My garden is taking its sweet time to produce tomatoes, green peppers, squash, and eggplant (I've given up on the cucumber and peas-it's just too hot for them). But there's no shortage of green beans. The only problem: My toddler twins don't like them garden fresh.

Not to worry. I came up with a plan B that my grandmother was famous for: pickled green beans. My father claims my sister and I used to gobble her pickled green beans by the handful. And my fond memories indicate he's right.

The only hitch is that my grandmother's recipe book is buried somewhere in a box in the bowels of my parents' house. So I had to pull a recipe off the Internet instead. It calls for lots of rosemary, which is also thriving in my garden, so these pickles really will be home grown. Other ingredients include white wine vinegar, pickling salt, sugar, and lemon. Check out the recipe [1].

Oops, I realized when I was about to make these that I don't have any "pickling jars"-something they definitely don't sell around here. Nothing to do but run to the local Safeway, pick up the cheapest pickles they sell, and transfer them into Tupperware. My mother was visiting this weekend, and when she saw me pouring out the pickles, she shook her head at me.

"So you're buying pickles to make pickles," she said. "That's just completely crazy. But I'm not going to argue with you. There's just no arguing with you mad gardener types."

A good call on her part, I'd say.

As for my husband, the smell of cooking pickled green beans got him out of bed this morning.

"What the #$## is that smell?" he said walking into the kitchen. "Smells like boiling Thousand Island Dressing."

When I explained my project, he said, "Oh. I've never heard of pickled green beans. Three-bean salad, sure. But not pickled green beans."

Are pickled green beans that weird and unheard of?

Next my husband said, "Oh, and I'm not sure those jars are going to work. I think they need to have those two-piece lids."

Now he tells me. Is that true - you have to use two-piece lids for things to pickle right?

Well, regardless the job is now done, and the beans are pickling away. Only time (at least three weeks) will tell if they're actually edible. And the judges, of course, will be the twins.