Easy Refrigerator Pickle Recipes – and How I Photographed Some of Them

What kind of pickles do you like? I love the tart, vinegary kind – not the sweet ones. A good friend of ours gave my boyfriend a great cookbook for his birthday. It’s called, “This is a Cookbook, Recipes for Real Life”. That was my inspiration for making pickles. They have some super easy pickle recipes in here (and loads of others too of course), and I have permission to share them with you.

This book was written by Max Sussman and Eli Sussman. They have several books and you can find them on Amazon (not an affiliate link btw). These brothers are very funny. They say, “Give pickled stuff as gifts instead of a lame bottle of wine.” Now, don’t get me wrong, I love the wine, but giving someone pickles takes time and is a thoughtful gift. This book is written very well and the photography is great too.

The Pickle Recipes

The authors called this recipe “48 Hour Dill Pickles”. These are the kind of pickles that you do not do the cooking, canning process with. That’s why they are called “Refrigerator Pickles”. You can’t store them at room temperature. They will last for several months in the fridge. I didn’t want to go through all the canning method stuff. I’ll learn that next.

 

I was lucky that Whole Foods had these Kirby cucumbers. The produce manager said they have a short season and the peak is June and July. If you can’t find Kirby cukes you can use Persian cukes too. It’s all about small delicate seeds, not the big seeds.

And Now for Pickled Beets!

So I grew up on pickled beets. The bright pink red ones that stain all your clothes. I found these beautiful golden beets and decided to pickle those instead of the red ones.

 

Photography Talk

Ok, so now for a little photography talk. Here is an image I did with all my pickles. My idea was to make this look like the county fair, and I won first place! In my mind, that is. The surfaces and back wall belong to my prop stylist friend Amy Paliwoda of the prop rental house, Surface Library. She also supplied the props for the 48 hour dill pickle shot above.

Here is the set for the shot above. I was trying to make the back wall look like the side of a barn or something you’d see in the country. I just love those garden lights hanging in the background too. This was lit with soft light from the left side and a fill card on the right side.

See the large black card on the left side? That is blocking light from hitting my back “barn wall”. This was taken with my canon 5D Mark II with a Canon 100mm macro lens.

To see how I put this image together in Photoshop and talk about using two images with two different depths of field, check out this guest post I did for Digital Photography School.

There you have it!

If you like this post, please share it on Facebook and sign up below so you don’t miss another post.