Pickling, and my dislike of "sweet"

I was cat-sitting for a friend who has HBO and also said, "use my beets".  So, I did.  It was a pretty sweet deal.  I also had tons of beets from my own farm share, so I ended up with something like 18 jars.

The hardest part was finding a pickled beet recipe.  Every one I found online called for insane amounts of sugar.  Even my friends who pickle beets (all men, interestingly enough) said to use a little sugar.  Searching for a sugar-free recipe, I came up with recipes that called for artificial sweeteners.  As if. My entire point was that I didn't *want* sweet-tasting pickled beets.

I like the flavor of beets, and it's slight sweetness adds to its depth.  But, and I may sound a little ranty here, I think too often people use sweet vegetables as an excuse to eat more sugar in their dinner.  I have trouble understanding this.  Recipes for already incredibly sweet-tasting vegetables like winter squash and sweet potatoes often call for massive amounts of refined sweeteners.  I've had carrots and green beans that are so sweet they taste more like dessert than dinner.  I'm all for having sweetened vegetables for dessert (pumpkin pie - yum!) but call it what it is - dessert.

Okay, fine, I admit it.  I am not a dessert person.

The simplest solution, to me, was to just use a cucumber pickle recipe.  Mostly because I also had cucumbers to pickle last week.  So I found a recipe for dill pickles, and used the same pickling solution for the beets and the cucumbers, only 'sweet' spices for the beets, and savory (dill and garlic) for the cucumbers.  My only worry is that they all might be too salty, but I think they turned out delicious.

I boiled the beets before peeling and chopping them (while watching HBO), and then used this solution, which I had heated until the salt dissolved:

8 1/2 cups water
2 1/4 cups white vinegar
1/2 cup fine sea salt (they were out of pickling salt)

I packed cucumber jars with a garlic clove and some sprigs of dill.
I packed beet jars with cloves and anise stars, since those were the whole sweet spices my friends had.

I boiled the jars in a water bath for awhile until they sealed.  I've never actually done this before.  But I'm thinking of buying a pressure canner, and then I can preserve my beets in cans, ready for deep winter borscht.

This is not what I picked, it is what I ate while pickling.  Cabbage cooked with garlic scapes and yogurt, corn on the cob - yum.