No, I am not sending a greeting to a musical instrument. Instead, this is my homage to Chow Chow, a slightly zippy pickle relish usually based on cabbage.
Mine does have cabbage, but the backbone of this pickle is cauliflower. And, really, I was making this long before folk were ricing and dicing and pizza crust making with the stuff, so mebbe call me a trend setter.
So, pull up a big pot and get to chopping veggies, there are rather a lot of them.
INGREDIENTS
•10 cups chopped cauliflower
•4 cups chopped carrots
•4 cups shredded cabbage
•3 cups sliced jalapeño
•3 cups chopped red pepper
•2 cups diced onion
•5 cloves garlic, minced
•1-1/2 cup sugar
•2 tsp pickling salt
•1 tsp tumeric
•1 tsp Aleppo pepper
•1-1/2 cup water
•4 cups white vinegar
Stir the vinegar together with the water, sugar, pickling salt, tumeric, and Aleppo pepper in a large (six or eight quart) pot and bring to a boil.
Boil for four minutes, then stir in the veggies.
Note: you are gonna be concerned that you should’ve found a bigger pot; but just cook and stir and chill, as you can see, the veggies will reduce quite a bit as they cook.
Cook the veggies for five minutes, until the mixture is nice and hot, then prepare to process – you will get seven pints in total.
Bring a large canning pot of water to a boil, I always add one cup or so of white vinegar to the water; it neutralizes any minerals or salts in your water and keeps you from ending up with cloudy canning jars.
Ladle the hot mixture into sterilized canning jars – I use my dishwasher for this, but 20 minutes in a 225º oven works, too.
Add pickling liquid to cover the veggies in the jar, then run a wooden skewer through the jar to remove any air bubbles and settle the contents.
Place a sterilized lid on each jar, then screw on a band using your fingertips – you do not want or need it to be screwed on super tight.
Process in the boiling water for 15 minutes, then remove the jars to a rack. You should hear them “pop” which means that the seal has set.
You can check the seal by pressing in the center of each lid. If it doesn’t move, the jar is sealed. If the center of the lid does click down when pressed, you are still good to go. If the center pops back up, open the jar and check that there is nothing between the jar rim and the lid, then reseal and reprocess.