he Beet me to it

A strange thing happened at our house last month.
In one of those Freaky Friday moments, it was like I was him and he was me.

Cause somewhere in the midst of my KID shorts drafting, drawing, and escaping at night to work on the pattern....Casey took up pickling.

Pickling!

Ya see, we were having dinner at a friend's house and our friend asked if we liked beets.
"I think they taste like dirt," he told us (always a great selling point). And then he offered us all the beets we wanted from his garden....along with some lovely heirloom tomatoes I should add.  Guess he couldn't wait to unload those things.  In fact, I came back the next week to get a photo of the beet plants and they were already pulled out! (with new zucchini in their place)

Well, Casey happens to love beets.
And he got super excited about this idea of having homemade pickled beets.
"Awesome. Great! We'd love some beets.  I'm sure Dana can figure out a pickling recipe. She's good at that stuff....or maybe I'll even try doing it myself"

And while I totally appreciated the DIY compliment,
What???
I was trying to put out a sewing pattern using precious small moments of free time in the chaos of constant kid-life....and now I had to stall everything for 2 days to figure out how to can and pickle what was just sold to me as "dirt"?

That's how it sounded in my head.

 What came out of my mouth was, "thanks for the beets!"
...and then they sat in a bag on our back porch for 3 days,
till Casey decided to do something about it.

At 10pm on a Saturday night I settled in on the couch to check instagram while he casually mentioned he was going to the store to pick up some canning jars.  Really?  Wow.   You're going to start a canning project this late at night?  Of course, duh, that's often when I start unrealistic projects.  So I tried not to squash the energy and loved that he was really going to try this on his own. 

And he totally did!  It was really fun to watch.  He spent the first night prepping everything.  And in the morning, he pickled away.
He's a pickler.

 He followed a recipe similar to THIS (and halved the recipe amounts)

He learned tricks for removing the skins, figured out how to sterilize jars, realized what whole cloves were,

and took pride in his new discoveries.

There's a DIYer in us all, right?
Of course Casey's always been good at creative projects.  He installed all that backsplash you see behind him.  I appreciate a handy guy.  And now a pickling guy.

There you have it folks.
Pickled Beets! 

And then he told Lucy all about it.
She was thrilled.

The real test came 2 weeks later when he broke open the first jar and gave it a taste.
He cut the first beet into pieces for all of us to try (and shockers of shocks, the kids actually tried some!  They didn't like it, but they tried).

 And what did Casey think?

Delish.
I'm gonna leave him to his 10pm devices more often.