Stand in Awe of my Cukes

I ran some vital errands.

First, I got me some new canning jars and lids. Now I have enough to make the effort worthwhile. Then I found diesel at the incredible price of $2.68 per gallon. Around here, that’s cheap. If you drive around Miami, you’ll see $2.90 fairly often. Then I got me a bunch of pickling cucumbers. After that, I loaded up with two picnic hams. These are uncured pork shoulder parts. Should be good for sausage.

My plan is to brine the pork with baking soda to kill the taint. Then tomorrow I’ll do my best to make sausage and can it. It should work out to about $1.50 per pound. I guess it would have been smart to find out what ordinary sausage costs. For all I know, it’s less than that. But I don’t care. I want my canned sausage.

I learned something important. Costco is the pork source. Winn-Dixie is supposed to have whole shoulders for 79¢ per pound, but they were out. I can get gorgeous loins for like $1.79 at Costco, so presumably their shoulders are a lot cheaper.

I’m going to put calcium chloride in my pickles to see if it makes them crunchy.

Tomorrow I have to go to Northern Tool and get a meat grinder. I got my jars at Goodmans.net (their warehouse is nearby), and they sell grinders, but they were out of stock.

That place is hilarious. Every canning item in the universe–and most other items–is available there. They have a bank of pretty young latinas who help you with your order. I think they think it’s funny that a grown man comes in and fills his diesel pickup with Ball jars.

I’ll look less silly in the post-Obama wasteland, when everyone is starving and I’m stuffing myself with delicious canned sausage and dried apple pies. I’ll be sitting on top of the world.

More

Let’s see. I bought seven packages with four cucumbers in each. I ate maybe two and a half cucumbers. Now I have about 27 cups of slices. So each cucumber makes about one cup of slices.

Good thing to know, next time I shop for pickling cucumbers. Which should be in 2013, given that I just bought 50% more than I intended. I’m going to have a dozen pint jars full of these babies.

I checked into beans for pickling. The big pole beans were incredibly expensive. Like $2.50 per pound. The smaller green beans just didn’t look suitable.

I don’t know why the cucumbers I bought were labeled “salad cucumbers,” and I don’t understand why people call them “pickling cucumbers.” They taste a lot better than the nasty, greasy, waxed jumbo cucumbers I used to buy. I am all done with those. These are superior.

I can’t stand wax on my food. Think about it. You have some dirty guy in the back of the store, picking his nose and spitting, waxing the cucumbers with a filthy rag. And the wax permanently traps the filth on the food. It’s very hard to remove. And what is wax made from? Is it petroleum? I don’t want to eat that stuff. It’s a fat, for sure. What will it do to my arteries? I can’t even guess.

This is going to be beautiful, but once it’s done, I won’t get to practice again for months. I guess that’s the point, however.