Relishing summer’s bounty.

A reader named Ringo apparently misses the garden updates, and asked whether we were still growing fruits and vegetables. Yes, and I’ve been taking pictures like mad – but still haven’t organized a major “looking at this year’s garden” post. As a stopgap, I’m going to write about relish.

Why relish? After all, we’ve frozen peas and raspberries, made rhubarb leather, and canned rhubarb compote and raspberry jam. We’ve eaten some very good tomatoes, lettuces, greens and strawberries. But the relish might be the best thing to come out of this summer, because we may have invented a new recipe.

Relish was never a huge thrill to me. It was just something to put on hot dogs and hamburgers. But last year our Chelsea Prize cucumbers, an English variety from Renee’s Garden Seeds, produced so heavily that I decided to look for a bonehead-simple relish recipe. (As a Renee’s Garden Seeds affiliate, I receive a small finder’s fee for sales made through my link.)

Found one, too. And then DF improved on it.

He improves on so many things in my life, as I’ve written before. When I described the relish recipe DF said, “You know what might be a good addition? Some jalapeño.”

We have pickled jalapeños in our fridge – a can we’d found in the dented-can bin, because that’s how we roll. So I diced up a bit of pickled pepper and added it to the mix.

The result was delicious: sweet yet pungent, mellow but with a peppery zing! that turns even the cheapest hot dogs into a decent meal.

Sometimes we nibble it by the forkful, like a salad. Which I guess it technically is, being made of cukes, onions, garlic, sugar, and mustard and celery seeds.

Our enjoyment of this humble condiment reminded me of a passage from Ray Bradbury’s “Dandelion Wine”: 

RELISH! What a special name for the minced pickle sweetly crushed in its white-capped jar. The man who had named it, what a man he must have been. Roaring, stamping around, he must have tromped the joys of the world and jammed them in this jar and writ in a big hand, shouting RELISH!

 

 

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Relish: The recipe

This recipe, found online somewhere, got tweaked a bit. For example, it called for a dash of turmeric, which we didn’t have, so I left it out.

It also called for the pickling salt to be added to the chopped cukes and onions and left to drain for a few hours. Frugal me wanted to keep that cucumber water and add it to the boiling bag liquid. So I put the salt-free vegetables in a cloth-lined colander over a bowl and left them to drip for an hour or so. After giving the cloth a squeeze, I added the salt and left the mixture to drain a second time.

(When I showed DF how much liquid came out in the first draining, we both got the same idea at the same time: Why not add it to our rustic bread dough, along with some whey from my homemade yogurt? We did that half-and-half, and the result was delicious: faintly sweet, with an even fainter ghost of cucumber. Delicious.)

Here’s that recipe:

4 pounds cucumbers (variety doesn’t seem to matter; we used a mix of English and pickling)

1 cup chopped onion

¼ cup pickling salt

Combine the three ingredients and let stand for two to three hours in a cloth-lined colander set over a bowl or pan. Press every now and then to drain excess liquid.

In a large pan, mix:

3 cups white vinegar

1 to 2 cups of sugar

4 cloves minced garlic

2 tsp. mustard seed

2 tsp. celery seed

Dash of turmeric (we didn’t have any, so we left it out)

Add the drained cucumbers and onions and simmer for 10 to 12 minutes. Pour into clean hot jars, adjust canning lids and process for 10 minutes in a water-bath canner.

Easy enough. But then came…

Relish 2.0

We eat a lot of fresh cucumbers around here, especially if DF’s grandchildren are visiting. Even so, we still had so many cukes in the greenhouse that I wanted to make another half-batch of relish. Which I promptly messed up. Which then became a triumph of recipe recovery.

Although I should never try to do two things at once, I made the mistake of chatting with DF as I made the pickle brine. Wait…Did I put in three half-cups of vinegar already? No, it looks like two half-cups, so I better put in another one. But as I stirred the vegetables into the simmering brine, I got the impression that it was awfully…liquidy.

One vinegary sip confirmed that yes, I’d put in two cups instead of 1½ cups. Apparently the extra liquid had seeped into the sugar in the pan, so it wasn’t apparent at the time. (Note to self: Stop chatting with DF when you’re trying to cook.)

No way was I going to throw away all that work. Instead, I dumped in some additional sugar (maybe a quarter of a cup?) and kept the mixture simmering, hoping to evaporate some of the vinegar.

I didn’t adjust the mustard or celery seed, or add more jalapeño; just kept stirring. The liquid level did start to drop, and the mixture seemed more like syrup. Or jam.

 

And oh my goodness, was it tasty. The extra sugar had given it a flavor akin to bread-and-butter pickle, with a just a touch of tingle from the jalapeño. Since then it’s proved to be superb on tuna and egg-salad sandwiches and hot dogs or, yeah, nibbled by the forkful.

I toyed with the idea of unsealing the other three jars and cooking them until they, too, were jam-like. But why waste a jar lid? Instead, I’ve vowed to re-cook each jar as it’s opened. We really like the syrupy mouthfeel.

Frugal relish hacks

Several frugal hacks in the backstory, because of course there were:

The food processor is the kind that works with an Oster blender, both of which I got free from our Buy Nothing Facebook group, after my former, very old blender jar cracked from sheer exhaustion.

The recipe said to drain the cucumber and onion through cheesecloth. Nope to the extra expense: I used the same cloth-napkin-in-a-colander method I use to make yogurt.

We got the colander and the pickling salt from Buy Nothing, too.

Our vinegar and sugar were bought in bulk at Costco.

We got two bulbs of garlic for free with points from Safeway’s “Just For U” program.

The celery and mustard seeds and canning lid centers were also free, due to rewards programs points.

My canning jars came from Freecycle, thrift shops and yard sales. I will drive these jars until the wheels fall off.

My sister gave me her water-bath canner when she upgraded. However, you don’t necessarily need one if you have a deep pan or stockpot. An article on Becoming Homegrown shows how to use washcloths/pot holders, a framework of wired-together canning jar lids or temporary aluminum-foil rings to cushion the jars from the bottom of the pan.

A canning jar lifter is pretty essential. I have two, both found at thrift shops.

 

Today’s tip: Try making your own relish

Seriously: Try it! Even if you don’t grow cucumbers, you could get a couple of pounds’ worth from the farmers market or the grocery store.

Making relish might embolden you to try other kinds of food preservation. It could wind up saving you money if you have access to you-pick farms, produce auctions, wild berries or the overflow from a neighbor’s garden. An invaluable resource is the National Center for Home Food Preservation, which offers a ton of how-to on canning, drying, freezing and other ways of setting victuals aside for the winter.

Or you could make a half-batch as a fun cooking experiment, then look down modestly as family and friends sing the praises of your cucumber-jalapeño relish. Although you might not want to share this stuff; it really is that good.

Again, this is a fairly simple process: Chop the vegetables, salt and drain them, add them to brine made with just a few ingredients, and stir the mixture for 10 minutes. (Or longer than 10 minutes, if you want jam-relish.)

You don’t have to can the stuff; you can just refrigerate it. After all, once I open a quart jar of this stuff it stays in the fridge for a couple of months – and the last bite tastes as good as the first.

Try it and see. You’ll never look at relish the same way again. Or hot dogs, either.

Related reading:

Always getting ready

Why you need a freezer

12 ways to save money on groceries

The marvel of an Alaska summer