Dilled Carrots

Last Sunday  we started our second part of our pickle mania marathon. Operation dilled carrots and pickled beets.

The carrots are such a treat during the winter months since they have a light brine and the sweetness of carrots.

Luckily I forgot the sheer amount of work involved in peeling and chopping the carrots from last year.

 

It took just over two hours to peel and chop the 25 pounds into sticks to fit into the jars.

There were several pounds of "dividend" carrots that were too small to cut into sticks that I cut into medallions.

With the majority of the sticks we created dilled carrots with garlic, fresh dill and brine from a recipe from the Ball Home Preserving Book.

A quick note on the brine - when we made the brine we initally found that the amount of salt that the recipe called for was WAY too over powering and so used half of the salt called for and a tiny bit of sugar to soften it.

Once we had the taste of the brine squared away it was pickling time!

This recipe is cold packed meaning that you put the spices and the carrots into the jars and then add the brine. The trick with carrots (and many other vegetables is to get enough of them into the jars so that they don't float willy-nilly in the jar - once packed firm they tend to stay put better.

Mark also tried a two recipe variations with some of the sticks that we hope will be interesting. Stay tuned...here is the gist:

1. Chinese inspired with ginger, star anise and Chinese chiles.
   
2. Carribean with ginger, garlic, bay, habanero, all spice and yellow mustard seed.

All told we ended up with about 30 pint jars of pickled carrots.

While processing and pickling the carrots we roasted the beets for 2 hours and then late in the day set about peeling them. We ended up getting half way through before deciding that they would have to wait on another day.

More on that in another post...

Pickle mania!

Saturday, September 17th,  I stopped by the Big Red Barn on the way back from volunteering at an event and went a little crazy with my canning purchases. 

(The Barn is located on 148th and Airport Way in Portland, OR and I have found that it is a good place to purchase things in bulk.)

Anyway, I got there just before 3 p.m. and decided that it was a good idea to purchase 15 lbs of green beans and 25 lbs each of carrots, cucumbers and beets. All told, it was less than $75 - how could I go wrong?

Saturday evening I sliced and salted just over half of the cucumbers - I had a little help from our neighbor Leah who was over for dinner.





 Sunday, I prepared three types of cucumber pickles:

1. Lemongrass cucumber pickle - We made these last year, and while they were good, Mark and I both felt that they were a little lacking in the lemongrass department. This year, I steeped the bruised lemongrass a bit longer in the brine and made sure that the stalks that went into the jars were a bit more substantial.
   
   I consulted several similar pickle recipes and decided to forego cooking the cucumbers in brine and then packing them hot into the jars. My hope is that they will hold their crispy-ness better, and I think that packing them while cool is so much easier.
   
   We also opted to experiment a little be by adding one segment of a kaffir lime leaf and a chili pepper to half of the jars. I had also made homemade ginger syrup for ginger ale that morning, so I added a couple of table spoons to two jars too. We are excited to see how our tinkering worked in a couple of weeks.
   
   
2. Spicy bread and butter - I love bread and butter pickles. For me, they are not your every day pickle, but when the mood strikes I can sit down and eat a whole jar. Mark is not so into sweet flavors, so I opted for the spicy variety which seem to fit his needs too.
   
   
3. Quick dills - I chose this recipe because I wanted a quick recipe to use up all my remaining dills. I chose to do this recipe last and knew an easy, no-fuss recipe would be what I needed at that point in the day.
   
   I had separated out all of the small cucumbers on Saturday, so I was able to fit quite a few into each quart-sized jar.

I thought that the whole process would take an ungodly amount of time, and had visions of me pickling into the wee hours Sunday night.

Interestingly enough, the whole pickling adventure lasted from about 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. including about a half hour for lunch. I attribute this to good planning, especially having all of the ingredients and jars on-hand.




Zydeco Beans!
I started pickling the beans on Wednesday evening the following week.

While I was excited by the outcome, it was a bit overwhelming to do it after working all day.. Two evenings later I was done.


We canned the carrots and beets this past weekend and week (more after work canning....next time I will not let my eyes be bigger than what I can actually accomplish without canning till 10 ish on a work night - lesson definitely learned!)

More on beets and carrots later!