If you are up to your elbows in cucumbers from your garden or just have a hankering for pickles, I have the perfect (and easy) recipe for you!
Thanks to my trusty church cookbook, you can have fresh pickles on your table in under an hour. They make the perfect side dish for a summer grill-out or just a yummy snack to enjoy during the remaining warm days of summer.
Refrigerator Pickles
Prep time: 45 minutes
Cook time: 15 minutes
Total time: 1 hour
Serves: 12
Ingredients:
- 2 cups sugar
- 1 cup vinegar
- 1 Tbsp salt
- 1 Tbsp celery seed
- 1 cup diced onions
- 1/2 ice cream pail of sliced, unpeeled cucumbers (about 6-7 cups)
Directions:
- Boil the sugar, vinegar, salt, celery seed, and onion together in a medium saucepan. Cool.
- Slice cucumbers thin and add to your clean ice cream pail or a large bowl.
- Pour the boiled ingredients over the cucumbers.
- Mix, cover, and put in the refrigerator. Keeps well and eat as soon as you’d like.
- Enjoy!
As some of you know, Jessica and I started a pretty sizable garden this year that mostly consists of cut flowers, pumpkins, and gourds. However, there’s a section dedicated just to vegetables Jessica planted. And in true fashion, the cucumbers exploded all at once and there were literally buckets to pick!
Now, I love fresh cucumbers as a snack. With a little salt and pepper, they can be so good! But if you’re like me, you can only eat so much of one thing before you get plain sick of it. So, by request from my husband, I used up the remaining cucumbers in our fridge and made a yummy batch of refrigerator pickles!
Our church, Emanuel Lutheran, has a “Country Cooking” cookbook and there are about 10 different refrigerator pickle recipes to choose from. Each had their own twist, but this is one I kept coming back to because of the simplicity. Jessica also made a big batch and this was the recipe she used, too!
One trick that saves time is to use the mandoline slicer on your cheese grater. It creates perfectly thin cucumber slices and is faster than using a knife, I feel. I also try to ring out as much water from my cucumbers as possible after I’ve sliced them. Removing the water helps them keep a “crunch”.
It is hard to believe that we are already going to be into September at the end of this week. I am not ready to say goodbye to summer and the longer days of sunlight, but fall harvest is my favorite time of year so I can’t wait to pull a sweatshirt on and deliver home cooked meals to the field.
In the coming weeks, while the guys get all of the equipment ready for the field, I will start my own preparations for harvest. Writing out my meal plans, organizing recipes, doing bulk shopping, etc. With all of the cooking I do during fall, I will be back to posting more regularly here on our blog. Subscribe below to get in on all of the action that will start up within the next month!
I pray God blesses these remaining days of summer for you all, friends.
Rooted in ag and led by faith,
Ellyn
