Week 35 - Pickling

I've never pickled anything before, but I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do when the Week 35 theme came up as pickling. I love those red pickled onions you get at Mexican restaurants and thought I would try my hand at those for another Taco Tuesday. 

Since we were doing Taco Tuesday, I followed this quick pickled onions recipe on Monday so that the onions could sit overnight. For this, I needed (all measurements approximate since I added more without measuring):

- 1 large red onion, cut into half moon slivers ($0.75)
- 1 cup of white wine vinegar ($1.92)
- 3/4 tsp of sugar ($0.05)
- 3/4 tsp of salt ($0.05)
- 1 garlic clove, cut in half ($0.02)

Pickling the onions was a fairly straightforward process. After chopping the onions, you move on to the jar in which you're going to pickle the onions, and add the vinegar, sugar, salt, and garlic (and any other seasonings you're going to use) and mix together well so all the salt and sugar dissolves. Run some boiling water over the onions to give them a quick blanch.

Add the onions and stir them all around so they all get soaked a bit in the vinegar. There obviously wasn't enough vinegar at the start to cover the top of the onions, but I wasn't worried as I figured over time that would work itself out. Consider this the "before" picture.

20 or so hours later, here's the "after" picture. The onions were pretty much all soaked in vinegar (I did shake it around periodically throughout the day to mix them up) and they had turned that awesome bright fuchsia color that I really like. Opening the jar, I got a strong whiff of vinegar. The pickled onions were definitely strongly flavored, but they were good. Nice and sour.

The pickled onions were an accompaniment to our chicken tacos. These were the easiest possible tacos to make. I just put 2 chicken breasts in the slow cooker, added some salt and pepper, covered it with 3/4 of a jar of Trader Joe's salsa verde (probably could have used a little less), and let it cook on low until the chicken was done. After that, I just shredded the chicken with forks, mixed it with the salsa in the slow cooker, and kept it on warm until we were ready to eat. Simplest Taco Tuesday chicken ever.

Our entire dinner cost about $10.50 ($0.93 for the pickled onions we did use (the whole jar was $2.79), $2 for the chicken, $1.49 for the salsa, $1 for the tortillas, and $5 for the incredible esquites we love so much). For that amount we got 4 generously filled tacos and an entire bowl of esquites, which was really filling. Although tacos in a restaurant aren't always that expensive, this was still a much better deal. The pickling experiment went well, which made me very happy, since now we can have pickled onions whenever we want for Taco Tuesday.