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 am picking lots of chilis, but it is too early yet for enough lemons to make Chili Jam, so it’s chili pickling time.
In the realm of preserves as condiments, preserved lemons are top of the list.
This recipe works for lemon or lime cordial, but limes have a shorter season when fresh ones are available.
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.…
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.
This recipe is not so much a way of preserving them as a way of making them a lot more popular (although it will last a long time in the fridge if someone doesn’t eat it first, which is highly unlikely because it is seriously delicious, for example on rye bread with cheese or in pitta bread with hummus, mmmm.)
Our mangoes are starting to ripen, and this year there is a bumper crop. I remember as a child in suburban Rockhampton mangoes were so prolific in their season that they laid thick on the ground making even the air alcoholic, and even the flying foxes couldn’t get through them. I’m not big on preserves. Many years ago I made a rule that I was not going to preserve anything…