Our good friend and food pal, Anne Byrn, author of the wildly popular Cake Mix Doctor cookbook series and the Dinner Doctor, is a cheater from way back. Long before she earned advanced degrees in cake-mix doctoring, Anne was doctoring pickles by transforming store-bought dills and sours into home-canned-style bread-and-butter pickles. Anne says cheater pickles were especially popular with her mother’s generation as a “homemade” Christmas gift, and a must for serving with the Christmas country ham. Our own sweet-hot version of cheater pickles enjoys a little heat from pickled jalapeños and tastes great with cheater meats. Pickled red jalapeños, if you can find them, are especially colorful for the holiday season. Sour pickles work best because their pungent flavor really hangs in there with all that sugar, but you can resort to regular dills in a pinch. We’ve had the best luck finding sours in big jars at Wal-Mart. The mustard seeds make the cheater pickles look even more homemade.

　　

Ingredients

makes 4 half-pint jars

　　One 32-ounce jar whole sour pickles, drained

　　3 cups sugar

　　One 16-ounce jar sliced pickled jalapeño peppers or sliced hot red peppers, drained

　　5 garlic cloves, peeled but left whole

　　2 tablespoons mustard seeds

　　

Step 1

SLICE the pickles 1/4 inch thick.

　　

Step 2

COMBINE the pickles with all the remaining ingredients in a large nonaluminum (stainless steel, glass, or ceramic) mixing bowl.

　　

Step 3

COVER the bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 2 to 3 days.

　　

Step 4

PACK the pickles in clean half-pint decorative jars. Seal the jars and keep refrigerated. The pickles will keep in the refrigerator for 4 to 5 months.

　　Cheater BBQ