pickling, my way

 

Asparagus season is long gone.  But about two, maybe even three weeks ago, the farmer’s market still had the last few asparaguses (asparagi?) and I decided it would be worth it to try to pickle a few and have them for the winter.  We try pretty hard to eat seasonally appropriate produce anyway, but asparagus is one thing that I just refuse to eat out of season.  I am not paying $5 a pound for some woody green grossness from Mexico.  And canned asparagus?  Frozen asparagus?  Those are abominations.  But I will eat just about anything pickled.

So, this pickling event was an exercise in how many ways I could possibly be half-assed.  Or you could call it an adventure, depends on how you look at it.  I am looking at it as an adventure until I poison my family.

I was going off this recipe from a local farmer’s market.  I liked it because it was only supposed to make a few jars and I didn’t want to spend fifty dollars on asparagus, and realistically?  How many jars of pickled asparagus can one family eat?

First off, as I said, this asparagus was at least two weeks old when I finally got around to doing this.  Probably half of it was floppy, and there was even some mold.  Moldy asparagus went into the compost, floppy but not yummy looking went to the chickens.  Depressing.  I hate that I wasted asparagus.  Also, I can’t help but fear that some of the mold from the asparagus got into the ones I canned and is now breeding there, waiting to poison and kill us all.

I followed the directions, salted the asparagus and waited, and this is when things really started to get half-assed.  White vinegar?  Had less than half a cup left from making surface cleaner, so out I ran to get some new vinegar.  Returned to discover that I was also completely out of apple cider vinegar.  Dammit.  I am a vinegar loving girl, so we had multiple varieties.  I remembered that to pickle it needed to be over 5%.  Balsamic seemed too heavy, red wine and sherry were 4%, leaving malt and white wine as my options.  White wine sounded better, so I went with that. Moving on…salt, check. Sugar, check. Mustard seed, check…..oh wait.  Is Indian brown mustard seed the same thing as mustard seed?  No.  Weeellll, I’ll use it anyway.  Dill seed?  Apparently, not available anywhere, so I just skipped it completely, hoping that the fresh dill springs I was adding would make it dilly enough.  Onion?  Okay, the white onion in the fridge that’s been sprouting a giant green stalk for who knows how long – rotten in the inside, of course.  So I guess I’ll use the half red onion in the crisper drawer.  (Thus turning everything a lovely shade of pink.)

This is my life.

So when the jars were sterilized, the asparagus had brined for a couple hours and I had boiled the vinegar mix for one minute exactly, it was time to fill the jars.  I reached into the fridge and pulled out the dill, which was, of course, as old as the asparagus but had not held up as well.  It was crispy.  I decided, hey, that’s what water is for.  It will rehydrate.  It’s the same as using dried dill.

I carefully packed the asparagus, tips up, into the first jar until there was no more room. Then I went to ladle the hot vinegar in.  But the recipe doesn’t say anything about whether the onions are actually supposed to go into the jars, or whether it was just in there to flavor the vinegar?  Since the jar was pretty full and the onions didn’t seem to want to go through the funnel, I decided to just put the vinegar liquid in.  Filled it up, screwed on the lid, and into the canner it went.  Perfect.

Of course, until I did the second jar.  I could tell immediately that there was not nearly enough vinegar to fill the jar up.  I ladled it all in and it came, maybe, to a third of the way up.  I decided to just put all all the onions in then to take up some space, but the jar was so full of asparagus that I spent a good long while shoving the onions in with a chopstick.  I finally got them in and the vinegar had risen by maybe an inch.  Once again, dammit.  I screwed the lid on and realized I’d just have to eat these sooner rather than later, but put then in the canner anyway.  Why?  I don’t know.  It’s not like they’d process properly, but this is the way my brain works.  I put the jar in there and it actually bobbed tragically about, mocking me.

Processed the jars and took them out.  I have to admit, one of my favorite things about canning is actually my pretty canning labels and getting to write in my best cursive in my grey sharpie on them.  As I applied the label to the unfortunate second jar, I noticed the fluid inside now appeared to be halfway up…definitely more than there had been.  Under closer inspection I realized that, as a final show of how truly half-assed I am, I hadn’t even screwed the damn ring on properly and water had leaked in.  I truly am a failure.

On the upside, the asparagus is actually really, really delicious.  Obviously I can’t keep the half full one because we’d all die, so I’m going to use it in a recipe later this week.  I think as long as it hasn’t been infected by mold the other one will keep and I’ll open it mid-winter when a little bit of spring will be much needed. And I will continue to pickle and can and jam and otherwise preserve and try hard to laugh at myself rather than getting discouraged.