Use your pickle brine for marinating chicken. You can leave it in there for 4 hours or even overnight. If you grill the chicken, it kind of tastes like chick-fil-a.
I put dill slices as the middle layer of any kind of peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Great brown bread, excellent jam etc, and thick crunchy dill slices! Yum.
We make small pickled onions... two varieties Malt and Balsamic. Great for snacking, ploughman's and also amazing chopped up on burgers and sausages...mmmm.
One of my friends mix the pickle juice with whatever nut butter (peanut, almond etc) she has on hand and spreads it on apple slices or bananas and topped with a pickle round. She prefers bread and butter pickles for this type of preparation. This is soooo weird that I plan on trying it some time (I don't usually eat bread and butter pickles) just to experience it.
Oh, and a friend of mine and her family, who's sports affiliations are opposing, take shots of pickle juice (instead of booze, I guess), when the opposing team scores. Its bizarre.
I eat them plain, straight from the jar, pretty much on a daily basis - I've started making my own, but still keep a jar of Maille cornichons in the fridge for when I'm feeling fancy. When I think of pickle brine, I think of the hoopla surrounding our football team, the Philadelphia Eagles, a few years back when the coach had players drinking pickle brine to ward off dehydration while training during a particularly brutal summer. I typically reuse mine for a quick batch of dilly beans or refrigerator pickles.
I don't know if this counts, but a friend of mine eats pickles with potato chips. Like a little salty sandwich. When I was a kid I would drink the brine (from jars of olives, too), which was definitely discouraged by my mom. And my husband swears that gargling with pickle brine cures a sore throat (I've never tried it).
13 Comments