Passata and Pickles

I seem to be in non-stop preserving mode at the moment. If there's a fruit or vegetable that can be stored by turning into jam, chutney, pickles or whatever, I'm doing it.
I've already pickled our home grown onions, turned cucumbers into bread and butter pickle, made chutney with pumpkins and jam with apples and blackberries.


This weekend I've turned my eye to the stock-pile of frozen tomatoes, and cleared some space in the freezer by making passata. Mine's a rather lazy version,with no sieving required! I pour boiling water over the still-frozen tomatoes so I can easily slip the skins off, then boil them for half an hour or so till the fruit 'collapses' - and that's basically it. Once the jars are sealed, I've found this to keep almost indefinitely, but over winter, I'll use it in soups, added to pasta sauces, or poured over enchilladas.




Next I decided to tackle the courgette glut that's filling my fridge vegetable compartment. It's possible to freeze them but they always seem so limp and damp afterwards, no matter how they're cooked, but a couple of years ago I tried using them instead of cucumber in bread and butter pickles, and the experiment paid off. I think they might actually keep longer, which is good as I already have two jars of cucumber pickle to eat!
So, an hour or so salting, some hot vinegar poured over, and that's another batch of preserving done ...

Bread and Butter pickle

I first experimented with bread and butter pickle a couple of years ago, when I had a glut of cucumber from the allotment, then last year I had a surplus of courgettes and tried using them as the main ingredient. Both worked well,though I think maybe the courgettes lasted longer without going soggy. 

waiting for salt to draw out the moisture

This year though I don't have either crop in sufficient quantities to make pickles, but I so loved them to liven up winter lunch-time sandwiches that I bought a net of cheap 'odd shapes' courgettes specifically. 

These really are the simplest pickles to make - draw out moisture with salt, drain, cover with hot spiced vinegar, then stand for a couple of weeks.

So easy!

sugar, mustard, turmeric + half a chilli
 to spice up the vinegar

Bread and butter pickle - with courgettes

 Last year I tried making bread and butter pickle for the first time - the proper way with cucumber. Now though I'm faced with a glut of courgettes. I don't really like to freeze them as no matter what I do with them afterwards they turn out soggy and tasteless, so.... thinking they're not very different to cucumbers I'm trying to pickle them in the same way.

Basically, slice them and an onion.




Sprinkle with salt and leave for an hour

Pour over the hot vinegar with sugar and turmeric added ......and wait a few days before tasting.

Now just crossing my fingers and hoping the experiment's worked!

Christmas Pickles

I usually hope to have red cabbage ready to pick for 'pickled' Christmas gifts, but this year's cabbages are so tiny I had to buy some. At least it's still my own concoction of pickling vinegar so should presumably have the same cold-cure properties as 'home-grown' pickle.

Rainy Monday

Yesterday was a really wet, generally horrible autumnal day - and so I got busy in the kitchen.

First, my lazy passata which is basically skinned tomatoes,cooked for a while, then when I think everything looks thick enough, pop it in jars, and re-boil them to seal.

Next task - freezing runner beans. These were so big and tough that a lot of them weren't fit to keep, but they did have beans inside which I've kept.

They look quite pretty when raw....





but boiling them turns the pink-shelled beans grey so I popped them out of their skins.

On to dinner - an almost free goulash-style meal using our allotment-grown squash and red pepper, onions, mixed batch of cannelini and borlotti beans, tomatoes and potatoes.

I used a small amount of smoked paprika, instead of my normal home-grown chilli which can be too hot, a small piece of pork from the Sunday roast, some left-over breadcrumbs and cheese for topping - so very nearly a 'free' dinner.








And, last thing before settling down with my knitting, setting up cucumber and onion to soak in brine overnight before pickling tomorrow.

Use it or lose it!

  Two attempts, this week, at trying to make something out of 'useless' food;


First a couple of whopper cucumbers found lurking at the back of the greenhouse under all the foliage. Both green cucumbers had hard knobbly skins and didn't look at all pleasant to add to salad or sandwiches. I've already made a stash of marmalade this year with surplus cucumbers, and experimented with piccalilli, so wanted to try something else and settled on 'bread and butter pickle'.

Basically, cucumber and onion are salted for a couple of hours,then drained and added to hot vinegar spiced with mustard seeds, fennel seeds and turmeric - the latter gives it a rather odd yellow colour that I'm not sure if I'm fond of.




Now it has to sit in the fridge for a while to let the vegetables 'pickle', so I can't test it for a week or so.

Meanwhile.... something sweeter. A couple of days ago I made curry which required coconut milk, and not having the tinned version to hand I made some by steeping dessicated coconut in boiling water. Having used the water as 'milk' I was then left with the remains of the coconut. it isn't really all that flavoursome by this point by I've tried using it in cakes before and it's ok. This time I made muffins  - with an extra little bit of 'use it or lose it' involved. In the baking cupboard, I found glace cherries (probably from last year's Christmas cake) with a 'best before' date of end of September. Phew! Just in time!

Eating/testing - pickled turnips

OK, so I thought this was a strange recipe when I found it but even so thought I'd try it out.

It looks very pretty as it's fist packed into jars but after a couple of weeks all of it turns a uniform pink.

Here it is on the left-hand side of my lunch plate.

The colour didn't worry me too much, afterall it comes from the beetroot slices.

What I wasn't prepared for was the taste - very salty and flavoured mainly of celery leaves! It's definitely an acquired taste and I'm not sure I'd make it again though it did use up those small turnips I'd have 

otherwise thrown away.

For now though, I intend chopping the pieces up on my plate and mixing in with blander vegetables. 

Testing - The Country Preserves Companion #1 - Pickled Turnips

Now, pickling isn't the first thought that springs to mind when faced with too many turnips but I have a surplus of small ones from thinning the turnip row, alongside some larger ones pulled for dinner. It's not really the weather for turnips in my opinion (far too hot) so, knowing I'd seen a recipe for pickling them in one of my books, I decided to give it a go.

The book in question is a The Country Preserves Companion by Jocasta Innes - and, although small in size (4 x 6 ins) it's big on ideas and inspiration. 

Today for a change I'm following the recipe exactly as given in the book.

Basically the turnips are quartered and packed into a jar with sliced beetroot and celery leaves.

And very pretty it looks too at this stage!

The jar is filled with a mix of brine and white wine vinegar, but then came the tricky bit.

With the lid screwed on lightly, the jar was placed in a saucepan of water and boiled for 15 mins to sterilise.

Then the lid is screwed on tightly. As the jar cools the lid should seal, keeping the contents free from germs - but it didn't!

I've done this before when bottling tomato puree and in that case when the seal doesn't hold and reboil the bottle but I didn't want to keep cooking the contents so I'm risking it and hoping everything is ok.

I now should keep the jar for 10 days in a warm spot - the recipe suggests next to a radiator but I think it's warm enough at the moment to not worry with that. 

After that it should be stored in a cool place and eaten within 6 weeks.

Hopefully it will taste good.

For the actual taste test see here

Autumnal kitchen

Today, instead of the scents of summer soft fruits wafting through the kitchen, there's been an autumnal smell in the air - vinegar boiling with spices ready to pickle onions later this week. It's a smell that always reminds me of the vast amount of chutney making that goes on at the end of Summer when I'm trying to use up green tomatoes and supersized marrows. Coupled with a drizzly afternoon, today could be a day in September.

Home grown, home pickled.

Some of the home-grown onions are far too small for anything but pickling - so in the jar they go!

I prefer my home-pickled onions as I put more chilli into the spiced vinegar than is found in the shop-bought variety.

Pickling time

It's definitely Autumn now so time to start laying down a store-cupboard of pickles and chutney. 

 

First up - red cabbage!

Wet day in the kitchen

A day of absolutely horrendous rain, and getting drenched while walking the dog, encouraged me to stay in warm and dry and potter in the kitchen.
I bottled up the elderflower fizz started yesterday.
I at last got round to making spiced vinegar for pickling some small onions I bought 2 or 3 weeks ago.
I found the last of last year's gooseberries lurking in the bottom of the freezer and made chutney.
I made two batches of muffins - choc chip and rhubarb.
And now the sun is streaming through the windows and I'm testing a recipe for Persian Stuffed Vine Leaves for dinner.

Cold cure?

I chopped up my last home-grown red cabbage for pickling this week. Cabbage layered with onions, a sprinkling of demerara sugar and covered with spiced vinegar.
It's a bit of a shame to hide the cabbage as I love the fractal-like patterns inside - ok, the same patterns are presumably there in green cabbage but not so visible.
I also love pickled cabbage on winter salads else I wouldn't be making it but while away at University my daughter and friends decided the vinegar from it made an excellent cold cure. Why it should, I have no idea - particularly as the same vinegar goes onto pickled onions and that apparently didn't have the same beneficial effects. Can cabbage really be that good for you?