Pickles, Zucchini, and the garage

Jeremy spent the last few days making his favorite pickles: Honey & Curry Bread-and-Butter Pickles. He made some last year and loved them so he made even more this year. About 26 quarts I think.

The recipe is from Carla Emery: Slice about 30 small cucumbers. Soak 4 to 8 hours in a brine (1/2 cup uniodized salt and water to cover). Make a syrup of 1 cup honey, 4 cups sugar, 1 tablespoon curry powder, 1/4 cup mustard seed, 1 quart vinegar and bring to boil. Drain the brine off your cucumber slices and dump them into the boiling syrup. Boil 5 minutes, then pour into your jars and seal (i.e. hot water bath!)

I think Jeremy adusts the amount of sugar when he makes these. I'll take his word for it on these - I don't like anything pickled at all!



A friend of ours was out of town for two weeks and asked us to look after her plot in the community garden. After lots of rain and some good sun, her patch produced some of the biggest zucchini I've ever seen! (Well - I guess our friend J down the block has grown some pretty big ones too!) Luckily, E came back into town so we could hand off some of these monsters to her, as well as some beautiful cucumbers. We checked out our own small garden patch and saw one ripe tomato! Which was mostly rotten - blossom end rot. It's no surprise since the watering has definitely been sporadic at best. No more tomatoes in the community garden!



And... work continues on the pesky garage!

We got the west side primed(have to work on that door some more...)



We've been scraping and sanding a lot on the east side:



The north side is half covered by a pile of wood I need to move:



And the south side will be difficult to do. It is in this tiny alley that you really have to squeeze into:



We might only get the priming done by Saturday, but it looks so much better than the original peeling paint, I'm sure the city won't mind...hopefully!