Adventures in Canning: Spicy Pickled Asparagus and Radishes

This weekend in our first attempt to preserve our bounty, Chef Z and I settled down to make Spicy Pickled Asparagus, and since we had a few radishes from week 1 left over, those were thrown in the mix too.  We want to have the disclaimer that we are very very new to canning!  Chef Z has never canned and I only watched my mother do it for the past 20 years.  If you are planning to can food, please read and use recipes that are approved by the USDA or from a Ball canning book so that you can have the safest product possible.  Our recipe was from the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving with references from the blog, Sustainable Pantry, as it was a small batch.  Now Chef Z will explain the process and what he did!  I agree with M.B., I like to fuck around with cooking, but improper preserving can lead to a lot of disease and wasted product. So for this batch, I cut the asparagus in half so it would fit in the jar.

  The mixture was coriander seed, mustard seed, 4 chilis, 4 garlic cloves cut in half, black pepper, and some pickling salt. While we were sterilizing the ball jars, I took maybe 3 cups of White Wine Vinegar and brought it to a simmer, I then added all ingredients sans the asparagus and let that simmer for about 15 minutes. Once I was satisfied that all flavors had been added to the liquid, I added the asparagus and simmered for 2 minutes. After that I added the ingredients to the jar and sealed it up using a hot-water-bath canning method, we had to let it cool on the counter because if we had put it in the fridge the jar would explode and I can't have that cause I really like pickles. It was a lot of fun and I look forward to canning more in the future, we are going to be doing a lot of it next week because we are going on vacation for two weeks and can't afford to loose all our food.

--- Chef Z and M.B.