Refrigerator Pickles

It's mid-summer at this little place here, and I have made a couple batches of refrigerator pickles all ready.  They are really easy to make, and while I'm not fond of them (I prefer my cukes as dill pickles rather than any other form of cucumber product), DH and the kids love them.  So I make batches and batches of them from mid-summer until the Fall frosts kill the cucumber vines.  Like I said, they are really easy to do, require only 4 ingredients, and make a great healthy snack for my family.

If you want to make your own, just take some cucumbers, either nice slicing cucumbers from the store or farmer's market if you're not growing your own, or some of the oddball ones from your own garden.  I usually can the decent pickle-sized ones and serve the beautiful slicers in salads or on sandwiches, and make refrigerator pickles out of the 'reject' ones: the twisted, gnarled, bug bit, one-end-going bad, overgrown, sunburnt, or otherwise funky cukes.

This year's inaugural batch of refrigerator pickles was made with some way overgrown pickling cukes I 'discovered'; they had been tiny bumps behind blossoms before all our rain, and by the time I got to the garden afterward they were bloated things nowhere near the size to fit into a canning jar.  So. . . refrigerator pickles it is!

1. Wash your cukes if needed.  If from the store, I definitely would, from my own garden I don't bother unless they have dust on them or got splashed with mud during a recent rain.

2.  Peel the skins off.

3. slice in rounds about 1/4" thick.

4. place in a shallow dish

5. sprinkle with salt (I used canning salt, saving the free-flowing stuff for our salt shaker that goes on the table)

6. cover with a 50/50 solution of white vinegar and water

7. place on a shelf in your refrigerator

They develop more flavor if you let them sit overnight before eating any, but that rarely happens here.  DH is usually snitching some right as I am mixing them together if he's home, or as soon as he discovers them in the fridge if he was at work during the assembly.

I can't tell you how long they stay good for in the fridge.  At this little place here they are often gone within 48 hours and the troops are clamoring for another batch.