When Life Gives You Cucumbers...

Make Pickles.

In our garden the plants seem to grow well, but the volume of fruits & veggies is low. Our four zucchini plants have produced a grand total of 2 zucchinis. Not 2 each. Just two. We have seven pepper plants and to date we've seen a grand total of 6 peppers. Our tomato plants are producing a reasonable number of tomatoes, but very few have turned red relative to the total volume. The tomatoes in the gardens on either side of ours have not only been turning red, but due to very little involvement on the part of those gardeners half have fallen off to the ground half rotten.

Our cucumbers for some reason seem to be doing quite well on the other hand. I mean we're not growing cucumbers out the ears or anything but I've had a cucumber a day pretty much for the last two weeks. Meg made some cucumber water with lemon and mint out of one. I made pickles yesterday from a half dozen that came out of the garden yesterday morning. And they're still coming albeit a bit slower now than the last two weeks.

The pickles I made are a simple refrigerator recipe. Now we wait ten days for whatever happens during the wait to happen. But even as I filled the two jars we made I could smell the wonderful smell of good deli pickles. I just hope the wait is worth it. I'll be so disappointed if I screwed this up.

Speaking of pickles reminds me of one of my favorite Annie stories. When Annie was a baby, just old enough to start eating real food, I wanted to play a mean little "evil daddy" trick. We were out at a restaurant and Meg always order's pickles on the side of any meal she orders. We had been sharing our food with Annie throughout the meal. Annie was funny about food.. she always made the "mmmmm!" sound whenever food was around. If a pizza delivery guy showed up at the door and she saw the box... she'd make the mad dash towards whoever had the box making the "mmmmm!" sound. She loved food and ate anything we gave her. 

So we're eating at this restaurant and I decide to do this trick and hand her a two inch length of pickle, knowing she'll put it right in her mouth and expecting her face to go sour and for her to spit it out. But not Annie. She started eating that pickle like it was the finest thing she'd ever eaten. She loved it so much that it was kinda scary how quickly she was devouring it. Afraid that it would be too harsh on her little system I attempted to take it away and it was like trying to take a bone from a dog.. she growled and hissed and cat scratched at me. Okay she didn't do any of those things but she may as well have because the cry she let out  was one of the very few she ever made. She was not a crying baby, she was generally happy and gave us very little trouble as a baby and this behavior was foreign to us. She was not giving in until I gave her that "Effing Pickle" back.

I gave in and let her eat the rest of the pickle and then she wanted another. To get through the meal we had to let her have that second pickle. So Annie played the trick on me. But she wasn't done with the trick just yet. When we eventually got home and settled in for the night Annie projectile vomited green pickle juice all over us. No crying... no fussing... just a little green pickle vomit as a sorta thank you gift for that wonderful treat.

To this day Annie loves pickles and almost always orders them on the side of her dinners just like her mom. Sometimes she'll take just a few bites of the meal she ordered, but there's never a pickle to be found on our table at the end of a meal.