I’ve written before how me and my sister became enamoured with and acquired our glass mason jar lids. And how some of the old ones don’t fit today’s mason jars. In what has been an extremely satisfying development, I found a new use for these old odd-sized glass lids today.
I started my first batch of pickles ever this afternoon. Not your standard hot-vinegar canned type pickles, but hippie-style brine fermented pickles. With grape leaves top and bottom to add tannin. The plan is that they will bubble and stew at room temperature, and turn into delicious pickles, and hopefully grow all sorts of happy healthy probiotics along the way.
Our resident gardener fermented pickles last year. Not only were they delicious, we used the brine as a probiotic electrolytic pick-me-up, like concentrated pickle Gatorade. So this year, after the second big armful of pickling cucumbers hit my kitchen counter accompanied by the usual “veggie delivery!” cry, I decided that pickles were in my near future.
RG shared her online recipes, handed me her bag of pickling spice, her dill and her non-iodized salt and finally, brought me one more armful of pickling cukes. I was ready to begin.
It was as I was fitting the top grape leaves into the jars, trying to tuck them in so that, as RG had instructed, they were “like a cap, keeping the pickles totally submerged”, while thinking wistfully about the fancy set of glass pickle weights I had seen in the Lee Valley catalogue, that I remembered those glass lids. They would make perfect weights, if they fit!
And eureka, they did!
I’m going to have to hustle on back to that place with the whole basket of odd shaped glass lids, cheap because there are no jars they fit, and pick me up a few more pickle weights. A lot better price than Lee Valley, I can tell you that! Probably grab some for my sis and RG too.
