Make the cucumbers stop!

Warning to anyone tempted to follow my footsteps into canning insanity. DON'T buy several baskets of cucumbers thinking it's a quick simple process to turn them into pickles. It's not quick. It's not simple. And you may permanently smell like vinegar. I do.

So having never made pickles before and standing in the market without having first checking a recipe, the primary challenge is to try to guess how many to buy! I looked at the two quart baskets for $5.50 and really had no clue how many jars I could expect to fill. No clue. So I bought four baskets and hoped that I wasn't getting too few.

Well, it worked out I had purchased somewhere in the neighbourhood of 18 pounds of cucumbers. That's a lot. DO NOT BUY 18 POUNDS OF CUCUMBERS!

I decided to try several different recipes. First, I would use the traditional Blue Ribbon dill method that involves long, slow brining of at least 24 hours. Then I would also make quick cold pack dills using prefab pickling mixes.

The brined pickles were relatively straightforward but SLOW to produce. 24 hours of brining was followed with 24 hours of soaking in vinegar solution. Well, Blue Ribbon let me down. The amount of vinegar mix they recommended wasn't nearly enough to cover all the pickles, and some of them poked out for the day (we'll see if I survive), not by a mile, and this is even after I had pared down the number of cucumbers it called for. But in the end, I got six pints of pickles, so I was placated.

The quick dills are much less work. Cut the ends off the cucumbers, wash them off, pack them, and then add the vinegar broth (which is basically just white vinegar and the packet of spice). I spruced up the jars by adding different things. Some got beautiful fresh dill weed that I bought. Some included garlic. In others I included hot peppers that I had dried a couple years ago. I primarily filled quart jars just to try to get them processed more quickly. But even so, the effort required was something like 6 hours over the weekend and another 6 hours on a Monday night after work (I was pickling til 1 in the morning), the whole time steam spewing from the canning pot and vinegar vapour curling my nose hairs. The dog hid outside the entire evening and coughed.

But the end result was something like 9 quart jars of pickles and at least 6 pint jars, so 12 quarts overall. Can anyone even EAT that many pickles in a year? And that doesn't even include the sweet pickles that I intend to make later.

Next time, I'm just buying ONE basket.