i attended a russian pickle making workshop last evening. it’s very easy to make pickles when someone else does all the prep work for you! i learned some stuff about pickling (like leaving the cucumbers in cold water for 3-4 hours before pickling them) and enjoyed the class. there was an older, white-haired woman there with too-short khaki pants, white socks, black tennies and a t-shirt with daisies that said “whatever” on it that cracked me up a little. i think the class was about “russian” pickles because the guy who was teaching it was from russia. the pickles tasted pretty much like pickles to me. garlicky and yummy.
at the beginning, some guy was writing out the class information on a big notepad and using one of those “king” permanent markers. the smell totally took me back to grade school. i loved to help the teacher grade papers and play teacher when i was a kid because i liked the smell of the marker. i didn’t “sniff” them per se, but i liked the way they smelled. i also remember that my deepest, darkest secret when i was younger was that i liked the way fresh cigarette smoke smelled. i felt it was deeply shameful that i would like the smell, but i felt guilty about keeping secrets from my mom, so i eventually confessed to her that i liked the smell of cigarettes. i think it was kind of an “out-of-the-blue” statement and i remember that her response was pretty non-committal, so i ended up sort of getting over feeling guilty and also sort of got over liking the smell because it was no longer taboo for me to like it. i still like it better than the smell of stale cigarette smoke. i guess i liked second-hand highs. :)
i’ll let you know how the pickles turned out in 3 to 7 days when i let them stop fermenting and put them in the fridge.
i also made more peach jam and some bread last night because it wasn’t deathly hot in the house. yum!
