Adventures in Gardening: Making Refrigerator Pickles

After being gone for the long weekend two weekends ago, I went to my garden on Tuesday night and had quite a bit of picking to do! Besides picking a big bag of green beans, some red peppers and some carrots, I picked lots of cucumbers.

While I use a lot of cucumbers in salads and have been giving some away to friends, I wanted to do something with the 6 smaller cucumbers I picked. Pickles are one of my most favorite foods, so I decided to make refrigerator pickles. My older sister makes them every summer so she sent me her recipe and I gave it a whirl. The nice thing about refrigerator pickles is that they are super easy to make! There are lots of recipes out there, but here is the one I used, which yields about 2 quarts:

 1/4 c. sugar
1/4 c. pickling salt
1 1/2 c. vinegar
1/2 onion, sliced
6 garlic cloves
6 sprigs of dill
6 small cucumbers (or enough to partially fill 2 quart jars)

1. Slice cucumbers and distribute between 2 1-quart jars. Add 1/4 sliced onion, 3 cloves of garlic and 3 sprigs of dill to each jar.
2. Mix together sugar, pickling salt and vinegar. Distribute between the 2 jars (I put it in a measuring cup after mixing it so I knew how to evenly distribute it).
3. Add water to fill to about 1/2" below the top.
4. Let the jars sit on your counter for 48 hours, then refrigerate.
5. ENJOY!!

The finished product! 1 jar is a 1.5 pint jar so a little bit small but I didn't have another quart jar on hand.

The nice thing about refrigerator pickles is that they are a quick and easy thing to make! I tried a couple last night and they are delicious! And even if you don't have a garden, farmer's markets always have the small pickling size of cucumbers or you could use an English cucumbers. My cucumbers were borderline too big (you can tell from the picture that they have seeds) but they still taste great.

Do you like pickles? Have you ever made or eaten refrigerator pickles?