Bread and Butter Pickles

Yesterday, Jasmine and I made Bread and Butter Pickles, which are Jensen's favorite. He asked where the name "Bread and Butter Pickles" came from. I didn't know, but this morning I used my Google Fu to find out.

According to egullet.com, they are named Bread and Butter, because during the depression they were as common on the dinner table as bread and butter.

That didn't seem right to me, since I remember my grandma saying she had them as a child, and that would have been before the 30's. So I kept searching.

Some sources said that during the depression people made sandwiches from them with bread and butter, (Yuck!) but again, I doubted that was the beginning of them.

The Journal of Home Economics in July of 1929 says that they were eaten with bread and butter instead of being merely a condiment. So, they were around before the Great Depression.

Then I found this on CooksInfo.com :

In case you have ever wondered where they got their name, GFA Brands, which owns Mrs Fannings, has supplied the background. In the early part of the [Ed: 20th] century Cora and Omar Fanning of Streator, IL found themselves short on cash. What they had going for them, however, was a reliable crop of cucumbers and Mrs. Fanning's great recipe for sweet & sour pickle chips. Mrs. Fanning worked out an agreement with a local grocer, who gave her groceries -- including bread 'n butter -- in exchange for the pickles. The name stuck, and has been used by many companies ... Although Mrs. Fanning's pickles began in the Midwest, they are not widely distributed there, but are more readily found in the Eastern, Southern and Western states." -- Feingold News. Feingold Association of the United States. Alexandria, Virginia. October 1996. Page 5.

"TWIN CITY PEOPLE in Other Cities. Mr. and Mrs. Omar Fanning were here from Streator Thursday, calling on relatives. Mr Fanning will go east today to close a deal with a large corporation for the sale of his pickle business in Streator. Among all the former Sterling people who have succeeded unusually well in other places, Mr. Fanning's success has been unique. He engaged in the business of raising cucumbers at Streator a number of years ago, and gradually developed a pickle business in order to use the small cucumbers that had been a waste product of his greenhouses. In time the pickle business became the main business and his products have met with immense sales all over the United States. A business regarded as in the millionaire class thus grew out of the thrift that prompted Mr. Fanning to make use of the waste product, and it is said that an old receipt for making pickles that had been in his family for two or three generations had quite a lot to do with the popularity of the "Bread and Butter" pickles which he originated and put on the market." -- Sterling Daily Gazette. Sterling, Illinois. 11 June 1926. Page 2 The Fannings went on to create a small pickle fortune.
All because of Bread and Butter Pickles.

Octopus Teapot

I pulled this out of the kiln, and am so pleased with how it turned out that I thought I would share:
I used a plain white porcelain teapot, and added iron oxide decals that I made from a vintage image I found at  the Graphics Fairy.

First, I printed the image out onto waterslide paper using my old printer.
I reversed the image for one side so the same tentacles can wrap around each side.  It looks great from the front!


I soaked the decals to loosen the backing paper, and placed and smoothed the decals.

After I applied the decals, I fired it to 2050 degrees F. in my electric kiln.
Now the image is permanent, and the teapot (with its image) is dishwasher safe.

And of course, the mugs that match are in my SecondChanceCeramics shop on Etsy.

My whiteware shop, SecondChanceCeramics on Etsy, has been featured on the A Little Etsy Love Blog.
I am giving away a mug there too, so head on over and get your comment in! I would love it if one of my readers won!

Heirloom Pole Beans

This year I decided to grow a different pole bean than I usually grow.  I want to grow mostly heirloom vegetables in my home garden, so I chose purple podded and rattlesnake pole beans. I also planted yard long beans.

Purple Podded Pole Bean Vine

The purple beans grew the first and fastest. The stems of the plant are purple, the flowers are a pretty violet,  and the leaves are a darker green than the other beans.  The beans start out green with a purple tinge, and then get solidly purple velvet over the whole bean when they are ready to pick.   The flavor is deeper than the Kentucky Wonders and Blue Lakes that I have grown before. Cooked, they turn a dusky green that is more blue grey than regular green beans. You can tell when they are just done by catching them the moment they turn from puple to green. Their flavor is sweet and grassy under the normal green bean taste.

Rattlesnake Pole Bean Vine

The rattlesnake beans haven't been the overachievers that the purple podded beans have been, but they flowered and grew beans pretty quickly after the purple ones. The vines aren't as tall yet as the purples, but I have gotten some large beans from them  already.  The rattlesnake plants are green vined with bright green leaves. The flowers are more on the pink side of violet. The beans themselves are flattish with stripes of purple mottling on bright green.  They get more purple mottling the bigger they are, it seems.  Only a few have made it inside to the cooking pot because they taste so good raw. Their flavor is green bean intensified.  Green bean to the second power, sweet and a little bit musky.

Purple pods with  rattlesnake beans

The yard long beans are way behind the other two.  They haven't started flowering yet, and are only about a foot high. I have grown these before, and they never climb very high -- only about to shoulder height. They also set beans a couple weeks after you are getting other beans pretty regularly, and they are not as prolific bearers. But, when they do grow beans, they really work at them and they grow them long and thin. I never waited for them to be a yard long, but instead picked them when they were smaller and sweeter, from 12 inches to 15 inches long. Their flavor was more savory and musky rather than sweet. Some people call them Asparagus beans because of the flavor.  I like the yard long beans for stir frying because they stay crisp in a stir fry and are uniformly narrow all the way down the bean, so they cook evenly over the high heat.

Purple podded vines next to Rattlesnake vines

An added benefit to growing these wonderful heirloom pole beans has been unforeseen.  In years past Japanese beetles (Gracie calls them japaneetles) have found my green bean vines about the time they reached head-high. I have done milky spore applications in the garden area to no avail.  Last year I broke down and sprayed tthe bean plants with Sevin, since the beetles were so bad it looked like we wouldn't have any veggies if we didn't.  Even though I spent an hour or more every morning tapping the vines with a stick to make the beetles roll into a bucket of sudsy water, they still ravaged the plants, especially the top third, which they ate down to the stems.  And each year, once they had found the beans, they infested every other vegetable too. My granddaughter didn't want to play in the bean tunnel, since with every vibration Japaneetles would fall on her head. I didn't blame her!

This year I haven't seen any of those horrible pests on the beans. I found a few on my roses in the front yard, and got them off pretty quickly, and they don't seem to be interested in these heirloom beans at all. This in turn means I haven't had a Japanese Beetle problem in my garden at all so far this year.  I am so happy! Wonderful, tasty, pretty heirloom beans and not a Japaneetle  in sight. Yay!

Winners!

Congratulations!
The winners for the Solstice Giveaway are:
Girl on the Net for the witch hats, and Ravenia for the soap dish.

Convo me on Etsy to give my your address, and I will mail these right out!

Thanks to everyone who played!

Happy Solstice Giveaway!

Happy Litha!

For this Solstice, I am giving away a soap dish from my latest kiln load, one made from folded clay slabs. Also, you could win a set of three witch hats. 

If you would like to win either of these, just leave a comment saying which you would like to win (or both if you want to be in the running for both of them!) along with how I can contact you (your etsy name, twitter, facebook, or something!).

Feel free to link to your shop or blog, if you have one.

Comments will be open until Midnight, June 24 (Sunday night). Then I will choose two comments at random on Monday to win them. Its that easy!

And while you are out and about, please check out my shop on Etsy, antb.etsy.com and SecondChanceCeramics on Etsy too. 

So, get to commenting, and HAPPY Solstice!

Windowsill Planters

A couple years ago, I was introduced to Global Buckets, and experimented with making my own from found objects. It was a great way to extend my food planting out of my garden.  I ended up giving away several that I started to interested neighbors.  I also made a few pots that had reservoirs and wicking systems but they were so labor intensive that I never even tried to sell one. They also were as heavy as heck.

Then last winter I read about Window Farms for the first time. I was fascinated.  If you don't know what window farms are, check out this blog post. I looked at my windows in a whole new way!  I started putting little potted plants with edibles in every sunny window that could hold them.  The problem was that most of my window sills could only hold the smallest pots because of the way they were shaped, and the smallest pots didn't work well for many edible plants.


I started playing with pot shapes that would work well for windows and yet were deep enough for herbs and  dwarf vegetables. I came up with a bag-like pot, made from thin slabs of stoneware clay, that was quite deep for its size. I planted the first ones I made, and they worked well.  Mache', summer savory, malabar spinach, chamomile, mint, chives, spinach, nasturtiums, basil and most other herbs, and even a strawberry plant all work well in these.

They hold moisture fairly well, probably since the top opening is small.

Watering them is easiest if I use an ice cream bucket that is 2/3's full of water mixed with organic fertilizer. Just put the little pots in and let them sit for a second or two, and hold them over the bucket until they stop dripping.  Then put the lid on the remaining water/fertilizer solution for the next watering.

If I lightly fertilize with each watering, my herbs grow very well in a sunny window, and they don't mind being cut back hard and often.

I am using all of my first batch of pots, but I just pulled a few more out of the kiln. So, if you want to buy one, please look in my shop. They each come with a simple little drip catcher.
I will be listing some over the next couple of days.
 Thanks!