With homemade pickles, made with cucumbers straight from the garden, how couldn't you love a fresh mozzarella, mayo and pickle sandy toasted on yummy bread? That sounds just a bit better than a plain old cheese and pickle sandwich!

I've included a few pickle recipes I thought of and whipped up the other day, and an awesome relish recipe. 

What's your favourite thing to add to pickles?

• Large cucumber
  
• 1 cup of white vinegar
  
• 1/4 cup of white sugar
  
• Fresh basil
  
• Fresh mint (I used Chocolate Mint. NBD)
  
• Dill
  
• Salt and Pepper

• Large cucumber
• 1 cup of white vinegar
• 2 tsp of sesame oil
• 1/4 cup of white sugar
• 1-2 cloves of garlic
• One glob of wasabi
• Fresh grated ginger
• Fresh cilantro
• 1/4 Red onion, finely chopped 
• Chili flakes and a fresh whole one (for good luck)
• Salt and Pepper

I found this recipe at Tastes Good To Me- 
a super rad, fellow Canadian. 
Head over to her site for the recipe!

I added a few things to the recipe, and the result added a whole new dimension to my relish world. Ok, maybe it's not that drastic, but I did add quite a bit of coriander, which really gave it a totally unique flavour, and a yellow pepper for some more colour and an extra chilli pepper for some extra heat. 

So good. 

Well, we finally have our new kitchen! In our basement, at least. We picked it up last weekend, and I can't wait to get it installed! Some are still in boxes, but some are built and ready to go.

All in all, the whole experience of buying an IKEA kitchen was pretty good. I went in with an open mind, expecting that it will take all day, that there will be a few mistakes, and that we will be taking the four hour trip back to Calgary in the next month back to IKEA.

I was mostly right. We had our design fine tuned, so the ordering part only took about twenty minutes, getting to the checkout another twenty minutes, and waited for about two hours for staff to round up all the parts to our kitchen. Two hours isn't bad, and is an ideal amount of time to go through the store at a relaxed pace. 
So I was wrong about that. It didn't take all day.

Things I should have done? I should have checked the list. It was so fast and automated, I just figured everything would be right. We knew exactly which cabinets we wanted; I probably could have listed all the IKEA serial numbers off for you. Okay, maybe not quite, but I definitely knew which sizes and styles we were going for.

Imagine my surprise when we got home (4 hour road trip) and we have a 30"x24"x80" pantry cabinet instead of the 24"x24"x80" cabinet that we needed. And a missing shelf and a missing drawer face. I'm not sure how the automated system turned our 24" cabinet into a 30" cabinet, but I might have been a little upset if we were really ready to install the kitchen.

Sometimes, it is good to procrastinate. I mean, plan early... We are picking up our special ordered countertops and outswing doors in a month back in Calgary, so I knew we would be back, but still.

At least a mistake or two were expected. And thanks to IKEA's 45 day return policy, we should be just fine.

So, despite that minor setback, in a few hours, I had managed to build all our upper cabinets. I have to say, pretty proud of how they are looking. Especially now that we fixed the backing of those two cabinets. Next step- the base cabinets! 
Maybe tomorrow....

Until next time, happy cabinet building!

Xo Jena