Why I'm A Pickleidiot

Let's start out by being honest - Emily is a much better cook than I am. She doesn't think that's true, because she uses recipes a lot and I tend to cook freestyle, but the fact is that I'm good at making a dozen things that way, and she's good at making pretty much anything she tries. But even though she may disagree about who the better cook is, she's smart enough to be wary when I try something new (she learned that in a disastrously failed experiment involving a soup that included both beer and cinnamon, which I conceived after a number of beers).

Anyway, so I made pickles. Regular pickle spears. No big deal. Cut the pickling cucumbers, put them in the sterilized jars, make pickle juice with vinegar, sugar, and a few spices, pour it over the cucumbers, put on the lids, and then boil them in the water bath canner. Simple.

Except I'm an idiot. So, instead of using narrow-necked jars, I used wide-necked jars, and the pickles floated up to the top. I kept pushing them down. And then they would float up. Down. Up. Down. Up. And somewhere in there I began to feel very, very stupid. So I just put them in the canner anyway, sticking up above the juices. Now, I'm not sure whether they will last less long this way, but erring on the side of caution means that we'll have to eat them within two months, instead of saving them for the winter. Which sucks, and it wasn't until today that I realized the problem was the type of jars I used. Emily, meanwhile, immediately assumed that they would be mushy and terrible because, well, she remembers the cinnamon beer soup. Luckily, they turned out to be pretty darned good.

But I'll have to do the pickles over again. Luckily, pickling cucumbers are really cheap.