No doubt this recipe is not authentic, and I would love anyone who has a real Vietnamese grandmother to share the authentic version. But one of the nice things about multicultural Australia is the cross fertilization of ideas, in food as in everything else.
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.
Peeled, the red eggplants work in just about any eggplant recipe. They are a bit more bitter and I tend to pick them green, just as the colour turns for most recipes. Unpeeled and fully ripe, they work brilliantly in an Indian style eggplant pickle.
The grapes are hanging thick and heavy in our pergola. Such a useful plant. In winter the bare vines let the north western afternoon sun stream onto the verandah, warming the floor and creating a nice spot for proving bread or sitting with a book. In spring the fresh, delicate leaves make dolmades, wonderful lunch or picnic or party food. In summer the vines are thick with leaves blocking the…
Guavas are in glut right now and I keep seeing unharvested trees everywhere. Guava jelly, which can be made as jam to spread on toast (just by using half the quantity of sugar) but is spectacular as a firm jelly to eat with cheese on crackers is the only really good thing I know to do with a glut of guavas, but it’s a really good thing to do with…
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.
Home making mustard is ridiculously easy, and worth it because mustard – Brassica juncea- is a member of the brassica family, closely related to canola – Brassica napus. It is prone to all the fairly wide range of pests and diseases of that family, and because it is grown in the same areas and conditions as canola, subject to all the same consequences of overpopulation of any one species –…
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…
This recipe is frugal on the work and energy, but really it’s not for the sake of keeping mangoes I make pickles. It’s for the sake of a condiment, a little bit of flavour sparkle to go with curries or dhal, or on crackers with cheese. Just a little spoonful of a really good Indian pickle can make a very plain lentils and rice dish seem like a feast.
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…