St Jacob’s Market Bounty
By Nico | August 10, 2012
I haven’t been to St Jacob’s Market since last October, and I may have over done it. It’s just difficult to resist so much fresh Ontario produce at such great prices. All this stuff on the left? About sixty bucks.
I bought, spiralling clockwise from the top, pickling cucumbers, two loaves of olive bread and a pumpernickel loaf, yellow plums, jalapeños, blueberries, yellow and green beans, strawberries, and fresh Ontario peaches. Out of frame are two large hunks of fudge I bought for my husband.
I’ll be canning for weeks. I still haven’t finished eating the stuff I made last year.
There are a ton of pickling cucumbers. I made two batches of spicy dill spears from a recipe found in Food in Jars, a beautifully designed book, written by Marisa McClellan.
The recipe calls them Classic Dill Pickles, but I added a little more chili, and from a drop of the brine on my finger, it seems quite spicy, though perhaps the flavour will mellow over the coming months. Either way, I’m excited.
Two batches amounts to eight 500 ml jars, about 30 cucumbers, and it looks like I haven’t even made a dent. I still have an absurd amount of cucumbers left over.
I recently made a batch of bread and butter pickles using cucumbers from my garden, but McClellan has a similar recipe that calls for red pepper, so I’m going to give that a go, as well as seeing what else I can make with them. I’ll probably make another batch of the spicy dill, and see about a mustard recipe too (sorry, Christine).
I have so many ideas about what I’m going to make. I need more jars.
Nico is a bibliophilic reader, writer, editor, reviewer, poet, blogger, hat wearer and kitten tickler. Nico's work has appeared most recently in Broken Pencil, The Antigonish Review, and Carousel, among other journals. Nico tweets as @plutopsyche.
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