Part One: Yes I Am. I finally got around to making refrigerator pickles. Here are my notes, so I don't forget by the next time I do this, and so you can learn from my experiences, or something:
- I read somewhere that it's helpful to make your brine in a pitcher, so you can pour it easily into the jars. I can say for sure that this was an awesome idea. It helps if you use a pretty glass pitcher you sometimes use as a vase, so you get the whole ridiculous shebang done as sweetly as possible.
- I doubled the amount of garlic she suggests and probably came close to tripling the dill.
- I thought at first glance that the amount of brine wasn't anywhere near enough for all the pickles I had, but I was only about a cup short for four pint jars. So, you know, don't double the batch until you're sure you need to. (To make the extra cup, I just divided the recipe in thirds. Duh, I guess, but I felt pretty clever.)
- I cut two jars' worth into spears, one into slices the long way (SANDWICH PICKLES!), and one into slices the short way. One of the spears jars got a serious shake of red pepper flakes.
- I used a total of eight gherkin (? The CSA sheet just said "pickles") cucumbers of varying sizes, so it averaged two small-ish cucumbers per pint jar.
- I have no idea how I'm going to wait 48 hours to try those things.
Part Two: No I'm Not. I just unearthed my smallest Pyrex bowl from the back of the fridge, where it has been hidden since I last made couscous. I have no idea when that was, but I can tell you that it took solid seconds of thought to realize that the black lumps had once been mushroom. There was also an interesting growth of grey mold on the top that seemed to be binding the grains together somehow, as that part of the stuff in the bowl stayed in a big clump even after everything else around it sort of shattered apart. My next-size-up bowl is holding the beets I finally cut up and steamed yesterday, and the bowl up from that is holding shelled peas. Neither of us particularly like peas, so those will likely sit there for a few more days then get eaten out of a sense of obligation and not because we do something delicious with them.
Oh my God. When I was younger (and much more careless with my money) I may have thrown away a perfectly good container just because I didn't want to deal with its contents.
ReplyDeleteI am ashamed to admit that shortly after I posted this, I dug even further into the back of the fridge and found a small plastic container that had once held homemade spaghetti sauce and now also contained a solid INCH of that interesting green-grey mold. I am such a paranoid weirdo that I was pretty sure if I breathed that stuff in I'd get the Black Lung and suffer terribly, so I tossed it. So, you know, you're not alone, and I'm still careless with my money.
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