When life hands you cucumbers......

This is a long story so bare with me. With this being a week of firsts let me tell you about my recent "canning" experiment. I use this term canning loosely. Shouldn't it be call jarring really? Anyway, as a child I grew up watching my mom and grandmother "can" all types of wierd yet somehow wonderful goodies that were grown in our gardens. This year my dad for some reason unknown to me or anybody else but him decided to plant 9 cucumber plants. Again, I still have no idea why. It has been one of those "I thought it was a good idea at the time" sort of events. Not only did my father plant 9 cucumber plants but he planted them right next to the fill lines by their house. So you can imagine that they have grown rather nicely. We are all so over run with cucumbers its ridiculous! There are only so many cucumber and tomato salads I can handle!! We decided that the best thing to do is make pickels. When life hands you cucumbers, make freakin' pickles!! Honestly "canning" and just cooking in general like my grandmother does is a lost art. It kinda makes me sad to think that once she is gone food just won't be the same but then I think about our pickels and change my mind. Anyway, back to my canning. So here we go, we are going to make pickles. Of course, we had to borrow all the nessecary tools to do so from my mother. If you can imagine my tiny little kitchen, we had 3 walmart bags full of cucumbers, 12 quart size mason jars, a huge canning pot, a huge thing of vinegar, and all the cutting utensils to cut 3 bags of cucumbers. No room to even move in there! I cut up all the cucumbers while Zac was cutting grass that afternoon. I had a huge bowl full by the time he got in! Oh yeah that adds another thing to the list of crap in my counter! Nevermind the fact that I had to call my mother 3 times before we even started to make sure I was in fact doing everything right. After we argued about how full the pot was supposed to be (hinse the call to the mother) we started boiling the jars to saterlize them. The package of pickle mix says it would make 7 quart size jars. Well, we thought that would be plenty so we just got one. We started boiling the mix and vinegar while waiting on this other HUGE pot to boil with the jars in it. All that finishes and I started suffing the jars with the cucumbers and Zac is pouring in the boiling pickle mix. As we get to the 4th jar he says to me "We aren't going to have enough" 'What?!? What do you mean not enough?!?. The package says 7 we only have 4 done!" Well we didn't have enough. He had to go back to the store to get more mix. As we are getting to the 10th quart size jar in our 3rd hour of doing this he says to me "We aren't going to have enough to do the rest of these cucumbers" Me: "I am NOT making anymore pickles! Enough is enough. I like pickles but we can only eat so many. If my father offers us more cucumbers we are just going to have to tell him NO!" "I just can't do it! Just throw them away. I'm done with pickle making for this year" So we stopped at 10 jars.

On Sunday after our wonderful canoe trip I opened our bag of clothes so we could change and the whole bag smelled like pickles. Our clothes smelled like pickles. Our shoes smelled like pickles. Even our undies smelled like pickles! Everything we own now smells like pickles!! Thanks Dad, thanks a lot!