Bread and Butter Pickles

Wow!  A lot of great comments on yesterday’s post.  Thank you!  I’d love to hear from anyone that has tried any of these recipes after I’ve posted them to share their experiences making them.  If you got a different result or hated something I liked, I’d love to know.  If you discovered a better way to do something, let me know that.

Now on to today’s recipe.

This is a recipe I found when I was originally putting together the cookbook for grandma’s birthday.  I had planted 4 cucumbers in my garden that year and was amazed at the number of cucumbers I got. I experimented with lacto-fermentation (I had one batch work and one that didn’t), I made a variety of pickles from one of my books.  I experimented with adding a chunk of horseradish and some hot peppers in with the cucumbers.  I was hoping that somewhere along the way, I would find the pickle recipe that would make all other pickle recipes seem insignificant and like a waste of cucumbers.  Not a single one of my experiments was as successful or eaten as quickly as these bread and butter pickles.  (Except for that one jar of spicy pickles that made it into a batch of dill pickle dip).  I ended up gifting a jar of these pickles to my grandma and grandpa hoping for it to trigger days of yore or something like that.  I don’t think it really worked, but they really are awesome pickles. You can get all fancy with these and use a crinkle cutter, but to get even slices, I usually use a mandoline. 

Bread and Butter Pickles

4 qts sliced cucumbers
6 medium onions

Slice cucumbers (do not pare).  Add 1/3 cup salt and cover with ice cubes.  Mix thoroughly, let stand 3 hours.  Drain well.

Combine:
5 cups sugar
1 ½ tsp celery salt
2 TB mustard seed
1 ½ tsp turmeric
3 cups vinegar

Pour syrup over cucumbers.  Heat to boiling and seal in pints. (As always use safe canning practices.  If you have questions, there are great websites out there.)

 

Tomato-Apple Chutney

I struggle with preserving.  I am a process person and need to be completely organized when I begin.  This was a struggle.  I often psych myself out of beginning because the workflow seems intimidating.  Canning is really not that hard.  It helps to have everything in place and set up before you begin, but the process is not overly complicated.  This is a place, however, where my training in project management and creating work flows helps.  I am able to visualize everything that needs to happen including timelines so that I don’t get in over my head.However, problems come in when in the middle of chopping everything, I realized I only had half the amount of celery that I needed.  And then comes the struggle.  I want to be true to the recipes, but there have to be some cases where substitutions are allowed.  I split the difference on this one. I went to the store and got the celery, but I did not go to Penzey’s to get cayenne pepper and used Berbere seasoning instead.  Berbere is an Ethiopian spice blend, the main ingredient of which is cayenne pepper.  When I consulted mom, she reassured me that great-grandma probably left it out all together.  Whatever.  We are talking about 1/4 tsp in a vat of tomatoes, apples, celery, and onions.

And since we are doing true confessions here, I used fresh tomatoes instead of canned.  I put a garden where the dog kennel used to be.  I grew a lot of weeds where I didn’t put down landscaping fabric, but I also managed to get some usable veggies out the situation including tomatoes.This recipe seems exotic for 1950’s Iowa, but I can see where it would be a good use for those vegetables that are still hanging on when the apples are starting to ripen.  Chutney, though, is one of those things that I sometimes have a hard time using up.  It’s a relish and goes with roasted meats.  It can be mixed into mayo and put on sandwiches.  Mix some into some veggies to make them more exciting.  I have no better ideas to use it and jars of it to use.  Please help.  This is a good basic chutney.  Not something you’d find in an Indian restaurant.  It might have a little too much celery for my taste, but it’s good.  It’s that nice mix of sweet and tart and spicy that chutney should be.

 

 

Apple Marmalade

The air is getting cooler, the nights are getting longer, I don’t automatically reach for shorts to put on when I wake up.  Occasionally in the evening I will put on a sweatshirt.  The air conditioning is off, the windows are open.  Labor Day is rapidly approaching and with it the new school year.  Pumpkin spice is appearing in stores and in coffee shops, but I prefer the smell of apples to pumpkins, which is good because I have apples like you wouldn’t believe.

I spent time today raking up some of the apples from under the trees.  I have the blisters to prove it.  Before the weather cleared enough to do that, I roped John into helping me process some of the bounty from the day before.

I am obsessing over Great-grandma’s apple recipes right now, so you get to be along for the ride.

First up is Apple Marmalade.  I know there are some anglophiles out there that will scold me for calling something that isn’t just peel “marmalade”, but it does have peel in it. I think in the overall categorization of fruit spreads, this is probably really a jam.  The way I have been taught is just juice=jelly, fruit chunks or puree=jam, whole fruit=preserves, peel=marmalade, and nuts and dried fruit with fresh fruit=conserves.  Feel free to correct me.

I have no idea what kind of apples are on my trees.  The “good” has apples that are slightly rosy and have a soft glow.  They remind me of a MacIntosh, but aren’t that red and aren’t that flat.  They are crisp and slightly sweet.  The “bad” tree has apples that are streaky and red-green.  The apples are crisp and tart.  They make your salivary glands clench in a good way.

 

And “good” is good because it has more fruit on it than the “bad” tree.  You should understand that when I say that the bad tree has less fruit, it still has more apples on it than I have ever possessed at one time in my entire life.  In less than an hour using only the stepladder, I was able to fill a laundry basket and a bin full of apples mostly off the “bad” tree.

 

Back to marmalade.  This marmalade smells like Christmas and tastes like sunshine.  I sent some home with a friend and she reported it gone almost immediately.  I spread some on zucchini bread.  It was delicious.

I chose to use blood oranges when I made mine since the type of orange was not specified.  It might have been a slightly defiant choice.  I do that.  I just thought that the red pulp would be pretty.  It is.  The red flecks in the orange spread make it look spicy.

It also occurred to me when I was reading the recipe that it said to seed the oranges.  I don’t remember the last time I’ve eaten an orange I had to seed.  This led to a conversation with my mom about the advent of navel oranges.  And how our grocery stores rarely carry any type of orange or orange-like fruit that have seeds.  I’m sure this has greater significance and says many more things than I’m willing to go into here, but food for thought…(see that pun?)

 

 

And just because it’s probably in everyone’s best interest, please adhere to the proper guidelines when preserving your food.  If you go to open a jar of this and it seems off, throw it out.  From what I’ve heard, botulism isn’t that much fun.