In A Pickle

Ah, pickles. Anyone who knows me knows that I love them. I love the crunch and I love the salt. I love the variety! Garlicky, sweet, salty, spicy - Any vegetable pickle, you name it and I probably eat it. So when I got the Just Bento cookbook for Christmas from my mom and found out that I could make salty, delicious pickles in five minutes.... well... you can imagine that I was excited.

Speaking of Christmas... I got a lot of great little kitchen things for Christmas, including a kitchen timer shaped like an ice cream cone , a good meat mallet (so I can stop using my rolling pin), a set of plastic matryoshka measuring cups, and two cookbooks. I already have a beautiful set of Matryoshka measuring cups from Anthropologie, but they are ceramic and I'm too afraid to use them for fear of breaking them. The plastic ones are a great substitute and add some flare to cooking! People who know me know I love anything that combines cute and practical.

Well, back to that Just Bento cookbook -- I see on the cover some yummy looking cucumber bits...and I open it up to find that it's a super easy pickle recipe. I'm going to share it with you here, because I've already made 2 batches and Aj and I love them! The Just Bento cookbook is great - it's simple - it's quick- it's practical. It's made for the American kitchen. It doesn't have insane ingredients that you can't find.

Japanese bento is the art of a packed lunch. It's a small, containered lunch that has a lot of color and a lot of love. It's not about what you pack but how you pack it. It's decorative and functional and delicious all at the same time. I took bento a lot when I was in Japan. Naturally, loving to cook and having ready access to easy bento ingredients, I bought my first bento box and so my bento insanity began. I took bento in that bento box 3-4 times a week, and ate at the cafeteria the rest of the time. It was great. Now with a full time job, it's good to have something fun to look forward to in the middle of the day.

While this recipe is great for bento, if you love pickles, you have to try it even if you don't have any clue what a bento is :)

Instant Salted Cucumber Pickles

• 1 English cucumber, sliced into thin rounds. (These are small, thin cucumbers. I found them pre-packaged in the produce section.)
  
• 1/2 Tsp sea salt (or slightly more if you like it salty)
• Squeeze lemon juice (I genuinely recommend using a real lemon, and not lemon juice from the bottle)

1. In a bowl, sprinkle the salt over the cucumber and massage well with your hands until the cucumber kind of goes limp.
2. Let rest 5-10 minutes.
3. Add a squeeze of lemon juice. Let sit for a few minutes.
   
4. Squeeze out most of the excess juices and then pack into a tupperware. Keeps for about 3-4 days in the fridge.