Pickled Vegetables

I was taking lunch round to a friend's house recently so made an eggless fennel quiche and decided to accompany it with some pickled vegetables.

I don't recall ever pickling vegetables before, actually.  I make chutneys and sauces, but don't normally pickle.  So it was a fun thing to try.

As my hubby hates the smell of boiling vinegar, this was a job for outside!

I pickled pearl onions (white, yellow and red), some carrots, some radishes and beetroot.  Hands down, the onions won! They were wonderful.  But naturally, they were the most work with the peeling however!

I used a recipe from Bon Appetit magazine and the only things I changed were using coconut nectar sugar instead of white sugar and omitting the oil.

Here's the Pickled Vegetable Recipe

The recipe mentions that you do the beets last so the vinegar doesn't go red on the veggies, but actually the vinegar went red with the radish color!  The radish were my least favorite actually, as they lost all their color and just looked washed out and had lost some flavor.

So my recommendation is skip the radish and if you have the patience, do more onions!

Pickled vegetables are a good portable food, as you can put them in nice jars, and also pair really well with richer foods. They have a good crunch and the vinegar cuts through the richness of what they accompany.

And talking of Pickles, we do enjoy the comic strip Pickles - here's today's in case you don't know it: