Pickles

The Irish are not known for their culinary prowess.  (More potatoes, anyone?  Anyone?)  Unfortunately, the selection of foods in grocery stores is limited, and a bit dull.   This lack of selection extends to pickles.  If you are lucky, you might be able to find some French Cornichons – which are small, pricey gerkins.  They come in a tiny jar and are very tasty, but usually 5 or 6€ per jar.  Dill pickles or more US-based varieties, such as bread and butter pickles are non-existent.

However, last week I ran across pickling cucumbers at Fallon & Byrne.  This is a great shop in Dublin where I have been able to find some unique, hard to source foods/condiments.

And then I found this recipe for refrigerator bread and butter pickles.  I love bread and butter pickles, and thankfully, these did not require any scary canning.  We actually had most of the spices that the recipe required, except apple cider vinegar, (and I wasn’t going back out, in the rain, to attempt to find apple cider vinegar!)  I’m not sure what it says about my cooking hobby if I have, on-hand, most of the spices needed to make pickles.

The end result:

These pickles are incredibly tasty.  The brine is a bit more yellow than I would like, probably as a result of me “eyeballing” the amount of turmeric I put in the jar, rather than actually measuring.  I’m almost convinced they are better than bread and butter pickles I can find in the US.  They are almost as good as the ones we would get from our CSA farmer in Austin.  Maybe I should just start my own food business for people looking to escape the mounds and mounds of potatoes.

Hmmm…two masters degrees, and I just blogged about making pickles.  This cannot be a good sign.