Pickles, eggs and fish

We bought some dill and ½ bushel of pickling cucumbers last Saturday at the market in Welland. I washed them and put them in a cooler to which I added pickling salt, water and ice, and held the cucs under the water with a weighted cookie sheet. I left the cooler closed overnight and started my pickling in the morning. The cucs were crisp and salty. I must admit that I ate a few in the process. Or how else would I have known that they were crisp and salty?

Dill Pickles
20-30 small cucumbers, about 3 inches each
powdered alum
fresh dill
garlic cloves

Make a brine with:
1 cup of coarse medium salt (pickling salt)
3 quarts water
1 quart cider vinegar
grape leaves from the vines in the woods

Wash cucumbers and let them stand in cold, salted water with ice overnight.
Pack them into clean hot jars. adding to each jar:
2 heads of dill, at leasat 1 clove of garlic and 1/8 teaspoon alum.
Combine salt, water, vinegar and boil.
Fill the jars with the boiling liquid, add the leaf and seal.
Hot pack for 5-10 minutes.

We can buy local free-range chicken and eggs on both sides of the border. We are also buying local honey with the thought of curtailing our use of sugar, which is not exactly or not at all, local. We have ordered part of a cow and part of a pig for the fall. It is hard to know how much we will need. The Welland farmers’ market on Saturday morning has lots of meat booths. It seems to have more than other markets. There is a chicken and quail farmer from Dunnville, Ontario, not far west from us. He sells chicken eggs from small to huge sizes that I didn’t realize exist. He also has quail eggs in packages of 18. I hard-boil them, shell them and serve them on tooth picks with a mustard/sour cream for dipping. I hear from my daughter Holly that the markings on each egg is specific to the bird from which it came and the all eggs from any one bird have the exact same markings. Amazing!

I am feeling really good about putting food away for the non-growing times. I am not happy, however, that I need to rely upon electricity for my freezer. I can’t can everything and really don’t want to, actually. Canning chicken is a little scary to me. I prefer to freeze it. At least I can trust my freezing ability.

There is great fish at Minor Fisheries at 176 West Street (905.834.9232) on the Welland Canal in Port Colborne, Ontario. They have their own fishing boats that fish the north side of Lake Erie. The lake perch is tender and melts in your mouth after a simple pan sauté. They also have a smoker out back. I really like the smoked whitefish; but mind the bones; and the smoked pickerel.