We are sure feeling the pressure these days! With the end of the season barreling down on us, we are racing every single day to accomplish our summer objectives. As usual, we won’t get done everything we set out to accomplish, but we’ll still be proud of what we did get done.
Extreme northern living has its advantages and disadvantages, but this immense seasonal pressure is definitely pretty unique to us far-northerners. It’s hard to explain to those who don’t experience it, but it feels like going 120 miles an hour straight towards a brick wall called winter. You can’t slow down, holding onto the promise you can rest soon enough.
We are never really sure how much season we’ll have. But, one thing we’ve learned is we need to be prepared for anything. We could be shutting things down in a couple of weeks from now, or possibly enjoying an extended summer with weeks of extra growing time. So, we generally like to make sure we have our “home” summer projects and maintenance completed so we can focus almost entirely on processing our major harvests.
All this has really pushed us towards “fast” food preservation techniques, as much as practicable. While we certainly love our canning and other preservation techniques, a very simple preservation like refrigerator pickles are definitely right up our alley. Quick to prepare, easy to put together and it helps us preserve our foods for a few more weeks than usual. It’s really nice to have something we can immediately do with those cucumbers as they come in.
Refrigerator pickles have definitely become a go-to for us and we often find ourselves throwing in some other stuff like peppers and onions. If you’ve never tried them, they are exceptional. You can find sweet, savory and dilled recipes out there, pretty much every iteration we’ve tried has been delicious. If you’ve never tried this method of pickling, we’d encourage you to as they’re quite different (and notably in a very good way) from the more traditional canned or fermented varieties.
And with that, I gotta get back at it here. I realized I missed last night’s post at 11PM, another long night ahead of me!
