Pickling time

With plenty of fresh fruit and vegetable around, autumn is the peak time for pickling.   I've picked hot chilly peppers and eggplants so far, and today I did lemon and ginger. 

I pickled lemons in Moroccan way.  It is actually quite easy when you get started.  The most time-consuming bit is to prepare lemons by removing their wax.   This recipe is perfect because the jar I used can just about fit five lemons with intensive squeezing.  I am not going to open the jar and compressed more juice out though, which seems to be a recipe for introducing bacteria.  Hopefully, time will do the trick as this other recipe says. I did shake and flip the jar whenever I remembered.

Pickling young ginger the Japanese way  is slightly more complex, because it involves dissolving sugar in rice vinegar over heat.   When the sugar-vinegar solution meets the ginger, it magically turns into a pink/reddish color--very pretty!