We had 2 bunches of celery in the fridge I figured might go the way of generations of bunches of celery before them: get soft and banished to the compost pile.
I’m not sure where the celery came from. Maybe left over from one of Sara’s functions. High time to try pickling it. And something to do on a healing hip to kill some time.
Yesterday, I pickled 2 wide mouth jar-worths of the first bunch for the refrigerator. Tried them this morning: freakin’ exxxxxcelent.
So today, I’m canning up the other bunch since we already have a packed fridge. I found a recipe that said to use 6 cups vinegar (I had organic apple cider vinegar from Costco), 2 cups water, and a half cup of canning salt for the pickling solution for canning celery. I added some spices that taste like lemon that I’d dried behind the wood stove, leftovers from our weekly Juneau Greens order.
The chopped celery bunch filled 10 wide mouth half pint jars, to which I added a third of a hot pepper to each jar.
I boiled the pickling solution to dissolve the salt, then filled the jars, put on reusable Tattler gaskets and lids, put the jar ring on hand tight, and put the jars in a pot of water heating on the stove.
After 10 minutes in the boiling bath, I pulled the jars out and cranked down the rings. You have to do that with the Tattler lids. I looked at my handiwork. A little disappointing in that, just like rhubarb, the celery softens and floats after the boiling bath so that the jars aren’t filled near as full as when I packed them raw, but that’s how it goes. I’ll let these set a few weeks to mature and see what we got.
