Suddenly, Pickles

Occasionally, market farmers will give me some vegetables with bad spots on them; they know my reputation.

Recently, a market farmer gave me a whole bag of bell peppers, about 10 in all.  Free.

Then, the next week, he told me he had pickles for me.  An entire half-bushel of pickling cucumbers, it turns out.  I did some rapid calculations involving time, hauling capacity, and dill. He saw the dismayed look on my face and kindly told me to just take what I thought I wanted. Again, free.

I took a bag and canned 10 quarts of dill pickles.  I discovered in the process that I didn't have enough apple cider vinegar or dill seed in the house.  I screeched out the door to pick up the kids (late) with the kitchen steaming, salty, and littered.  I was definitely out of the canning rhythm!

But the pickles look lovely.  I experimented with putting some green tea in the pickle brine to see if the tannin keeps the pickles crisp.  I used grape leaves for their tannin this past summer and the pickles are remarkably crisp.

Love this bumper sticker from Marilou, although the canning in this post wasn't with local stuff!

And next time I went to market, I took a carefully-wrapped jar of pickles to that farmer to say thank you for all the free veggies.  We were both pleased.