Bread and Butter, Hamburger Dill and Dill Pickles

The calendar has reached October, and for us that has meant that we've toned down our canning efforts. But we were busy shoring up our winter stock of garden-grown food nearly every weekend in July and August. And one ingredient that we had a ton of was cucumbers, pickling cucumbers in particular.

Pickle harvest from West Allis Farmers Market

When we were deciding how to preserve those cucumbers for the winter, a few thoughts popped to mind. Obviously, we wanted to make some pickle spears. Melissa really wanted some hamburger pickles and I wanted some bread and butter pickles. We consulted with our Ball canning books and magazines to find appropriate recipes.

Crinkle-cut cucumbers

Our yield:

• 14 pints of hamburger pickles
• 6 pints and 1 quart of bread and butter pickles
• 6 quarts of dill spears
• 4 quarts of kosher dills
• 2 pints and 1 half-pint of pickles

And that isn't counting the canned pickles we've already given away plus the other cucumbers we used fresh and didn't can.

This past weekend we popped open a couple of our hamburger pickles, dredged them in buttermilk with a little bit of hot sauce, and dipped them in a cornmeal and flour mixture. Then we fried them. Frickles. With some ranch dipping sauce, of course.

How do you like your pickles? 

Dilly Beans

This is our second year of gardening, but one thing we haven't grown is beans. So when we get a delivery of beans from family, if we don't plan on using them immediately, they get blanched and frozen.

But with our chest freezer filling up, we decided to use some green beans we got and save them via canning. Enter the Dilly Beans.

One thing we learned from our dilly bean canning is that you should take the beans and measure them in the jar before you process them. This gives you a more accurate bean length and ensures you don't snap off more than can fit in.

Our dilly beans have been packed in dill and garlic and left unopened for a couple of weeks while all of the flavors get their mingling on. Neither Melissa nor I have ever had dilly beans, which is why we've made just a small couple of batches, totaling about 1 1/2 pints. But we know when it comes time to snap into them, we'll love the freshness, if nothing else.

Brandied Door County Tart Cherries

It all started a few weeks ago: Melissa was chatting with Rebecca at Cakewalk about Door County tart cherries one July afternoon. After much talk, they decided to split a large bucket of cherries.

But when an offer came in through fellow food bloggers Lori and Paul (from Burp: Where Food Happens) to purchase 27 pounds of tart cherries from Cherryland's Best, the urge to have a full bucket to ourselves was too much to pass up.

Even if neither of us had never had a tart cherry before.

And that's the story of how we ended up with 27 pounds of Door County cherries!

Now when you buy that much of something, you have to come up with a lot of ways to use them. So welcome to Cherry Week on our blog (it's much less dangerous and much more delicious than Shark Week).

Day one: Brandied Door County Tart Cherries.

In Melissa's search for inspiration on how to use the cherries, she turned again to our friends at Burp, who have been known to make brandied cherries. Since it tied in nicely with our first-year canning binge, now a weekend staple, we thought we would try our hand at making them.

Melissa has dreams of turning the brandied cherries into something extra special around Christmas too, so watch for that in the coming months.

Brandied Door County Sour Cherries

We tasted the unprocessed cherries while we were busy in the kitchen, and we loved them. But the brandied cherries? That warm hint of the brandy and the tartness of the cherry should be inseparable.

(By the way, I wonder what's hiding behind those cherries in the photo above. Hmm ...)

If you've never heard of CherryLand's Best, since 1994 the company has used Montmorency cherries from Door County orchards to create dried fruit treats. The company's facility is located in Appleton.

Pickled Jalapeno and Pickled Banana Peppers

The alternate title of this post? "An Ode to Our Pepper Plants."

It's those plants that have been producing like crazy, even as the tomato and cucumber plants took time to recuperate from a ferociously hot spell earlier this summer. Our pepper plants didn't seem fazed by it.

And so we've been taking those peppers, just banana and jalapenos, and using them in a couple of ways. We've cut them up and used them fresh, yes, but we've also pickled them.

Since this is our first year canning, we've chosen to use recipes instead of march out on our own. Next year, with a summer's work under our belts, we'll be able to adapt and wing it more.

Jalapenos, fresh from a waterbath canning.

We chose recipes from a canning book from Kerr, and they're straightforward. The banana peppers recipe involved a one-day brine before the canning process, while the jalapenos were topped with a mixture of vinegar, water, olive oil, salt and pickling spices.

What have you canned this summer?