Menu Close

Tag: Preserves

a basket full of large, brown skinned tubers. In the background is a garden.

All About Yacon

I’ve been bandicooting the yacon for months now, but this morning I harvested the rest – over 10 kg from about 2.5m2 of garden bed. The tubers are sweet and crisp and very good for you. My grandkids love eating fresh yacon just as is, peeled and eaten like an apple straight from the hand. We adults eat it mostly finely sliced in salads, or as batons in stir fries,…

Jars of dark red sauce, labelled "Tamarillo Sauce April 2023"

Tamarillo Sauce

Tamarillos are like a sweet, tart tomato in a tough skin. If you like tart fruit, they are good to eat just out of the hand. To my mind though, the highest use is for tomato sauce. In the tropics and subtropics, fruit fly make bulk organic tomatoes a bit of a challenge. I grow cherry tomatoes for eating and cooking fresh, but I’ve moved to substituting tamarillos for preserving.

top left is a basket of unshelled Madagascar beans, and next to it a bowl of shelled beans. Bottom left is a bucket of bananas and next to it a pile of ripe bananas. In the middle is a tray of tomatoes, a bowl of Davidson's plums, and a pile of green grapes extending beyond the photo edge. At the bottom is a pile of tromboncino and cucmbers.

Processing Mid-summer gluts

I try hard to avoid gluts. It was always a goal even in rural homesteading with lots of room, but I’m even more motivated now in suburbia, where every glut is using space that could have been saving a trip to the supermarket. But I don’t mind full day in the kitchen every so often if the product is worth it.

Simple Hot Sauce

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.

Red Eggplant Pickle

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.