Pickled Okra

I pickled some (more) okra last night.  Most of it came from the farmers' market, but I did do another quart of pods from my own diminutive set of plants.  I'm growing burgundy okra and it has turned out well.  Last year I tried to grow it but the deer got it all before it produced anything.  Output has been modest and has trickled in, so it has been a challenge to do anything with it.

At any rate, I had about a half pound of my own okra plus six pounds from the farmers' market.  Flipping over to the NCHFP, one can see that six or seven pounds of okra ought to net out to around eight or nine pints.  I knew that was wrong.  As I have noted elsewhere, I usually don't get as much food content into the jars as the guides say for whatever reason--and for some things, I have been waaaayy off.  I knew that I'd get more jars of okra than forecast--I expected about seven quarts.  It ended up being the equivalent of seven quarts; I did six quarts and two pints.  Interestingly, I upped the liquids to seven cups each of water and vinegar, and probably had about two cups left over--so the quantities of water and vinegar were okay.  I also increased the salt proportionately by another two tablespoons.


It wasn't possible to get any more okra into those jars.  I packed them very tightly and even crushed one or two.  Hopefully the end product will be okay. The jar with the burgundy okra is at the right front in the photo to the right.

Bread and Butter Pickles

A couple of weeks ago I processed some cucumbers.  My overall harvest isn't going to be all that great; the vines are not looking like they'll produce that much longer.  But I did get enough for a load of bread and butter pickles, my favorite.  The Ball Blue Book and Pickyourown.org have similar recipes, which I generally follow.  One exception is that I don't salt and ice the cucumbers; I just fresh-pack them, cutting the salt a little. PYO mentions draining and rinsing after icing.  The NCHFP site calls for icing beforehand, as well, but skips the rinsing step. So although I use a bit less salt, my finished product might have more salt in the brine.  I end up with a brine that is about as salty as what one would get by using Mrs. Wages' bread and butter mix.

My cucumbers this year were all yellow (Edmonson from Southern Exposure and Miniature White from Seedsavers).  The recipes above call for onion, so I added some white onion slices, using store-bought ones (I haven't grown my own onions yet).

The procedure is pretty simple: slice; mix the brine (with the various spices indicated, plus sugar); add the slices (onion and cucumber) to jars; pour in the brine, and process.  I got about 1.1 lb. of cucumbers per quart (when mixed with the onion).  That's a bit less than anticipated by the recipes above, which suggest around 1.5 lb. per quart (or per two pints).  As I have noted elsewhere, I'm usually not able to pack as much into jars as the recipes suggest.  Hot- vs. raw-packing matters, but in this case the recipes are for raw pack, as well.  I had two bowls of cucumbers, not the one suggested by the picture above.  All that notwithstanding, I'm happy with the results (shown below is also a jar of pickled okra I threw in; I used a different brine mix for that).