This is straight hot sauce – just chilies, vinegar and salt. Depending how hot your chillies are, it can be anything from magma to mildly spicy. Its simplicity is its strength – you can add it to anything without muddying flavours.
This year’s Hot Mango and Tomato Chutney is in the jars. I make some version of this every year around this time, when mangoes, tomatoes and chilies are all available in glut proportions.
Since I’ve discovered roasting the chilis and garlic first, harissa has become one of my very favourite things to do with the summer chili glut. It’s fast and easy to make, and though it’s spicy hot it’s not raw – it’s also complex and interesting with lots of depth.
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade, and when life gives you a heat wave, make sundried tomatoes. Last year I sun dried the principe borghese and made the yellow cherries into passata. The flavour of the passata was good but the yellow colour was just a bit too odd for many dishes. This year I thought I might try sun drying the yellow ones and making passata from the…
My glut crop this week is chilis. The chooks get bucketfuls. They like chilis. Birds (all kinds) have no receptors for capsaicin, so they’re immune to chili heat.
My glut crop this week is sweet corn – the last round of sweet corn for the year. Sweet corn is one of the trickier crops for a home gardener. What goes wrong?
Kasundi is a good way to make bottling tomatoes good enough for gifts and treats, worth the $5 or $6 a jar they would be worth if you paid yourself for the time it takes. It’s a rich, spicy but not too hot, tomato sauce, great with eggs or baked beans (or eggs and baked beans!), or with dhall or dosa or on bean burgers or kangaroo burgers or a…
We were all flooded in over the weekend, so we invited neighbours for a curry night. Curry nights are a great kind of potluck dinner, needing no co-ordination, and allowing people to go simple or as gourmet as they like.
I was picking for an Indonesian style curry – ginger, galangal, turmeric, lemon grass, chili, Vietnamese mint (and I added – Kaffir lime leaves and garlic as well) and I couldn’t resist the photo. Add this spice base to an oily sauce and you have a wonderful curry sauce for fish or meat or poultry or vegetables.
I spent a couple of hours making corn vadai and azuki vadai and eggplant and beetroot pakora and zucchini muthia, and I really needn’t have bothered cos there were two clear favourites on the platter, and they were the quickest and easiest ones – the muthia and the pakoras.