Home, Cooking: Lemon Sesame Quick Pickles

We are in the green time, here in Athens, and the farmers market is full to bursting. This is a good thing. But it creates some problems for me, a person whose ideas of balance and proportion in weekly grocery shopping fly out of the window in the face of a Cowdery Farms table stacked with green beans, zucchini, tomatoes, and corn. What, I wonder when I’m packing everything I bought into the fridge later, could I have been thinking? How will we eat all this?  

If this is you, too, here’s a thought that may help. Tamar Adler, a writer of fascinating cookbooks and also a wholly original cooking advice Substack called The Kitchen Shrink, is an expert in the eating of leftovers and a longtime warrior in the battle against food waste. She recently wrote an extremely memorable reply, in her newsletter, to a letter-writer who said they could not figure out how to take “time to cook.” 

Adler described what she does in the kitchen as “making tiny gestures of cooking almost constantly”—or, “nudging ingredients forward, ceaselessly.” This mindset is about taking any chance you can to wash all the lettuce, or make all the stale bread into breadcrumbs, or cut up the cantaloupe. You’re not going from ingredient to meal all at once; you’re just doing one or two prep tasks, making it more and more likely that, when you do go to make a meal, everything will be closer to the finish line.

This idea crystallized so much for me. Now, when I open the fridge, especially on a Sunday, after I’ve let my enthusiasm take over at the market and our refrigerated storage situation is direly out of hand, I think of my duty as a nudger, and just move things on, as much as I can. 

This summer, quick pickles are a good nudge-forward option for the many beautiful, crisp cukes that sing to me on Saturday morning, then go unattended in the crisper drawer until Thursday, when I begin to panic on their account. The quick pickles recipe below is an unusual one—sweet-ish, with a zap of chile and lemon. It lasts for up to two months in the fridge, which buys you time. The author of the recipe recommends cutting these pretty thick—½ inch—which seemed like a lot to me, but which helps them maintain some crunch. I sometimes fish them out of the jar and cut them up, before using them in salads. 

Lemon Sesame Quick Pickles

Adapted from Bon Appetit/Andy Baraghani

Ingredients

• 1 lb. cucumbers, sliced ½-inch thick
• ½ lemon, thinly sliced into rounds, seeds removed
• 1 small green chile, thinly sliced (can reduce or de-seed if less spicy pickles are more your house’s speed)
• 1 2-inch piece ginger, peeled, julienned
• 1½ cups unseasoned rice vinegar
• 2 cups water 
• ¼ cup sugar

• 4 tsp. Diamond Crystal or 2 tsp. Morton kosher salt
• 1 Tbsp. sesame seeds

Directions

1. Bring lemon slices, chile, ginger, vinegar, sugar, salt, sesame seeds, and water to a boil in a small saucepan and cook, stirring, until sugar and salt are dissolved, about 1 minute. Let the brine cool. 
2. Using a slotted spoon, remove lemon slices and chile slices from the saucepan. Layer the lemon and chile with sliced cucumbers in a glass jar, probably about a quart in size (my yield was a lot smaller, and I went with a smaller vessel because I love any chance to use a beloved Weck jar).
3. Pour the cooled brine over the produce in the jar. Cover and chill. As with many quick pickles, they’ll start to taste really good after about a day in the fridge.