How to Make Quickles

That’s quickles, not quickies. Quickies are a whole other blog post – stay tuned for that one.

But this post is about quickles.

Quickles are pickles, yes, but this not a homesteading journal. I’m not preparing you for the apocalypse (sorry, hubbie). I’m not a housewife-gone-wild, growing and canning my own food (sorry, Barbara Kingsolver). Quickles aren’t even a fancy recipe, or a recipe at all.

They are something far better than any of that.

There are other refrigerator pickles, but none as lazy and cheap as mine. It’s like how I keep leftover bread ends to make breadcrumbs or freeze the coffee dregs for coffee cubes. I splice expensive detergent with the cheap stuff; I add water to my hand soap. It lasts longer that way. I reuse fried-food breader, sieving out the little meat or seafood hunks before coating the next entree. I didn’t live through the Great Depression, but I was raised to cry over spilt milk.

I’ve made real pickles before, and they were good, but those real pickles took real effort. There’s no beating a homemade bread and butter pickle, yet, I’d argue that a bread and butter quickle is nothing to pucker your lips at.

I was even canning last month – eight quarts of crushed tomatoes – per the Ball Blue Book from 1982, the year I was born. That recipe recommends fifteen minutes processing time. If you have an older Ball Blue Book, like we did at the farm, it’s ten minutes, maybe less.

I’ve heard that’s because tomatoes are less acidic than they used to be. But I think it’s like anything else now – we’re overdoing it. We’ve raised expectations too high. We gift enough at Christmas to make the sides of the house bulge. We work longer hours and run side-hustles. We want everything, right now, and it’s impossible.

There are times when less is more, when good enough is perfect.

If you look up canning tomatoes on the Googles now, you’ll see recommendations for 45 minutes of processing time.

If you make quickles, it’s zero minutes:

Quickles Recipe

1. Eat all your pickles (we like gherkins)
2. Put something else in the pickle jar, like sliced cucumbers
3. Put them back in the fridge
4. Eat them in a few hours, up to a few days
5. Repeat until the pickle juice looks gross

You could throw onions in your quickles, or peppers, hard-boiled eggs, or a shoe. Surprise me.

And if you’re looking for a fancier recipe, try this one. This lady’s refrigerator pickles look the way I imagine mine looking while I eat them – homemade, gourmet, crisp and fresh. But I’ll settle for good enough. And I’ll enjoy it. Now back to the quickies…

by Jessi Waugh