A simple pickle recipe that's great for pickling broccoli, cauliflower, radishes, onions, cucumbers, and more!
I love cookbooks and I hoard them pretty obsessively. Although, I’ll admit, I have a hard time following recipes from start to finish. Which is why I love the premise of Kate Payne’s new book, The Hip Girls Guide to the Kitchen. It’s a “hit the ground running approach, seeing as you need to eat three times daily whether you’ve mastered your kitchen or not.”
It’s full of, really, everything you need to know to be pretty successful in your kitchen – from how to set up your pantry to how to put meals together intuitively and economically. (Also she’s gluten free, so she includes tons of dietary options). She offers suggestions for what to buy in bulk, (and what not to), tips for buying kitchen tools from second hand stores, plus tons of clever “hip tricks” along the way. (For example: did you know you can buy a refurbished Vitamix blender for a fraction of the cost? …me neither).
She’s truly your friend in the kitchen and her writing is charming, witty, and just fun to read. Some of my favorite sections are:
Equip your Ship: Setting up your kitchen without winning the lottery
Methodology & Madd Skills: Learning how to cook without books or your laptop
Kitchen Kick-Ass: Tapping into your inner depression-era granny
Using Stuff Up: Preserving projects any beginner can handle
Since I’m clearly a beginner at preserving projects, I instantly gravitated to her recipe for Any Vegetable Vinegar Pickles. Any recipe that has “any vegetable” in the title, is my kind of recipe. I chose cauliflower, broccoli, red onions, radishes, and cucumbers along with a few various spices. Her brine recipe was quick and easy to make. The hardest part is the waiting – she suggest stashing them in the back of your fridge and not touching them for at least a week, although she says 2-3 is the best. (We’ll see if I can hold out that long!)
Click here to go buy her book!
Also, be sure to check out Kate’s blog, as well as these fine fellow bloggers who have also written posts about the book: Food in Jars, Healthy Green Kitchen, Local Kitchen Blog, Autumn Makes and Does, Punk Domestics, Spinach Tiger, and Local Savour.
the giveaway is now closed, a winner has been notified
any vegetable vinegar pickles
- any vegetables you like (I used cucumbers, broccoli, cauliflower, onions and radishes)
- fresh or dried spices (I used peppercorns, cumin, coriander, mustard seeds, & caraway)
- 1 cup any kind of vinegar (I used white wine vinegar)
- 1 cup filtered water
- 1 tablespoon kosher or any non-iodized salt
- optional: 1 teaspoon sugar
- Wash and cut up your vegetables and pack them into a clean jar.
- Add between ¼ - ½ teaspoon of whole dried spices.
- Combine vinegar, filtered water and salt in a medium saucepan and bring to a boil.
- Put your just boiled brine over the vegetables in the jar.
- Wipe any vinegar spills from the rim with a clean towel and put on the lid.
- Hide the jar in the back of the friedge for at least a week. Two weeks is better, three is best.
- Keep them in the fridge for up to 6 months.
I used these Ball jars (and also the smaller version).
recipe published with permission from Harper Collins.
oooh baby i gotta start pickling radishes. i am always leftover with a ton after i use them for like one salad!
ok my best kitchen trick is ummm…. the best way to clean a cake batter bowl is by sticking your head in it and licking it!
Whenever I don’t have ricotta cheese on hand, I use cottage cheese instead. It’s cheaper and tastes similar, and noone in my family ever notices!
My best tip is to not feel like it has to be big to be right. I have a problem with canning: if I’m not doing 50 jars of something, I feel like it’s a waste of time, but since I nearly never have enough produce around to do 50 jars of anything, I just never get around to canning (or pickling, or what have you). You have to get out of the mind set that it isn’t worth it to do 4 jars for just yourself. It is worth it.
Everything you do is just so beautiful, a real work of art!!
ErinElizabeth
I love vinegar/balsamic. I wish I did know some fast easy ways to make these wonderful additions to a meal. Thanks : )
Whenever I have citrus rinds, I put them in a clean ball jar and top with white vinegar. I add more rinds and more vinegar as I collect them. After about 2 weeks, I pour off the vinegar and use it for cleaning around the kitchen. It smells better than straight vinegar and the citrus oils help with the cleaning.
Excellent tip ill definitely be trying this one thank you.
fantastic website by the way. following and subscribed plenty of inspiration.
If your potatoes are about to go bad, ferment them whole, put them in a large mason jar with salt and water, replace your lid with a paper towel, use the ring to hold it on, and preserve your potatoes until you need them. Fermentation is a great way to preserve your farmer’s market produce!
A tip that just came up today is that I freeze leftover ancho chilies. Most recipes call for 1-2 peppers, yet the smallest can has over a dozen peppers. So, I use what I need and then toss the rest into a freezer bag and then break off a pepper as needed once they’re frozen. They keep for months!
Love Kate’s blog! My small-kitchen trick is to hang measuring cups and spoons from hooks stuck on the inside of the cabinet doors. You have to be careful not to open them too fast, but it’s worked like a charm in my small kitchen!
I make my own yogurt, and about a year ago started making “Filmjölk” and “Piimä” – these are two Scandinavian yogurt cultures that are mesophilic, which basically means (to me) that they are even easier to make than “regular” yogurt. You literally throw in a tablespoon of culture into a jar, add milk, screw the lid on and shake, then leave on your counter for about 24 hours with the lid lightly sitting on top, and voila! I make up a new batch as part of my morning ritual every other day. Both are nice, mild yogurts that I use constantly at breakfast, to make salad dressings, in baking, and yogurt sauces with Greek and Indian food. I bought my starter through Etsy, but you could also get it through Cultures for Health. It’s an heirloom and so will last indefinitely!
This book looks awesome! My best kitchen tip is make ahead as much as you can for a dinner party so that you’re not slaving away in the kitchen when your guests arrive! Makes entertaining fun and stress free 🙂
I love to make my own vegetable and chicken broths. It makes the flavor of every soup or risotto you use it in have a great deal more depth. Plus you’re not filling yourself with all that nasty sodium that’s packed in the cube stuff. Gwyneth Paltrow’s cookbooks, It’s All Good and My Father’s Daughter, both have the recipes and they are well worth the buy! It makes plenty for freezing and the leftover chicken goes great on salads or sandwiches.
I like to plan my meals (at least a week in advance) and it helps with the shopping, what to pull from the freezer, dicing extra veggies for more than one meal, etc.
This is probably not much of a tip really (since I imagine a lot of people do it) but when I roast a chicken I put the bones and such in a freezer bag and toss it in the freezer until I have enough (and the time) to make stock. Homemade stock is so much better!
Have extra sets of measuring spoons and cups so you don’t have to stop and rinse.
I shred, chop, par bake as much as possible on Sunday afternoon & store it in glass containers in the fridge. It makes dinner prep easier on crazy rushed week nights.
Make your own salad dressing – its super easy and way better for you! Equal parts olive oil & vinegar (balsamic or red wine), pinch of salt, few turns of the pepper grinder, dollop whole seed mustard, and squirt of honey. I usually make it in a small pint jar – put on the lid and shake like crazy. Enjoy!
Make extra of something and freeze it. Especially baked goods.
I had an overage of zucchini from our CSA last year. I made about 12 mini loaves of zucchini bread and stuck them in the freezer. I’ve been pulling them out for weekend breakfast treats all year.
I think most know to do this – actually doing it is the problem – clean as you go! This is especially important for me when I’m doing a prep day on the weekend and I’m making several recipes. My other option: buy more bowls! 😉
Oh, I love this recipe- I think I’ll be using it a lot this summer. 🙂 I had an all-out love affair with pickled red onions last summer, and I’ve been wanting to pickle everything in sight since. 🙂 Oh, and since I’d love a copy of that awesome cookbook, here’s my favorite kitchen tip: Keep freezer “stock bags”! I keep a gallon-sized bag or container in the freezer and any time I’m prepping vegetables, I thow the peels, onion nubs, greens, anything into the bag and pop it back in the freezer. I keep chicken bones and beef bones in similar bags. As soon as they get full… I make chicken, beef, or veg stock! Nothing goes to waste and I have flavorful healthy stock out of the deal!
Hi, I was curious to know where you bought the jars for canning. I have them searched but could not find it with the screw cap, and also so beautiful to see.
Hi Laura, I got them on Amazon, I just put a link to the exact type at the bottom of the post under the recipe.