
1/2 cup water
1/4 cup sugar
1 bay leaf
1 dried chili pod
1/2 cinnamon stick
6 pepper corns

and then brought the whole mess to a boil. I set it aside to cool down to room temperature. After it was all set, I put the pickles in a jar and dumped the marinade over the top and shoved them in the fridge. After another 24 hours (all this waiting was making me really want these pickles) they were all nice smelling, and pretty nice tasting to boot.

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