Serbian Lily-Nuts (бели лук)

I do go out of my way to avoid being politically correct, do I not?

One of my long-planned projects has been to clean and pickle some garlic cloves. Mixy likes to dig them out of the bottles of pickled peppers and dill pickles; we sometimes have a difference of opinion over who gets the last one in the bottle. Therefore it simply made sense to pickle some cesnak and forget the peppers and cucumbers for the moment.

This required that I peel the cloves first, and it took about 45 minutes per cup to get the three cups of Serbian lily-nuts I needed.

I also had to get some bottles of a proper size collected. Since I don't throw away very much stuff (pack rats prevent litter!) I had some 8 ounce jars from various items -- jelly, fancy roasted peppers, etc. -- on the shelf in the basement. They just needed some cleaning and boiling.

Then I had to scale down the recipe for the pickle. Obviously, I was not going to need 5 quarts of pickle. The following was the starter:

Just to make it easier, I decided to use the dill pickle variant, which calls for a 1:3 vinegar:water ratio. That meant that for 2 cups of pickle, I would need 1-1/2 cup of water, 1/2 cup of vinegar, and converting cups to teaspoons (48 tsp:1 cup) 5 tsp salt and 2-1/2 tsp sugar. I mixed that together in a saucepan and brought it to a boil.

Meanwhile, the bottles and their lids were hauled out of the boiling water, drained, and a nice sprig of dill was put in each. Dill? Yup, frozen from last summer.

Then the bottles were filled with the lovely cloves and the hot pickle was poured over them, filling the bottles to the bottom of the threads.

The lids were screwed on loosely and the bottles put back in the boiling water bath for 10 minutes. Then I let them go for another 3 minutes, just because.

Removed from the boiling water bath, the lids were given a final tightening and they were allowed to cool until the lids clicked down.

Of course, this stuff now has to age a bit. For that reason, I hid them from Mixy. Ha. Ha. Ha. When I think they have aged long enough, I will take them out of hiding.

Of course, I have more garlic in the garage that I can peel and can. I should probably do that, since I had quite a bit of it dry up on me last winter because it didn't get used. This is a good way to turn it into snack food. I also thought about sprinkling some hot red pepper in each jar but today was Be Kind to Mixy Day. Maybe next time.

I'm also going to have to investigate getting a beer bottle capper. Granny often told how, after moving to Canada and setting up housekeeping during the Depression, she and her sisters would scavenge beer bottles from the dump for canning tomato juice (Mason jars were nearly luxury items then). It would be fun to can garlic and chili peppers and salsa and home-made ketchup in beer bottles.

Just another project to have on the back burner for when I have nothing else to do...