Farm Fresh Friday #11
Welcome to Farm Fresh Friday
This week on the prairie....
Pickles!!
Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers;
A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked;
If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,
Where's the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?
In our case, it's cukes
and Peter Piper
is Proprietor Sall....
(that old nursery rhyme comes to mind
whenever I think about pickles)
I'm thinking our basket was a little
shy of a "peck"....
I had to"Google" this
question and it took me to this
answer at:
"When Peter Piper picked his peck of pickled peppers,
he picked the equivalent of 1/4 of a bushel.
While no one knows the origin of this word nor
how it came to be a unit of measurement,
we do know that Peter's peck of pickled peppers
amounted to the equivalent of 2 gallons of dry weight,
or 10 to 14 pounds."
I think our basket
maybe weighed 1 pound....
Never the less, enough to make
a couple jars of Sall Farm
Deluxe Kosher Dills
So, with the family here
(for the first time during pickle season)
we let our New York kids
learn the process and
make the first 2 jars
of our 2012 pickle season!!
Sall made up a batch of our
secret recipe pickle brine,
while Eric and Rachel
loaded the quart jars
with garlic...
dill....
chili pepper...
and cucumbers...
It was fun to watch these two
artists from New York City
fumbling with cucumbers
and trying to get the
jars packed just so!
(Sall Farm has standards ya know!)
They really did well considering
the mixed sizes of cucumbers they had to work with!!
Initially the cucumbers are always
varied in sizes for the first couple of picks....
after that they become more uniform
in size (unless we miss one, then it becomes ginormous!)
The hot brine was ladled
over the top and then
into the cooker!
Voila! Two jars of
beautiful Dill Pickles!!
(ART at it's finest)
Eric and Rachel were
so proud they got
to make the first two jars...
Wyatt was super
excited when
Grandpa told him they could
take them home with them!!
And so, last Friday began the beginning
of the Sall Farm 2012 Pickle Season!
After a year off,
we are ready to resume pickling!!
We won't be into it 'big time' like 2010,
when we were canning 160 quarts in one day...
but inching our way back in!
Full-filling a few orders for special pickle fans,
and filling up our own pantry shelf.
The Pickle Tradition
Must Go On!
We feel canning and preserving
our own food is a valuable thing
and we will do our best to keep
our kids active in gardening
and teach the grand-kids
those same values....
"Care less for your harvest than for how it is shared
and your life will have meaning and your heart
will have peace."
-Kent Nerburn
Please take a little time and visit the bloggers
sharing their farm fresh posts this week...
I am grateful for their participation,
thank you all!!!
This is a place to share all things FRESH,
homemade and/or home-grown.
There is no rule that it has to be made by you or grown by you,
just the fact that it was
hand made or grown by somebody
and not mass-produced or imported from Timmbucktu is good enough for us!!
Want more details? See our Farm Fresh Friday Page at the top of the blog.
Here's how to join in:
- Publish your Farm Fresh Friday post on your blog.
- Once it is published, click on the title of the post. This will lead you to the static link for your post. The static link is the page with only that post on it. Copy the url from your browser at the top of the page.
- Paste the url into the appropriate inlinkz box in this post.
- Type your name in the appropriate inlinkz box in this post.
- Click on "Enter"
- Please link back to this Farm Fresh Friday post so that your readers can find other posts related to the party!
Comments
Blessings!
Gail
After reading how many quarts you've made in the past in one day, you must can pickles in your sleep! :-)
Judith
I bet the kids had a great time.
Somwhow I got behind on your posts.
Busy busy is what you guys are.
Have fun!
:)