Our cucumber vines are bearing many fruit. So many that, despite eating the cucumbers in salads every day, we still have a lot. It must be pickle time!

Today, I picked 8 pounds of cucumbers and processed them into 8 quarts of sweet pickles. Recipe and procedure below the fold…

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It’s fresh produce season again, which is wonderful. That plus a little encouragement from Thug Kitchen has got me making fresh salsa and guacamole pretty frequently. Hooray for our house! In case anyone was wondering, here’s the OCD salsa I just made (OCD because I did all that tiny chopping by hand, sort of a meditation):

• 3 tomatoes (the roma kind, because they’re less juicy)
• 1/4 onion (it’s a darned big onion, this would be maybe 1/2 a regular onion)
• 1/2 a fuji apple
• juice of 1/2 a lime
• 1/4 bunch of cilantro
• 1 jalapeño
• salt

Quarter the tomatoes and take out the seeds and the juicy pulp around them. Slice the tomatoes into little tiny chunks. Chop the onion into little tiny bits. Slice the apple and chop the slices into little tiny bits. Cut open the pepper and remove the seeds, then slice it up into little tiny bits. Cut the cilantro into little tiny bits. Combine all these ingredients in a bowl and juice the lime over the whole thing. Sprinkle with salt, maybe 1/2 teaspoon. Stir it all together with a fork until it’s all mixed up. This is sweet and spicy and crunchy and not too soupy. It would be great on a tostada or in a burrito but it usually just gets eaten on chips while dinner prep is going on and then, whoops!, there’s no salsa.