Making More Cucumbers Than We Can Eat

A bumper crop of cucumbers is not a problem.  It's an opportunity.  Most everybody around gardens and has excess cucumbers.  We're eating cucumber and onion salad with olive oil and balsamic vinegar every day.  We're also making tzatziki often.  We can't catch up and the cucumber supply continues to build.  So what do you do?  We make dill pickles!

First we brine them in salt water overnight.  These are organic Boston Pickling Cucumbers.

We rinse them off in a colander.

The canning jars, lids and rings are all sterilized.

The cut up cukes are packed tightly in the pint-sized canning jars along with garlic, peppers, dill, and herb and spices.

All the while we're boiling a vinegar solution on the stove with pickling spices.  A canning funnel is used to fill each of the jars with the pickling liquid and then the lids are placed on the jars and the rings tightened finger tight.

We place them in a big pot on the stove and ensure that the jars are submerged beneath the water at least a couple inches.  This is water bath canning - no pressure.  Once the water comes to a boil, we set the kitchen timer for 10 minutes.

When the timer goes off, we remove the jars from the pot of water and set on a cooling rack.  Then we listen.  Can you hear it?  One by one, the lids begin popping as the jars cool.  That means they're sealed.

I put them on the window sill while the morning sun was shining through.  Always a nice sight.  For now, we'll stack the jars of pickles in the pantry.

As our supply of pickles grow, we'll continue to make pickles and stack them up in the pantry.  It's always nice to have a good supply of pickles to pull out of the pantry, pop the lid open and snack on dill pickles.