pickled gerkins

See these babies? Beauties, aren't they? 

These are gerkins (a type of cucumber). This is the 'before' photo.

Meyles grew these in our garden and has been picking them every few days over the last 10 days or so. Now we have this many and I'm going to pickle the little suckers.  Yes I am!

Sterilise the jars first.

I do this by whacking a few jars with metal lids in the oven@150 for 30 minutes.

This is what's going in the jars:

• gerkins

• chillies

• garlic

• onions

• dill

Make the pickling liquid. This is a combo of white wine vinegar, water, salt and peppercorns.

This stuff is used to fill the jars and also to briefly boil the onions.

Chop stuff up.  

Boil the onions, garlic and fresh chilli for 3 minutes only.  

Also, I did the 3-minute boil trick with enough gerkins to make one jar too.  The rest are pickled raw. Why?  Because some recipes tell you to, and some just use fresh. I know that using raw will work, because that's what I did last time. But I trialled one jar with boiled gerkins - just to see which ones we like better.

Assembly. Watch out, because the jars are hot from the oven. And so are the lids. So is the pickling liquid.  I put a few onions, chillies, garlic and fresh dill in the bottom of each jar, then stuff it full - really tightly - of as many of those little green suckers as you can squeeze in there.  

Try not to spill the pickling liquid all over the bench like I did. Put the lids on tight. See these babies? The jar on the left is the one that has the boiled gerkins. 

I have to wait 2 weeks now, for the pickling to take place. Then it's, sharp and crumbly cheese, gerkins and slices of turkey rolled up. Ho yes! We gave a jar to the neighbours and they reciprocated with a jar of their mum's secret-recipe-tomato-chutney! I love tomato chutney.

These taste just like those little green suckers they stick on Macca's burgers.  

Recipe

Pickling Liquid:

1 cup white wine vinegar

6 cups water

3 tbsp flaky salt

4 tsp peppercorns

What goes in the jar:

3 brown onions

3 chillies

3 garlic cloves

1.5 kg gerkins

big bunch of fresh dill