Easier Processing and Pickling

Last summer I wrote a pair of posts in which I dubbed myself the human food processor (see Part 1 and Part 2). It's the pickling time again, and today I picked what we need for bread and butter pickles (which I talked about before here):

I love bread and butter pickles, but man oh man are they a pain to make. Thinly slice four pounds of cucumbers and two pounds of onions. It takes for-freaking-ever. And makes you cry a lot. To give you an idea, the picture above is only about 1/3 of the amount of vegetable matter required.

That is why I am so excited about our anniversary gift from my in-laws:

Woohoo! It's a great, big Cuisinart! This made all the slicing and dicing go by at lightning speed (well, give or take 20 minutes to figure out how to use it without cutting myself). 

So fast! So beautiful! So uniform!

I was so impressed that I also used it to shred another giant zucchini for more zucchini bread:

Maybe I got a little too excited, because I forgot to add the grape leaves to the jars for the pickles. Ruh-roh. Hopefully they won't be too terribly mushy without them, but this pickle is kind of a eat-it-with-a-fork, relish-esque side dish, so maybe it won't matter as much as as it would with kosher spears. We'll see.

Anyway, here's a whole day's work in the kitchen, all packaged up and ready to store. Oh, plus another half gallon of green beans in the freezer. And it really did take almost all day — boiling all that water in the canner takes forever. Notice there are still two big zukes on the counter. It's kind of endless this time of year!