Bread & Butter Pickles

I love to cook. Experimenting with food can sometimes backfire, but I otherwise love to try new flavor combinations and recipies.

That's part of the reason why I love my garden so much. It's a heafty workload, but well worth the sweat and bug bites. I love the feel of the dirt in my hands, the sense of accomplishment after you pick a vegetable off the plant you've babies for months. And there's nothing better than crunchy, fresh vegetables.

We always find ourselves with more than an abundance of fresh vegetables. I'll give them away to anyone willing to take them.

But...cucumbers are another story. A few years ago my mom and I decided to dig her old recipe out of her cookbook. it was hand-written on yellow legal pad, tucked neatly into an old cookbook about southern pickles. We decided to see if we'd rather try something new.

Definitely not. Most of the recipes called for us to "remove the scum" off of the top portion of cucumbers sitting in salty water, sometimes after weeks. Yuck. Here is my mom's easy, and awesome, recipe:

Ingredients:

4 qts medium cukes, thinly sliced (i use the long, thin cucumbers)

6 medium onions, sliced

2 small yellow squash, thinly sliced (this is my addition to the original recipe)

2 green peppers, chopped

3 garlic cloves

1/3 cup pickling (or sea, or kosher) salt

crushed ice

5 cups sugar

3 cups apple cider 5% vinegar (or white vinegar with a little extra sugar)

2 tbs whole mustard seeds

1.5 tsp ground turmeric

1.5 tsp whole celery seeds

Combine cukes, onions, peppers, garlic and salt in large bowl. Cover with ice, mix, and let stand 3 hours. Drain.

Combine remaining ingredients, pour over cucumbers, and heat just until boiling.

Spoon cucumbers into mason jars, fill to .5 inches from top and process 10 minutes in warm water bath. Or, if you're going to eat them within a reasonable time, just put them into the jars, wait for the pop, and put them in the fridge.

Mmmm...