I make pickles on Friday night -- don't you?

This weekend, I needed to spend a little time in my little kitchen, doing a little project to take my mind off some things.

I chose Dilly Beans.

I had some of the last green beans of the season in my fridge, and it was time to either use them or freeze them. So I decided it was time to face the pickling process again. During any summer the past few years, you'd find some fresh refrigerator pickles in my fridge, sometimes with radishes or a jalapeno thrown in. But the process of processing pickles hadn't gone that smoothly before.

I didn't have one of those jar lifter thingys --

yep, one of these, and I didn't realize how important they were until I had a death grip on a hot jar with my restaurant supply tongs. I didn't have a rack to sit in the bottom of the pot to keep the jars steady, so they started bouncing against each other, which you can imagine isn't a good thing for glass.

But on Friday night, I still didn't have those things, but I knew what I was getting into. I put a clean dish towel in the bottom of my big stock pot and covered it with water. I prepared myself for a two-handed tong grip once the jars were ready. And I picked out pretty jar rings for the holiday.

The result:

Three jars for gifts and one jar for B. already in the fridge. And the fear of the process gone.