Food experiment

I successfully pickled okra. Remember that? Two weeks ago? Yea, it came out really good. The okra is crisp – much more crisp than store-bought. It’s very spicy (probably because I added way too much red pepper flake), but it’s not so spicy as to be unbearable. I like it.

Most importantly, I clearly sterilized everything correctly, because I ate some last night and am still alive. That’s good news, because that’s the part I was most worried about, and despite my best efforts, ended up half-assing it, because that’s just how I roll.

Still, I can say that I have successfully pickled something.

This is a jar of pickled okra that I made. I’m a pretty big fan of store-bought pickled okra, but I also feel that most store-bought items are inferior to homemade. So I combined:

1/2 tablespoon mustard seed
1/4 tablespoon whole peppercorn
2 cloves garlic, smashed
A bunch of red pepper flake
A heaping tablespoon of kosher salt
A bunch of fresh dill
1 cup bottled water
1 cup rice wine vinegar
A bunch of okra

Take the dill, garlic, peppercorns, mustard seed, dill and okra and jam it all in the jar. Boil the vinegar, water and salt, and then pour it in. Bam. That’s it. The complicated part is sterilizing the jar (which is an old pickle jar I saved). That involved steaming the crap out of it, and using also-sterilized tongs to move stuff around so as not to contaminate them with my bacteria-carrying skin.

Two weeks in the back of the fridge and it’s either going to be a filthy, moldy mess because I did a half-ass job sterilizing everything, or they will be little okra-shaped flavor bombs. My fingers are crossed for the latter.