Got headed off into a bad mood before dinner. Not good, don't like it, so i worked out a few things to focus on. Still haven't gotten on the bike, that may not happen. might have to put the studded tires on and just ride outside tonight if i can't sleep or tomorrow in the morning.
While hanging out with my dad a bottle of dill beans was produced. A staple of every garden we had. Always too many bean plants and basil plants to consume fresh. And there isn't much better than canned dill beans. Before my parents split my mother would make them. We had beans and pea rows so tall that I could hide in them as a kid. Looking at the spot where the garden was now gives me some perspective but that memory of the long row of beans and peas, picking piles of them. My mother would pickle them. Southern tradition if I would hazard a guess... a staple of child hood. Each jar precious like gold. Each crunchy dill (never sugar added, just vinegar and salt) bean pickle was savored.
We would be lucky to have one jar still left at Christmas despite the best rationing.
My step mother was better at rationing them when she made them from the mountains of beans my father grew as one of the founding green thumb/urban gardeners in DC. After a bit most of the beans came out of his garden plots at the house or at the Colonial farm, not from the plot across the street from the Air and Space museum.
His was the first garden there, soil was pretty crappy, but he had a large plot, I listened when he would talk about it. I was always the last of the four of us to bail on a hot Saturday and find an excuse to stop weeding and join my brothers wandering around in the icy cold air conditioned museum of awesome across the street.
Beans.
Dill beans.
My step mother gave me a small jar of them (the jars seem smaller know even) this week. Beans from the garden in Saguache, CO this time, Pickled with the hot canning method. Boiling bring poured over raw tightly packed beans, and then capped, boiled for a few minutes and then a turn of the lid and they were set to cool.
There was an art to packing the beans in those Bell jars, and this time for certain my memory stood, the jar I have not is a bit smaller in volume than the ones we used to fill with Blue Lakes. We would pack them in tight until they squeaked as you pushed them in.
With the fresh recollection of that in my mind, after a 9.5 hr drive home yesterday I saw a pile of beans on sale and grabbed a handful.
I've been watching the food chatter a bit and noticed a while back the trend towards refrigerator pickles. Not canned but just brined. It works with most all veggies and plenty of people are doing it with carrots and anything other than cucumbers you can think of.
I had an empty Grillo quart in the fridge, not empty, just no more pickled cucumbers, some garlic and dill. Well I ate those and cleaned out the container to make my own first run with the stuff.
My only stainless steel pot is soaking some black eyed beans so I went all science like and created my own protocol. Will it work? I'll find out and report in two days.
Here's how it went...
1.5 cups of water, 3.5 teaspoons of salt (not Kosher/coarse) into a 2 cup pyrex measuring cup. Heated in the microwave until the salt dissolved. (most of the recipes used sugar and combined the salt, sugar, vinegar and water in a sauce pan and boiled until dissolved). I nuked it.
Once dissolved I poured that and then added 1.5 cups of white vinegar,
1 teaspoon of mustard seed
1 teaspoon of dill seed (I forgot the damn fresh dill but, we always just used the seed)
1 teaspoon of black pepper
That was mixed up, heated again for 1 min in the nuker.
Since i was making pasta for dinner i had a big vat of boiling salted water, so I blanched the beans, a bit too long, a whole minute, and then plunged them into an ice bath. Probably should stick with 30 seconds.
Once they were cool I sliced up 4-5 cloves of garlic put them in the bottom of the empty pickle container, dumped 1 teaspoon of red pepper flakes on top of that and then packed the beans in.
Sadly my two or so handfuls once lined up neatly, ends trimmed to expose the cellular matrix behind the waxy cuticle, weren't enough to squeak the last few in there tight. More of a loose arrangement of beans in the container.
BUT this is a quart container, bigger than the odd size jar given to me, bigger than the jars I packed as a kid at the kitchen table in Accokeek.
The brine was still hot so I put that in the ice water bath (in a container) that i used to plunge the beans into after blanching. Cooled the bring down, swirled the spice seeds around and dumped the cooled liquid over the beans. Snapped that lid on. Gave it a shake, and put it in the fridge.
Lots of salt, and vinegar, and cool, not much will grow in there no matter how badly i messed up the contamination... Gonna give them a shake or two and wait the two days most recipes call for before trying them
One common comment I found looking at a few of the recipes was that they should be good for about 6 months pickled like this, more importantly that there really is little chance that they will last that long.
Will report back. Pickles in the winter? crazy talk. Yeah, I'm not perfect, far cry from it, sometimes ya gotta do something fun. Now, I just hope they are too spicy for everyone else or I will have to share, or adj the heat level in the next batch (or stick some Serrano slices in between the packed beans).
Heddwch
G
