I made pickles a couple weeks ago. It’s not a very good story. Our garden produces cucumbers at a way faster rate than my wife and I can eat them. I bring them to work sometimes and give them out, but I think people think I’m weird for distributing cucumbers in the office. On Saturday I gave about 15 cucumbers out to the guys I play baseball with, but by now we have a whole refrigerator drawer full of cucumbers again. It’s nuts.

Half the cucumbers we get are the type that’s good for pickling, and since pickling preserves cucumbers and pickles are totally delicious, turning our excess cucumbers into pickles seemed an obvious decision.

There are many pickle recipes on the Internet and I used one of them. I can’t find it now. It was extremely easy. I put water, vinegar, salt, sugar, dill, garlic and pickling spices in a big Tupperware container then left in our refrigerator for two weeks. I threw in a kung pao pepper from our garden too.

The hardest part by far was waiting for the pickles to pickle the first few days. But then after about a week, the container got pushed to the back of my fridge and mind and I stopped feeling the bizarre need to incessantly check on them as if anything was going to happen.

It turns out, the pickled pickles look like pickles:

Turns out they taste like pickles too. Not like overwhelmingly strong pickles, more like the big half-sour deli pickles you get at Ben’s. Pretty delicious, with a really good crispy snap to the skin and a touch of spiciness from the hot pepper.

I’m satisfied. I have successfully decreased the size of my pickle footprint. Thought you should know. I’ve got a line on a pork butt, and I’m looking forward to slicing a couple of these up and using them to top off pulled-pork sandwiches.