Radish Pickle Follow up

So admittedly Jenn and I have been on a kick lately for pickling things.  We really can’t wait until it’s fall crop time so we can pickle our own beets.  I don’t know what it is, maybe the heat of the summer leaching something out, but I can’t get enough of eating these things.  Could be replacing some sort of imbalance in my body.

Anyway, after the bumper harvest of even more radishes this morning, we decided to make a second batch of pickles, since the others ones are so far along.  It wouldn’t work out quite right to have them this far apart in relative pickling age and to stack them up now.  We also wanted to go for a slightly sweeter recipe than we did last time, since the radishes were a bit bigger, we figured they would be spicier as well.

So here is our recipe this time.

Sweeter Pickled Radishes:

1 Teaspoon of whole peppercorns

A heaping teaspoon of minced garlic

A rounded teaspoon of dill

Half a teaspoon of kosher salt

3 teaspoons of honey

Splash of unfiltered apple cider vinegar

Add a little white vinegar to allow you to swish it around and mix it all up at the bottom of the jar.  At this point you should be tasting your mixture to see if it is the flavor you are going for.  If it is, go ahead and add enough white vinegar to fill up the jar to the desired level for your radishes.  It’s much easier to fine tune the flavorings when the mixture is smaller.

So far the mixture is delicious.  Jenn sliced up the radishes and put them in the mixture so they can absorb the flavor.  So far so good.

A quick follow up too.  Here is what our other batch looks like 5 days in.

You can see the red color is leaching off of the radishes.  Upon tasting them, they are getting even more excellent.  They would be absolutely awesome on a hot dog.  They were great with some sausage the other day, but I know a hot dog would just light up with these babies.  Any of the radishy sharpness is long gone, and they just taste amazing.

What we really need to do is get some apple cider vinegar with mother, so that we can make our own PRObiotic pickled things.  I don’t know if that will affect the taste or not, but they will be even healthier that way.   I can’t wait.

 

Maybe it wasn’t the Mountains

I had an interesting experience today, and it gave me some pause for reflection.  Being from western Pennsylvania, there are hills everywhere, but you can’t tell, because you are stuck in them all of the time.  You can rarely see more than a quarter mile in front of you, and over time, it starts to close off your perception and sense of scale.

As a kid, I was lucky enough to travel frequently to other parts of the country.  Many people like the beach, but not me, I always liked the mountains.  One of my favorite places to go was to Colorado, and get to see the rocky mountains.  This of course despite being incredibly altitude sick most of the time, but I still enjoyed it.  I loved being able to see the mountains stretching up higher than I could ever reach, as well as being able to look out to the very edge of the world.  I always assumed it was the mountains that were appealing to me.

When we moved to Tucson, it seemed perfect.  There are mountains all around the city, so I got to look out from the front of my house every day and see them rising up in front of me.  I always thought that it was uplifting to look out and see them rising up in front of me, just like when I traveled as a kid.  So one of the things that I made a priority when we were moving was that I wanted to live somewhere with mountains.  That was one of the reasons the Pacific Northwest appealed to me.  Lots of mountains.

Well, this part of Kentucky has no mountains.  At all.  In fact, it is very similar to western Pennsylvania with both it’s hills and it’s sight lines.  I missed the mountains, or at least I thought I did.

Well today I had cause to travel to a slightly different part of Kentucky, that was about 45 minutes to the northwest from here.  This was far enough to take me out of the hill country, and into more of the plains type terrain.  It was quite a bit flatter, but suddenly I could see much further than I have been able to for the last few weeks.

Suddenly I felt different.  My horizons were stretching further.  Even though there were no mountains to pull my eyes up, I still liked searching out over the plains to see what I could see.  Several years ago I would have felt like a bug on a plate being that stretched out in the open, but this time I didn’t.  I enjoyed not feeling boxed in.  So perhaps it wasn’t the mountains that I really enjoyed.  Perhaps it was simply the feeling of being on the edge of an infinite horizon with no place to go but forward.  It was an interesting feeling, and one that I am glad I am able to capture here in Kentucky.

Homemade Radish Pickles

Well folks, I have been away from the blogging keyboard for awhile.   I am not sure if I will try to make this a regularly scheduled even again or not, as my goals have shifted a good bit after arriving here in Kentucky.  Those last few weeks in Tucson were just an absolute trial.  I felt like the house was literally sucking the energy out of me, so I let a lot of things go that I really enjoyed, including this blog.

However, going back to that period is not really that much fun.  So instead, I will just do a quick share of something fun.

As I mentioned a bit earlier today on our Facebook page, we had some leftover pickle brine and we tossed some radishes into it, which turned out to be amazing.  It was leftover bread and butter pickle brine, so the sweet brine worked out great with the slightly spicy radishes.  We just took the radishes that were too small for our dinner salad, sliced em in half, and chucked em in.  48 hours later, they were delicious.

Well, today when we went out to the garden, we had an incredible bounty of radishes waiting for us.  They are all coming to the finish at the same time.  So we went through and picked a ton of them while they were a bit smaller, because they are less spicy that way.  I didn’t think to take a picture of the radishes before we cut them, but here are the tops.  It was a bunch.

Radish Tops

So rather than simply using leftover brine again, we decided to make our own radish brine.  So I can actually expand on my 13skills goal, and work on homemade pickling and lactofermentation, despite forgetting about it for a few months.

So here is the Ayers family pickled radish recipe   We tasted the brine after we were done, and it was absolutely amazing, I will let you know how the radishes taste when they are done.  Anyone else know a good pickled radish recipe  Share it with us, and I will share it with our Facebook page and give you the credit to your blog or site if you have one.

Ayers Pickled Radishes:

Apple Cider Vinegar (splash)

White Vinegar

Honey (1 Tsp)

Dill (Dried or Fresh)

Black Peppercorns

Minced Garlic (1 tsp)

Kosher Salt

The finished products

Take all the above ingredients and mix together at the bottom of a canning jar.  I didn’t include a lot of measurements, because we didn’t measure much.  You can taste brine, so season to taste.  If you want sweeter, add more honey.  More sour, more vinegar.  Etc.  Once that’s all in place, stir it up really well.  Then toss in your radishes, fill the empty space with water, put the lid on and pop it in your fridge.  Start tasting after a few days and see how they are turning out.  The longer they sit, the more the flavor will change, so don’t hesitate to taste every so often.

Enjoy!