three bowls

There is an episode of the Simpsons with a relatively brief joke that has become my go-to metaphor for getting blocked by too many things.

Montgomery Burns goes to the Mayo Clinic for his first check-up in ages, where they have some rather alarming news for him.

Here, why don’t I let Wikipedia do the work for me? Crowd-sourcing, it’s what all the writers are doing these days. If it’s good enough for the New York Times, it’s good enough for me.  

"Burns discovers that he not only has all existing diseases (including pneumonia, juvenile diabetes and a little bit of hysterical pregnancy), but thousands of diseases the doctors apparently have just discovered in him. However, the sheer amount of diseases prevents any one disease from actually doing harm to him (a condition the doctors call 'Three Stooges Syndrome)."

My tendency towards excess often runs directly into my separate tendency towards getting confused into immobility by excess.  So I get a lot of mileage out of this imagery.

I am at that point with posts for this site. I have a few posts that just need some editing to be ready, a bunch of dishes I’ve photographed that I could write about, and some new recipes to post that can then be organized into Menu Ideas. I also keep trying to develop a narrative or some kind of structure (salads! eating meals!) and then that doesn’t happen in an orderly fashion and I become even more confused.

So when trapped on the phone today for work I edited some photos and decided to maybe just start sticking some stuff up here regardless of the narrative tidiness.

In this case: Refrigerator Pickles. Mainly: why not?

I mean, pickles are actually kind of expensive for what they are (mainly water).  You have to imagine that what you are really paying for is the cost of transporting heavy glass jars of liquid.

And, it turns out, refrigerator pickles are pretty easy and quite tasty. Summertime is cucumber season, so if you, like me, have never tried making fridge pickles, I say go for it.

The recipe I tried was this one for Dill Chips from Martha Stewart. I didn’t have the dill seed so I skipped that, but think I’ll use them in the future for even more flavor.

The process is simple, salt the cukes for a bit to get rid of some of the excess water and rinse them.

Put them with the dill weed in a jar, boil the other ingredients, and pour it all over the vegetables.  Stick it in the fridge and in a week you have made pickles, my friend.

By using the fridge, you don’t have to deal with the frightening elements of botulism. (Recently went to a canning class where I was terrified out of my Laura Ingalls Wilder dreams of a dark and cool root cellar with walls lined with shelves full of preserves. Any activity that requires your attention to never wander, like neurosurgery, or stunt driving or, apparently, canning, is off the list of options for this space cadet.)

You have to wait a little while for them to be ready, and yes, fishing them out of the dill-filled brine is a bit like navigating a particularly sea-weedy beach.

But delicious, and with a least a mild frisson of Handy Homesteading.

I especially enjoyed these pickles on a sandwich with sharp light Irish cheddar, some avocado, mustard and tomato.  They were also great diced in an egg salad as a more flavorful alternative to the usual celery.