Before Christmas I had a few friends over to work on a canning/pickling project. I know this is from something I did over a month ago, but since the holidays there has been a lot going on. I found some pickling recipes in a few of my favorite cookbooks, Twenty Dinners, Gjelina, and Hartwood. Most of these recipes call for a quick or cold brine, which didn’t work for what we were doing because one of my friends was going to have to travel with them. The vegetables would have to be preserved for at least a few weeks and not refrigerated, so we did need to find a recipe in which we boiled the jars to seal and sanitize them. I did use the books I had on hand for wonderful photo inspiration! Here is a link to pickling different types of vegetables if a cold brine is ok for what you are doing. Here is another link on how to do the canning with the sealing process, if you do chose to go through the preserving process. I am certainly going to do this next year because I have a great garden plot and I ended up with a lot of extra vegetables, particularly peppers and would love to give them away. I also think a great idea I read to sterilize the jars is run them through the dishwasher. Super easy! We boiled ours which was a bit tedious since the pots would only fit a certain amount of jars to boil at a time. I would say that we used a ready made canning spice when we pickled our peppers and for me that turned out a bit too sweet for me with their being cloves and allspice in the recipe. I might just use individual spices like a few of the recipes I posted above, or this one from the Hartwood cookbook.
In other news I am super excited to go back to LA next month. I am already started on my list of places to go and things to see. Including Gjelina, listed above! Time to make reservations. I can’t wait to be biking down the beach in Venice and eating breakfast on the beach. Particularly after just seeing La La Land. If you haven’t seen it, you definitely should!
Also, I went to the Women’s March yesterday and it was amazing! I couldn’t be there for all of it, because of some other volunteer obligation that I had. But it was so amazing, and I am vowing to try to do this 10 actions in 100 days. It is great because it is not an unrealistic goal to achieve and it makes it really manageable by breaking it up that way.