In the Kitchen | Key Limes & Cucumbers

Back in March I saw a post on Food in Jars about salt preserved key limes. I bookmarked it and finally the other day I saw key limes for sale at the store. In Florida we had a small key lime tree I grew from seed—even managed to get a few fruits off one year—and while most ‘wild’ citrus was oranges or grapefruit, I once came across a key lime tree! That’s a good find!

Staring at the photos on Food in Jars I was entranced and could just imagine sipping a homemade limeade from the juice I would ferment. Oh, it looked so good; I had to make it!

I sliced up the limes and instantly my mouth was watering, the tangy scent teasing my nose. But, I kept them for the jar and managed to put them into an old spaghetti jar we’ve kept around for pickles and other home preservation ideas.

Some juice managed to fill the bottom of the jar but like Marisa, the author at Food in Jars, I had to buy some lime juice to finish it off. I was able to find key lime juice at the store which made it even better—I would have settled for regular lime juice if I’d needed to.

The other thing I’ve been doing is making pickles with the insane amount of cucumbers we’re getting. Insane. I think I picked 30 within two days! We have so many claussen pickles right now and since they have to be refrigerated I am running out of room in my fridge for that type. We also have pickles still from last Fall so I wanted to make something else.

I ended up making some relish based loosely on a recipe I found online. I am not a sweet relish or pickle fan and every recipe I found had sugar in it. Even Googling ‘no sugar’ resulted in a recipe with Splenda. Dude. No. So, I just left the sugar out and adapted it for my needs. *I did have to drain the water from the veggies/fruits before putting in the vinegar concoction…because I used my food processor to chop everything up the water easily leeched out.*

The result was 5 pints of relish ready to be eaten sometime soon! These jars came from my mom without lids but I bought replacement lids at my local grocery store very easily. The jars are super cute and I’m glad to have found some way to use them. I’m probably going to make more soon and was thinking of making some kind of cucumber chow-chow too. Any other ideas for cucumbers?