Musing about Preserves – Peach & Chilli Chutney

Posted on March 15, 2014 by Liz

This year might not have been a great year for veg in Melbourne but if my friends tree is any indication it has been a wonderful year for peaches.  She had loads and loads of beautiful, big and incredibly sweet peaches.  Just luscious.  I was the happy recipient of a large bag of these peaches and while the kids and I made a large dent in the bag eating them fresh there were simply more than we could manage before they would go off.  So I turned to my preserve books only the be met with, well, not very much at all.

Personally I think the best method of preserving peaches is probably bottling them but these were a little past that point – they were pretty soft, and I was concerned they would collapse in a sloppy mess in the preserving jars.  Bottling not being an option I pondered both sweet and savoury treatments but my books didn’t offer much in the way of either.  So I decided to try both.   I made some into Peach & Ginger Jam and the rest became Peach & Chilli Chutney.  Sadly I failed to document the Jam recipe – I used a basic  jam recipe (ie weight of fruit = weight of sugar)  and then just chucked things (ginger, chilli, salt) in until I got the ginger, sweetness balance right .  Or rather it seemed right.  I do find it hard to judge what the jam will taste like cold when I’m tasting it while cooking.

The chutney though I did document. (And I think it is probably the nicer preserve anyway).  I used a Nectarine Chutney recipe from my CWA cookbook as a base and then adapted it – primarily by the addition of lots more chilli than the original recipe included.

Peach & chilli Chutney

This is what  I did:

Peach & Chilli Chutney

  • 1.5kg chopped peaches
  • 3.75 cups soft brown sugar
  • 3.75 cups cider vinegar
  • 1.5 tspn grated fresh ginger
  • 1 tspn ground cinnamon
  • 6 cloves
  • 2.25 tspns salt
  • 12 fresh chillies chopped (more if you like really hot chutney)
  • 1 tspn chilli powder
  • 2 apples grated
  • 2 onions finely chopped

Place all ingredients into a large saucepan.  Bring to the boil and cook uncovered for a couple of hours until the mixture thickens.

I started with fewer chillies than above, tasted my chutney as I went and added more chilli along the way.  In my experience the chutney tastes hotter when warm so I tend to add slightly more than I think is perfect.

The variety of chillies you use will have a huge impact on the heat of finished product – the above recipe was made using medium heat chillies (Joe’s Long Cayenne) and I think the chutney is a little too mild for my tastes so if you want  a hot chutney then use hotter chilli varieties.

Pour into hot sterilised jars and seal.

 

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Posted in Fruits, Recipes, Summer Harvesting | Tagged | 7 Comments

Musing about Preserves – (Caramelised) Onion Jam

Posted on February 9, 2014 by Liz

My daughters school held a BBQ at a local market yesterday.  Unfortunately the weather was pretty damn hot (41C), and patronage at the market was down on its usual numbers.  As a result we had quite a few sliced onions left over.  Naturally (read foolishly) I decided to ignore climatic conditions and spend 3 hours stirring a pot over a hot stove making onion jam (albeit with glass of sparkling wine in hand).  While I was stirring my mind turned to what makes a good preserve, and in particular a good chutney or ‘savoury’ jam.

For me it is all about the right mix of sweet and sour coupled with a pleasing texture.  I have any number of jars of mediocre preserves sitting unopened in my cupboard because they fail on one or all of these points.  As a result I am on a personal mission to find the perfect preserve recipe (for my tastes) for every fruit or veg I could possibly get in large numbers.  This may take a while as I have only ticked off one –  I am very happy with my adaptation of the recipe for Bread & Butter Cucumbers  from Stephanie Alexander’s Kitchen Garden Companion.  So that’s cucumbers sorted.  But what about other veg?

Yesterday was my 2nd attempt at making Onion Jam this season.  The first attempt, whilst enjoyable, wasn’t exactly what I was looking to create.  I used a CWA recipe for onion marmalade from a preserves book I was given for Christmas.  The recipe can also be found here.  Whilst I enjoyed it I found the flavour a little raw, despite cooking it for a good 3 hours.  This time though I decided to sauté the onions (and a little thyme) in a small amount of olive oil before adding the sugar and vinegar.   I think I’ve got a lot closer to what I was trying to achieve (although I think it could have benefitted from a little chilli – but then again what couldn’t?).  I should really have cooked mine for a little longer as it isn’t exactly set.  I reckon it will still taste delicious in a bacon sandwich though.  Here is my revised recipe:

Onion Jam (makes about 2 litres of jam)

Onion jam

  • 2kg sliced onions
  • 2kg sugar (I used a mix of white and dark sugar as that is what I had in the pantry)
  • 1 litre apple cider vinegar
  • 2 tblspns salt (this is a reduction on the 3 tbspns for half the quantity of onions specified in the original recipe – I’m not sure what impact this will have on its keeping qualities).
  • 1 tblspn olive oil
  • Leaves from about 10 sprigs on thyme

Saute the onions and thyme in the oil until they colour slightly (this will take quite a long time).  Add the remaining ingredients and cook until the jam reaches setting point – about 2.5 hours.  Seal in sterilised jars.   Note: This makes a very sweet onion jam.

In the original recipe it suggests that this will store “in a dark cupboard for a long time”, however I am not knowledgeable enough about preserves to know how reducing the salt and adding oil will affect its keeping qualities.  If you know I would love to hear from you.

I would also like to know about any perfect recipes you have for dealing with a particular crop.  A recipe you wouldn’t want to change, that you are pretty much 100% happy with, that doesn’t need tweeking and you happily eat every single jar of, every year that you make it.

My next post in this series will be peaches – I have been playing with the base recipe on The Witches Kitchen’s excellent post about mango chutney and in a week or two (when the chutney has matured a bit) I should know how successful I have been.

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Posted in Alliums - Onions, Leeks, Garlic, Recipes | Tagged , , | 9 Comments

Citrus Gall Wasp – Pruning

Posted on January 31, 2014 by Liz

I have been battling citrus gall wasp for a few seasons now and have tried a number of methods to attempt to get rid of them.  I have tried slicing off the galls, I have tried ignoring them and I have tried pruning.  None have worked particularly well.

Citrus Gall wasp is a native pest traditionally living in our native citrus.  Ironically my native Finger Lime is the only one of my citrus that has yet to play host to it.  The wasps lay eggs in new citrus growth and as their eggs grow galls form on the parts on the branch hosting the eggs;

KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA

In Melbourne the basic lifecycle of these tiny, tiny wasps seems to be:  Wasps emerge about mid to late Spring, lay eggs in new growth with the galls becoming obvious by late summer.  The galls get larger as the larvae feed on the tree.  The larvae continues to feed all Autumn and Winter to emerge the following Spring and so the cycle continues.

In the past I have tried slicing off the galls (described here), and pruning the tree in late winter before the galls emerge.  Although the first method was moderately successful at killing some larvae it didn’t get them all and it also weakened the tree (probably more than the galls themselves would have).  Pruning the tree in winter definitely got rid of many galls before they hatched.  The downside was that either; I missed some or some new wasps came into the garden because the galls still came back.  I suspect that by pruning in late winter I was actually giving the wasps lots of nice new growth to burrow into.  With that in mind I am going to try pruning them  now (Summer).  My hope is that if I prune now the tree will do lots of growing and that growth will be less new by the time the wasps emerge in Spring.  I will also hang some sticky strips in the trees then and hope that that gets rid of them.

My feeling is that I should keep trying to get rid of them as, while they don’t kill the tree, they do weaken it, and I think its appropriate that I try and do what I can to limit numbers of this pest.   Of course given the number of citrus trees locally I might be fighting something of a losing battle…

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Harvest Monday – 20th Jan 2014

Posted on January 20, 2014 by Liz

Happy New Year!  Apologies for the lack of posts for the last couple of weeks but I have been making the most of the holiday season and I don’t like advertising our holidays online.  Unduly paranoid?  Perhaps….

We are back now though and I am keen to start making the most of some summer crops.  If only I had some to make the most of….  Actually that’s not quite true, but it is fair to say that I have found this season challenging thus far.  Our cool Spring made way for a mostly mild start to summer until the weather woke up and decided to hit us with 4 days over 41 (106F) in a row.  Needless to say the garden wasn’t completely happy with this turn of events….

On the bright side it has meant that the first of the tomatoes are starting to ripen:

Tomatoes

The back two are Tigerella.  I’m not sure what the front ones are.  Between the chooks and any number of small children almost all of my plant labels have either been moved or disappeared completely.

I picked the tomatoes under-ripe mainly because I am still concerned with the resident rodent population.  So far they seem to be content to feast on chook food and, more irritatingly, the figs, but I suspect its only a matter of time before they go in search of new flavours.  Hopefully they wont like the cucumbers even if they find them, as I’ve been really enjoying the first few of this seasons harvest:

Cucumbers

Other than cucumbers and tomatoes the only other really summery crop ready in reasonable numbers are beans.

Beans

It has been a weird year for beans.  The chooks sat on my bush butter beans and the climbers haven’t put out many flowers despite masses of lovely green growth.  As a result I’ve getting handfuls of beans rather than basketfuls.

The Red Russian Kale, on the other hand, has been a far more predictable performer.

russian red kale

Thankyou to Nina for the seed.

I suspect the lettuce sensed the imminent heat wave and most of it bolted before temperatures even hit 30.

Harvest basket

Another victim of the heat were these lemons, which the tree gave up, presumably to reserve energy for saving itself.  In contrast the turnips seemed unfazed by the temperature fluctuations.  I picked this one but in retrospect I’m not sure why as I have only ever used them in soup so now I’m at something of a loss to know what to do with it.

lemons  KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA

I know what to do with potatoes though so these Kipflers and Dutch Cream were most welcome for salads;

Potatoes  Kipfler potatoes

KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERAOther harvests this week included a handful or two of kumquats – the first my relatively young tree has produced.  I think I will candy these and then use them on top of cheesecake.

This week also saw the first of my padron peppers.  These came from a tree which overwintered in a pot. I planted it out in the beds in September.  I have yet to eat these so I can’t comment on flavour yet but I am intrigued by the fact they are fatter and more of a squat shape than those the plant produced last year.

My final harvest this week was a red cabbage.  The variety is ‘Red Express’ which I have posted on previously.  In the past I had only ever tried growing it during our winter and I had been completely unsuccessful.  Clearly it likes more warmth than our winters provide as this attempt was far more fruitful.  Pleasingly I have a couple more coming on to enjoy after this one:

Red Express Cabbage

As usual this post is for Daphne’s Harvest Mondays.

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Posted in Summer Harvesting | 12 Comments

Monday Harvest – 16th December 2013

Posted on December 16, 2013 by Liz

Another week of erratic weather, another week of spasmodic plant growth, another week of harvests.

I have 3 blueberry plants which I bought about 18 months ago.  They are growing in pots.  Two are fruiting at the moment.  Both are evergreen varieties, one of them is  a Nelly Kelly, the other is unknown as I lost the label.  Any fruit they bore last year was taken by the birds but this year the birds seem to be leaving them alone (touchwood).  Whilst the crop isn’t large it is nice to be able to pick a few each time I go out to water.

blueberries

Other than the blueberries my crops this week are all veggies.

The occasional warmer day is a good excuse to start eating a lot more salad.

Salad ingredients

A forage around the potato bed yielded these:

Kipfler potatoes

A few remaining overlooked broad beans:

Broad Beans

I also harvested a couple of womboks this week.  Two of which had some usable leaves but the third was so infested with caterpillars that it has to go to the chooks.

Wombok

Finally a couple of perennial favourites.  I don’t think there is a week that goes by when I don’t harvest spring onions and silver beet at least once (if not more often).  This week was no exception.

KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA   Silverbeet

One day soon I hope I will start getting some more summery crops but in the meantime I will have to content myself with looking at other people’s over at Daphne’s.

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Posted in Summer Harvesting | Tagged | 16 Comments