Chilis for Winter

by Linda on April 19, 2012

We have bulk chilis at this peak of the chili season.  I’m not a huge fan of preserving – I’m lucky enough to live in a climate where if we eat seasonally, we can eat fresh all year round.  Freezing takes lots of electricity, canning takes lots of work,  and most preserves have more sugar or salt than I really need.  But of course there are exceptions!

I’ve made Chili Jam with chilis and lemons,  Tamarillo and Chili Sauce with chilis and  tamarillos, and Pickled Chilis, with chilis and vinegar.  Normally by now I would have made sun dried chilis too, but it has been so wet this year I was in danger of being left without dried chilis for the winter.  But we have the slow combustion stove going regularly now, to heat the house, the hot water, and the oven.  A tray of chilis left in the oven with the door ajar dries to crispy by the morning.  These will go in a glass jar for adding some spice to winter dishes.




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Tamarillo and Chili Sauce

by Linda on February 17, 2012

I have chilis, lots of chilis, and not enough lemons ripe yet to make Chili Jam.  I’ve made some Pickled Chilis so as to have some chilis for curries and spicing up winter dishes, but I’ve still got chilis. And this year, the tamarillos have been really prolific.

I’m not a big preserve maker, nor do I freeze vegetables. I sun-dry tomatoes and make passata if I have enough, but I am lucky enough to live in a climate where,  if I plant sequentially and we eat seasonally, we can eat fresh all year. So preserves tend to just sit on the shelf looking decorative.

So if I make preserves, it’s not to preserve things but because the result is worth making all of its own account and not just to keep something for later.

The Recipe:

This recipe made these four jars – about 1.4 kg altogether.

The first thing to do is de-seed your chilis. I used about 40 medium sized chilis, but the recipe is forgiving. My chilis are medium-hot, and 40 sounds like a lot, but the resulting sauce is pleasantly spicy, not blast your socks off hot.  To de-seed them, chop the tops off  and swivel the point of a fine knife blade round inside them to loosen the seeds.  Use gloves or really, really remember not to touch your eyes for hours afterwards! Rinse under running water to remove most of the seeds.  There is no need to be very diligent about this. The more seeds you miss though, the hotter the resulting sauce will be.

I use a blender to make quick work of finely chopping the deseeded chilis, along with

  • 1½ cups of malt vinegar
  • 1 dessertspoon of salt
  • 1 cup of raw sugar
  • 3 or 4 cloves of garlic
  • a thumb of ginger, peeled
  • a thumb of fresh turmeric (or a teaspoon of dried)

Many metals will react with acid fruit and vinegar, so use a stainless steel or enamel pot.

Simmer the chili-vinegar-sugar mix with the flesh from 15 tamarillos (leave them chunky – just halve them and scoop out the flesh with a spoon), until the sauce has reduced and gone a bit syrupy - about 40 minutes.

While the sauce is cooking, put your jars and their lids on to boil for 10 minutes or pressure cook for 5 minutes to sterilize them. I just recycle any jars of the kind that the lid pops when you open them.

Ladle the hot sauce into hot sterilized jars. Screw the sterilized lid onto the jar. As the jar cools, the middle of the lid should pop in, showing that you have an airtight seal.  Wait until the jars are cool to wash the outside (cool water on hot jars will crack them).

The sauce will keep for several weeks in the fridge, so any that doesn’t completely fill a jar can be eaten first. It’s great with meat,  anything with cheese, lots of kinds of vegetable patties or fritters, on sandwiches ….

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Seed Mustard With Thyme

by Linda on August 10, 2011

Back in May I raided the spice rack and propagated a few brown mustard seeds, just from a packet of seeds from the supermarket.

It’s hard to plant just one of something!   You can eat a few young mustard leaves in salads and stir fries, but most of the harvest is in the seeds, and one mustard plant, one of those tiny little seeds, will grow over a metre tall, dominate most of a square metre of space, and yield enough mustard seed to keep us going all year. I still have another five or six plants in the garden.  This mustard recipe is good, maybe even good enough that  I will still have enthusiasm for processing it by the time the last one is ready for harvest!

The Recipe:

Wait until the seeds are fully mature and the seed pods going yellow, then cut the whole plant off at the base. Hang it upside down with the head in a paper bag in a sunny spot for a week or so. The seed pods should go brittle and easy to crush.

Tip the seeds into a baking tray and blow gently to winnow out the pods.

Mix together and allow to soak overnight:

  • a third of a cup of brown mustard seed
  • a dessertspoon of black peppercorns
  • ¼ cup of vinegar
  • ¼ cup of olive oil
  • 1 teaspoon  salt
  • 2 teaspoons sugar

The next day, strain the seeds and lightly crush them in a mortar and pestle.  Put the lightly crushed seeds along with all the liquid you soaked them in in a food processor with:

  • a small handful of fresh thyme leaves and
  • 2-3 dessertspoons of lemon juice.

Blend until it goes creamy.  Taste and adjust the seasoning.  It will taste quite sharp – it needs to mature a bit to develop the taste – but you should be able to decide if it needs more salt, sugar or lemon juice.

It will last several months in the fridge and will get better as the flavour mellows and matures.  Great on a cheese and tomato sandwich, in kangaroo stroganoff, in cauliflower cheese soup.

(If you’re up for another recipe, Celia at Fig Jam and Lime Cordial blogged hers last week too – it must be mustard season!)

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Pickled Chilis

March 16, 2011

I am picking lots of chilis, but it is too early yet for enough lemons to make Chili Jam, so it’s chili pickling time. Once upon a time, in an effort to be the original Earth Mama I used to spend hours enveloped in steam, making pickles and jams and chutneys and vacola jars of [...]

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Tamarillo Chutney

February 20, 2011

I’ve made this chutney in bulk (scaled up to 8 cups of tamarillo flesh) with roast lamb for a wedding feast.  But the sweetness and acidity go really really well with kangaroo fillet, cooked on a barbeque or pan fried. Kangaroo is the red meat I believe is the most ethical choice for Australians, for [...]

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Preserved Lemons

May 14, 2010

In the realm of preserves as condiments, preserved lemons are top of the list. Once you have discovered them you will never go back!  They are absurdly easy and cheap to make during lemon season – no cooking involved – and they are so difficult to find and expensive that they make great gifts.  So [...]

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Lime Cordial

May 12, 2010

I have a thing about preserves.  I can see the sense in climates where it snows and for several months there is no fresh food, but in my climate it seems like make-work.  Why eat bottled peaches when there are fresh pears?  Why eat frozen peas when there are fresh beans?  Especially given that preserving [...]

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Rod’s Lime Pickle

April 15, 2010

This is an Indian style oil-based pickle that is fantastic on the side of a vegetable curry, and really really good with cheese on bread.  I think it is probably a classic recipe – my version came from Rod but I don’t know where his came from!  It’s a great way to manage a surplus [...]

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Chilli Jam

April 5, 2010

Chillies and lemons are both glut crops – if you have any, you have too many! For this recipe though, the challenge is that you only have too many of both at the very end of the chilli season and the very beginning of the lemon season.  It’s a moment to pounce on. The trick [...]

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