Zippy Li'l Pickles

Being of good Midwestern stock, I always viewed pickling as a noble but somewhat intimidating task. Lunch when visiting my grandma in downstate Illinois was almost always accompanied by glass dishes with homemade bread and butter pickles and green tomato relish. Both were amazingly good but my own effort to make her bread and butter pickles was a three day project with lots of vats of things like brine and boiling vinegar and sterilizing baths. And then had to wait to eat them.

I recently, however, got a new bookcase and have been shuffling around my rather extensive cookbook and culinary history and food writing books. In the process I was flipping though Elizabeth Andoh's lovely Washoku which hovers perfectly between cookbook and reference guide and stumbled across a section on making pickles.

But these were not huge undertakings. These were little projects. I had some radishes from my veggie box that were getting close to over the hill and decided they'd make good candidate for pickling redemption.

The base liquid for the pickles is:

• 1/2 cup rice vinegar
• 3 tablespoons sugar
• A bit of salt
• 1 inch square of kombu

It soaks together for about 20 minutes and then you heat it, which takes no time. Meanwhile the radishes were sweating under some course salt and then were rinsed, packed in glass and the cooled liquid poured over. They cured for about 30 minutes and then they were pickles.

They were lushy and addictive. And so simple. They were soon followed by a batch of pickled "blushing" ginger (like what you get with sushi, but fresher so with a bit more bite) and another batch of radishes.