Smokey Mountain Breakdown

I'm down to my last jar of these babies and they have been calling to me. You can keep your fried green tomatoes...Dill Pickled Green tomatoes are the absolute best! I'm going to make lots more next year. They are now my favorite pickle.

You can take these and put them on an antipasto plate with some fresh goat cheese and olives, then drizzle with Pompeian olive oil or Good Season's Italian dressing. Serve with some crusty Italian or French bread.

I used The Ball Blue Book's recipe for these. I probably put more garlic cloves and messed around a bit with the dill ratio, but that recipe is good to go. I think I packed some jalapeno peppers in some of the jars as well. I probably left out the bay leaf.



Canning is super easy and very rewarding. If you use the Ball Blue Book and follow it religiously, you will not have any trouble. Always use the most recent edition of the Blue Book. Canning arts and sciences are constantly changing. What you find in your granny's old Norge Cookbook is probably no longer considered safe canning practice. Following USDA guidelines for home food preservation will take much of the fear out of your own canning experiments.

I have a long standing relationship with canning. It started when I was a child when each year, my mother would make dozens of pints of fig preserves. My father just couldn't get enough of the things, and they were very delicious. He liked them in peanut butter sandwiches, but I've always preferred them as a side to Smithfield ham.

We didn't have a fig tree, but there was an old black man named Sammy who lived on Calhoun Street in Bluffton who had some of the most beautiful fig trees you ever saw. More importantly, Sammy knew how to pick those figs just so for preserves. You see, you have to leave about an inch of stem on the fig when you pick it. That way, when you take one out of the jar, it already has a little "handle" to hold the sweet dripping fruit by.

This was something we did each summer. Sammy would deliver the figs in brown paper bags from the Piggly Wiggly and we would get started immediately cleaning them and getting them ready for the big vat of sugar, lemons and water simmering on the stove.

Mother also enjoyed making a number of other acid-based preserves. Not my favorite was the watermelon rind pickles. Indeed, no one seemed to like the watermelon rind pickles. They just seemed to sit on the holiday table as a testament to my mother's summer domestic endeavors. They were really pretty. I'll give them that.

I didn't start playing around with the other sort of canning until I moved here. That's basically because I'd been traumatized by my grandmother's exploding pressure cookers as a child. Mutt loved a pressure cooker. Every time she drug it out of the cabinet, I was escorted to a safer place in the house. I'm not sure there was a safe place. My grandmother's pressure cooker was the original IED. I can still remember the sound of that thing blowing the hood off of the stove and the falling shrapnel of the spice cabinet in the aftermath of the explosion.

But, I've cautiously re-acquainted myself with pressure cookers. Now I can green beans, soups, and other safely canned low acid foods. I do sort of cautiously back away from it when it starts making that rattling, hissing noise.

It's just one of those domestic arts I think everyone should have a go at. It's not that time consuming or difficult, but people do tend to get intimidated by it. Here in the mountains, many men also can. Pickled hickory king corn and beans is a favorite of my buddy Aurthur. The gentlemen also enjoy canning hot sauces, pickled peppers and barbecue sauces.

Do give it a whirl. There is nothing more satisfying than watching the appreciative faces around your dinner table in mid-winter when you put out something that tastes so strongly of those warm fruitful days of summer.