We just got back from FL yesterday (that blog post will come later this week as we still have tons of pictures to siphon through), so of course our food stores in-house were very low. At this point in our lives, we make just about everything from scratch and we had nothing. Clearly a gigantic grocery shopping trip was in order to both Whole Foods and COSTCO…and that’s when the day got out of control. While shopping, we decided that today was the day we would try pickling some of our freshly purchased produce items…we have been talking about wanting to do this for weeks, so it seemed like a perfect activity. We picked up several canning jars, vinegar, cucumbers, onions, beets and carrots (among many many many other items) for pickling.

After the morning errands, Jilly whipped up a fun new sammie recipe: “chicpea salad sammies” from a NEW cookbook that was given to Jill for her birthday from our lovely sister-in-law Julie Blandford (which she got from our super cute niece, Lucy, while we were in Disney last week).

Since we knew crappy weather was vastly approaching, we decided to head out for a few hours of sailing. A storm front provided us more than enough wind for a grand ol’ adventure on Sailing Vessel (S/V) Bosco. Once the white caps started to form on the water after about 2 hours, we knew it was time to drop the sails and head in.

As day rolled into evening, it was time to begin the ‘crazy’ part of the night. In the Challis abode, that means doing 176 impressions of an epoisde of ‘Portlandia’ where the two characters pickle everything they come across, while saying, “we can pickle that!” in excited overtones.

We found some great instuctions from our Clean Eating magazine and supplemented it with various google searches on the process. We have always wanted to try pickles, but since we were now stocked with tons of other ingredients, we also included beets, carrots and onions.

Overall, pickling is very easy, but it seems like overkill if you only jar one thing, since the work involved is the same whether you do one or many. It’s best to pickle lots of things at once since its easy to make the brine and spread it out. The beets were by far the most time consuming and EXTREMELY messy…and Jilly had to do those on her own since I was on the phone. She actually managed pickling beets while making vegan donuts with her brand new donut pan…pretty impressive multi-tasking if I do say so myself. Before she finished w/ the beets, I glanced over at her and it looked like bloody murder was commencing in our kitchen. By the end, Jill simply said

“I love pickled beets but from here on I will be buying them.”

 
Last Saturday was the offical ‘Fun Day” but we pretty much had a super fun time all day today as well. Tomorrow will likely be a snow day and of course we have various fun projects and hard training planned so stay tuned for more Challis Adventures.

Ohhhh side note: we discovered that we have a new friend living under our deck. Her name is ‘Mama Coon’ and she is super cute! She has 6 babies, as we learned today from one of our neighbors and has apparently lived with almost everyone in our hood over the past month. Today we found a laundry list of items that we can try to encourage them to leave. So after a quick trip to Home Depot we are now ready to evict Mama Coon. However, due to a huge snow storm coming and tomorrow being mothers day and all, we couldn’t bring ourselves to evict mom and her little ones, so they will have a few more days of peace until the weather warms up…then we will be as gentle as we can in getting them out of there and hopefully into a more appropriate home.