Can It

Zucchini pickles - I look forward to canning my way thru Dorothy’s recipe box of pickled everything. Recently, the pickling cucumbers are not what they used to be - not what they appear to be – they are salad cucumbers posing as pickling cucumbers. Small enough to appear as a pickling cucumber but then seedier and squishier on the inside – and that kind of thing just doesn’t hold up to hours of icy salted water.

Zucchini provide a great pickle alternative! They’re a real team player…working well with others and anticipating the needs of the common goal. The original recipe calls for zucchini, onion, turmeric, sugar, mustard seeds, celery seed, etc. I went for celery flakes, instead, and less sugar. Then I decided to also offer a spicy version of these zucchini pickles, which include slices of fresh jalapeño and garlic.

Bread ‘n’ Butter pickles – these pickles are my…well…bread and butter. Adored from coast to coast, these are not ordinary bread ‘n’ butter pickles. With thin slices of onion and garlic, sweet but not overly so, all floating in flavorful brine that is unlike the heavy-goopy bread ‘n’ butter pickle standard. People have said they’ve shamelessly powered thru an entire jar while sitting (and some standing) at the kitchen counter.

Worcestershire Sauce – once you’ve had homemade Worcestershire sauce you can never go back to the jarred varieties, except maybe when you’re out of the homemade stuff. In which case, use something else! This sauce is a labor of love. I get as excited to make it for people as they get about eating it. Like making maple syrup, so much more goes into this process than the end result that I could charge $10 per pint jar, but I’d never dream doing that. Doubling the recipe is the only way to go when embarking on this project and so that entails boiling it for 12 hours or so. Beginning in the early evening, cooking thru the night, up every hour or so for a stir, which is not difficult to do since the extreme smell of this on the stove will certainly knock a person out of bed. With 12 cups of chopped onion, 8 jalapeños, cans of anchovies, vinegar, over a pound of fresh chopped horseradish, and other powerful ingredients all cooking for a day…your sinuses will thank you and your house will smell of bbq sauce for a week. Steen’s Pure Cane Syrup from Louisiana is the real key - no substitute will do! The caldron has to cool down for hours before you can even touch the outside of the stockpot…the intensity exploding as it cools. More to come...

Regular zucchini pickles without turmeric and using celery seed instead of flakes...