Guess what I'm doing this weekend

Do these give you some clues?

That's a half bushel of sweet peppers.

Pickling cucumbers 

If you guessed making and canning sweet pickle relish you'd be correct. I will probably also make bread and butter pickles because we go through them quickly and they're not something you can dobuy in the store. If I still have cucumbers left over, I'll probably make some dill pickles as well. They're actually the quickest of the pickles I make. And maybe I'll decide we need a lot more dill pickles, in which case I'll have to go buy more cucumbers. 

The relish is not going to use up all those peppers, but the price was far too good to pass up. I'll slice/chop and freeze them in recipe sized amounts. Did you know you can do that? Freeze them as is then put them in recipes where they'll be cooked? The same goes for onions. Neither would be good to eat raw, but they're fine in things. Plus, it's super easy to just take pre-chopped peppers or onions out of your freezer. I'll freeze them on baking sheets then put them in bags with my vacuum sealer. That way I don't end up with one large mound of frozen vegetables. 

The reason I bought all the vegetables was that I needed to go to our local farm stand for tomatoes and corn. We were having a kind of goodbye to summer dinner of BLT's and corn on the cob. I realized that we were nearly out of mayonnaise, which would be a tragedy for BLT's. Costco isn't in the budget until next week, so I stopped at our local chain grocery store to get a small container to ride us over. 

You know you are part of a large family when you come home from school, see the small jar of mayonnaise on the counter, and everyone joins together to ooh and ahh about how cute the tiny jar of mayonnaise is. The "so cute and little" jar of mayonnaise in question.




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