Gettin' Dilly Wit It

We started our adventure in canning the other day with dill pickles. It was actually pretty easy, but if you don't want to can there's lots of recipes to make refrigerator style pickles as well. I figured they'd taste better if they had more time to brine and this way we can make a bunch and give them out to people. I was thinking about posting the recipe, but until we've tried them maybe I'd better wait and make sure it worked!!
The first batch made 7 jars and apparently we think everyone we know will want some so I picked up some more cucumbers the other day along with 30 jalapeños to make jelly. I felt like people were going to start staring at me with my huge bag of cucumbers and jalapeños. I'm excited for the jelly, I always say to James I want to buy some, and then whenever we see it at the market I'm like... I dunno... it's too expensive... so now we'll have enough to last us... well however long it lasts I guess. Good thing we bought a book on canning at Costco last night. Everywhere we go we find things we need for canning on display or sale and I think it's like this great coincidence and then I remember it's summer and that's when people do canning... we're just late on the trend.


So I'll have to read my book and learn all about the world of canning... maybe I'll take up knitting again, get some cats... actually we have thought about getting a cat. But really it's just a solution to replace how bad we want a dog which isn't going to happen anytime soon. Even the fish idea went nowhere...
Anyways back to canning... which is my world now. So we also bought bags of frozen berries from Costco because we were a little late on getting the big flats of fresh berries cheap. Plus frozen berries are picked at their best so I figure it should work just as well.
I also was looking through our new book and saw recipes for salsa which would be awesome. I always am let down by the grocery stores salsa options so this will be a great way to have fresh salsa ready at any time.
Then I started to have crazy ideas about making ketchup, mustard and chutney... but I'm assuming I'll get distracted or bored by the time I get finished our other projects.

So I hope my friends and family are ready for some canning gifts!! Even if you don't enjoy it just pretend you do to humour us! :)