My version of being pickled.

I'm up late. But I've been productive! Well, for a certain value of "productive," anyway. A value that tends to include pickles. You see, my being one-quarter Swedish and one-quarter Norwegian (both on my mother's side) means that my family has a tradition of having a smorgasborg for Christmas Eve with aunts and uncles and cousins and orphans and then reprise it at brunch the next morning with just our immediate family. My aunt and uncle are hosting Christmas Eve this year, so I asked what I should bring and got assigned pickled beets (easy enough, just pick up a couple cans at the grocery store) and gurka, which are basically thin-sliced peeled cucumbers in a vinegar-sugar liquid. After picking up the cucumbers my mother had already bought for this purpose, I stopped at the store, thinking to buy some bananas which would be good with breakfast and maybe in banana bread later. In the store's markdowns section I found three bags of pickling cucumbers for a dollar each bag.

...I now have four quarts of spicy dill fridge pickles going, and about four more quarts of Tillie Lasker dill pickles weighed down and fermenting in a food-grade plastic bin in the downstairs bathroom (door to said bathroom being closed to keep Sushi from investigating). Plus two quarts of gurka in the fridge, but those will be mostly gone by the end of the week. I'm using this sudden windfall of cucumbers to refine techniques on how to do pickles right. This time of year the ambient temperature will be lower, and I've also sliced off the blossom end of the cukes to get rid of the softening enzyme that's there. In about six weeks I'll be able to judge whether or not the pickles turn out crisper for either of these differences.