around these parts, we try to use our money as a chance to vote everyday.
we enjoy our environment.
we enjoy our national parks, state parks, rivers, streams, and our backyard.
quality food is important to us.
scratch that- good for the earth food is important to us. (see reason above concerning environment)
scratch that- fresh, unprocessed, un-pesticide produced food is important to us.
scratch that- food that is grown in a manner that is good for the earth and good for our bodies is important to us. and the farmers and companies who agree with our standards are who we choose to give our money and support.
that sometimes most often means giving up on any and all prepared snack foods. lucky for me cody i love to make food of any variety- so snacks we will have.
so, as we all know, most snacks arent really that great for you and your growing and toxin free body but we all have to indulge a little right? see poptarts. since we spend the bulk of our food money on wholesome quality foods and ingredients for meals, it leaves little excess for buying, lets say, prepackaged pickles!
here to save the day is my garden. and my $2.75 investment in a pack of seeds.
who loves a good pickle? i sure do.
i had a recent pickle catastrophe.
i made several pints of bread and butter pickles as well as 12 pints of kosher dill pickles, and canned them.
cut to, last thursday. i decided to open the bread and butter pickles. weird looking. has weird grey spots, possibly from the onions, but possibly the deadly botulism bacteria. i am an extremely clean and precise canner, and also a slight hypochondriac, so i dare not take my chances.
enter friday- after i called my mom mourning the loss of all of the jars of my bread and butter pickles, to possibly nothing or possibly a deadly bacteria (it wasnt botulism for inquiring minds. i researched and found that it is actually a product of the onion) she showed up armed with my favorite childhood pickle.
the freezer pickle.
you are going to say, gross that sounds terrible. or dont they just become soggy. well no, actually quite the opposite. they are crisp and clean and perfect in every way.
so after polishing off a whole container of her sweet freezer pickles, i found a new freezer dill pickle spears recipe to try and decided to use some of my recent cucumber harvest as trial.
here is her recipe for her freezer pickles or as she calls it:
freezer cucumber salad
7 cups cucumber
1 cup onion
1 cup green pepper
1 teaspoon of salt
2 cups of sugar (i sometimes use agave nectar)
1 cup white vinegar
wash cucumbers and slice. dice onions and peppers. mix together in a bowl with white vinegar, salt, and sugar. let sit in fridge for a couple of hours or up to 2 days. when time is up, spoon into freezer containers* and cover with liquid and freeze. take out of freezer a few hours before you are ready to eat them.
*you can use a bpa free plastic freezer container or a glass freezer container, but make sure it is made for the freezer.
do me a favor. throw a few carrot seeds in the ground this week in some loose soil. you will thank me in november. or april if you forget about them. dont worry the snow will only make them sweeter.
