Watermelon rind pickles!

I started learning to preserve around the time I started learning to garden--when I was about 4 or 5 years old. We lived in a one-bedroom milker's cottage outside of Tracy, California--my hometown. Tracy is in the San Joaquin Valley, which has some of the richest farmland in the world. We were poor, so we raised as much of our own food as possible--beef, chickens, turkeys, and, of course, vegetables. Some of my earliest memories are of trailing along beside my mother, planting hills of squash in what passed for our front yard.

One of the advantages of living in farm country is that you often have access to lots of produce in large quantities, whether you grow it yourself, buy it for cheap, or glean in the fields after the harvesters come through. So like most farm kids, I shelled a lot of beans and ate a lot of home-canned tomatoes, home-canned black-eyed peas, home-canned lima beans, and home-canned anything else my mother could get her hands on. As soon as I was old enough to be more of a help than a nuisance, I was enlisted as kitchen assistant. And so I learned to can.

When I was around middle-school age, we'd moved to town, but we still gardened, and every now and then Dad would still glean in the tomato fields. And I had graduated from kitchen assistant to tomato-canner-in-chief, since I was home all summer with "nothing better to do" (apparently watching The Price is Right and Family Feud didn't count as something better to do). So I got to can tomatoes--lots of tomatoes, tons of tomatoes, a positive plethora of tomatoes--in a hot kitchen in triple-digit heat. Thank heaven for our swamp cooler, or I probably would have passed out face-down in the pressure canner.

For some odd reason, I have fond memories of canning (masochism? Stockholm Syndrome?), so I picked it up as a hobby around the time my son was born over 18 years ago. I started with jam then bought a pressure canner and started preserving anything that would stand still long enough (my family have learned to stay out of my way when the canner and jars come out). I didn't have much of a vegetable garden this year--damn  grasshoppers!--but in my usual determined (deranged) fashion, I still found something to can. A few weeks ago, it was apple pie filling using apples gleaned (the nut doesn't fall far from the tree) from--I kid you not--a local dentist's office. They have several large apple trees on the property, and they let people pick the apples. I wonder what the dentist would have thought if he'd seen the 2.7 million pounds of sugar that went into my apple pie filling--but I digress.

After spending about 12 hours processing and canning apples, I never wanted to see another one of the dang things, but I still needed to feed my canning addiction. A trip to the local produce market revealed watermelons on sale. Watermelons. In Flagstaff. In November. Uh huh. But I couldn't resist pretending it's summer for a few more days, so I bought one. The watermelon itself was less than thrilling (duh, it's November), but it gave me an excuse to try something I've been curious about for years: watermelon rind pickles. I always figured they'd be nasty, but I tried some at a craft fair a couple of weeks ago and discovered they are delicious. And so, after an hour or so of peeling and cutting rind and 6 hours of brining and a couple hours of cooking, I have: 3 pints. 3 whole pints from the rind of an entire watermelon. *sigh* One of the hazards of preserving is losing heart when you see how much you started with, how much work you did... and how much you actually end up with. The cure is to crack open a jar and savor the delicious fruit of your labors.

If you want to make watermelon pickles, it's easy to find a recipe. I used the one in my Ball Blue Book, but you can find a bunch of them online, including some with illustrated instructions. There's a recipe on the Ball site that's similar to the one I used, only mine includes other spices besides cinnamon. And since they only need a boiling water bath, you don't need a canner--just a large pot. What are you waiting for? Get a watermelon and get canning!