Pickling tutorials, highbrow-lowbrow fare over here

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This morning, Oliver and I hit the jackpot at the farmers market and came home with tons of: potatoes, summer squash, cherries, Methley plums, chicken, carrots and garlic scapes. He also chose and devoured a buffalo jerky and the most divine cream-cinnamon popsicle. He is now, however, grossing me out by dipping animal crackers in his cup of water, then eating them and drinking the cloudy, crumb-infested water. Disgusting. Today I am excited to launch Em-i-lis video embeds. These first two are live tutorials of me pickling fresh baby squash. I find that visuals are often a nice accompaniment to written instructions. Hope you enjoy!

Garlic scape pickles, vanilla sugar, rhubarb crumble

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The pickled garlic scapes are beautiful and are in the water bath now. I used a recipe by foodinjars' Marisa McClellan but, in addition, added a clove of garlic to each jar. After their week of rest and pickling, I will let you know how they are. With the amount of scapes I had, I made two pints plus a bit for the fridge, so I might taste along the way as well. I also wanted to let you know about a marvelous tip I learned last weekend during the canning demo I attended: you can re-purpose seeded vanilla bean pods! As Marisa was making strawberry-vanilla jam, the cost of vanilla beans came up. Not only can you buy them in bulk (she recommended vanillaproductsusa.com) which is much less expensive than one-off purchases at the store, you can rinse and dry them for reuse. After making my batch of strawberry-vanilla jam, I rinsed, dried and then immersed mine in a jar of sugar. You can also submerge vanilla beans in vodka to make homemade vanilla extract.

Lastly, as if I were blind but then could see, I've just realized that I still have an enormous amount of rhubarb in my fridge. Yo! I think I'll chop and freeze some and with the rest make a rhubarb crumble for dessert tonight/breakfast tomorrow. Sounds so darn good, yes?

Off to fetch the pickled scapes from their bath.