Garlic Pickles

So Monday was the first my second full day out of school for the summer, so naturally that means begin preserving anything that came out of the garden recently. This case was pickles. I used a recipe that my grandma gave me that my dad loves (and loved when he was a kid too). It came from a friend of my grandma's from West Texas named Mrs. Totsie Hines. It's a rather...sparse...set of instructions, but they serve well. It didn't have a processing time for boing water bath, so I do them for 10 minutes just because. It's the prevailing time that I came across from other pickle recipes.

Mrs. Totsie's Garlic Pickles

6 cups vinegar
13 cups water
1 cup salt (I used pickling salt)

Bring to a boil. To each jar of spears, add 2 cloves garlic, 2 peppers. Let stand 6 weeks. (I BWB for 10 mins.)

In this batch, instead of doing spears, I did thick slices and chose not to put peppers. Mainly because our pepper plants haven't a thing on them but flowers right now. But the recipe tastes great without peppers as well. Just don't eat a clove of garlic thinking it's a pickle. It doesn't say if it's for quarts or pints, but every time I've done them, I make pints and 2 cloves of garlic/2 peppers works for me in that size. I made 12 pints and ended up with a little under 2 quarts of liquid left over to make some more later.

I decided to keep the ends of the cucumbers and used them on Tuesday to make cucumber soap. Right now it's a nice green. I'll post that later once I get some pictures.