All posts tagged condiments

Pear & Vanilla Jam

By On 29/03/2012 In condiments, Food With 9 Comments Permanent Link to Pear & Vanilla JamPermalink

Pickle club may be done and dusted for the time being but it looks as though I’m in a bit of a preserving groove. Whilst researching a few different recipes for last week’s Nectarine & Spanish Onion Chutney I stumbled across this recipe on a great blog called Food in Jars. This blog is fantastic if you love trying different recipes for chutney, jams or anything else worth preserving. I’ve tweaked the recipe a little by reducing the sugar slightly as it seemed a little excessive. I also made it sans pectin but cooked it a little longer and found the consistency to be thick enough for my liking. This jam looks so pretty. You can see all the lovely little specks of vanilla bean as the pears are quite translucent. Also, our whole house smelt like heaven whilst this was cooking. We had the sweet smell of pear and vanilla wafting through our house for hours after. A-MAZING.

Apart from cooking jams and whatnot, I’ve been lucky enough to have some time off before I start my new job… hurrah! I’ve been extremely busy with different photography projects this past week so I thought it was time to take a break. Therefore I booked a quick trip up to Sydney for the weekend. I’m looking forward to spending time with my bro and my very awesome friends that I lived with in London. It’s such a shame we all chose different cities when we moved back to Australia, but at least we now have people to visit ; ) I’ll be sure to tell you all about my Sydney adventure in next weeks post.

x e.

 

Pear & Vanilla Jam with wholegrain toast and butter. I LOVE breakfast.

 

Pear and Vanilla Jam

Adapted from Marisa McClellan from Food in Jars

9-10 chopped smooth skinned pear (I used Bartlett)
2 vanilla pods (worth using the good stuff for this)
3.5 cups sugar

 

1. Chop all pears and place into a large heavy bottomed stock pot with the sugar. Slice down one side of the vanilla pods and scrape out all the innards into the pot. Once you’ve scrape out as much as you can, place the whole pod in the pot as well.

2. Cook on medium heat until the pears become soft and tender. I didn’t add any pectin into the recipe to thicken it up so I cooked it on the stove for another 20-30 minutes to reduce it to the right consistency.

3. Once you’re happy with the thickness of the jam remove the vanilla pods*. Now, do you like your jam smooth or chunky? If you like it smooth blitz the jam with a food processor or handheld blitzer.

4. By this time, the smell of the vanilla and pear wafting around the house is like heaven!

5. When your jam is almost ready, you’ll need to sterilize the jars. To do this you’ll need to heat the oven to 180ºC. Wash all in hot soapy water and rinse well. Place all jars on a oven tray facing up and not touching each other and pop them in the oven for 20 minutes. After this time, take them out of the oven and let cool to the same temperature as the chutney. Never add cold chutney to hot jars or vice versa!

* Once I removed the vanilla pods from the pot and let them coo. I added them to my white sugar jar. In a few weeks time your sugar with be slightly vanilla infused.

Pickle Club: Nectarine & Spanish Onion Chutney

By On 21/03/2012 In condiments, Food With 11 Comments Permanent Link to Pickle Club: Nectarine & Spanish Onion ChutneyPermalink

It’s that time again! Pickle Club has come around so quickly. Just in time too because our chutney, pickle and jam supplies were running low! If you’re not familiar with Pickle Club you can read up on it in one of my older posts here.

Pickle Club has created quite a stir over the last couple of months. After my last post I received quite a few emails asking how it all works and if I know of any other Pickle Clubs out there (no idea sorry)… even Frankie magazine wanted in! A few of us had a photoshoot in the park before all the other ‘Picklettes’ arrived. Everyone turned up bang on 3pm including Georgia (the writer from Frankie) to experience first-hand the swapping of pickles. Needless to say she loved it and we now have a new member for the next meet!

This Pickle Club I wanted to make a Nectarine Chutney. I saw a recipe in Gourmet Traveller a few months ago where they’d served it in a sandwich. So with this in mind, I thought I’d make something similar and add my own little twist.

There are a few notes I’d like to make with this chutney as I’d made a few little mistakes along the way – things that I’d recommend you don’t do. Firstly, I put in too much water to cook and stew the nectarines. This meant that we had to let it cook for hours and hours to let it reduce to the right consistency. The second is (this is just plain common sense I would think) to make sure the fruit is ripe! *facepalm* Our nectarines were quite hard, but I was impatient and wanted to make it straight away. In hindsight I should have waited a few days to let them ripen. To compensate I had to add a lot more sugar, so this recipe below is the un-compensated version. Regardless, it’s still super tasty with cheese and crackers.

x e.

 

(Top) My caramelized meringue with berry syllabub, passion fruit & fresh nectarine.
(Middle) Milly’s Picalilli
(Bottom) The perfect autumn day for a picnic in the park.

 (Above) The Pickles I picked. I couldn’t resist the ‘Tangy Cucumber & Apple Relish’.
It came with a very pretty bonus (an aerogramme) from The Hungry Workshop! Woohoo!

Nectarine & Spanish Onion Chutney

2.5kg Nectarines
5 large Spanish onion diced
1 good glug of Olive oil
150gm Sugar
1 tsp Curry powder
1 tsp Mustard powder
1 cup Cider vinegar
200ml Ezy Sauce

 

This is enough to make a batch of chutney for your first Pickle club. It’ll make 6 jars to take plus 2 to keep for yourself :)

1. Heat olive oil in a large pot. Add chopped onion to the pan and cook well until well browned.

2. Chop all nectarines into small pieces and remove the pips. Add these all to the pot and add four cup of water to the pan to prevent the bottom from burning.

3. Once the nectarines start to cook through, add the sugar, curry powder, mustard powder, vinegar and Ezy Sauce.

4. Cook well for a couple of hours until it looks like the right consistency. Remember it’ll thicken slightly as it cools. Continuously taste to see if you’d like it to be sweeter or more spicier.

4. When your chutney is almost ready, you’ll need to sterilize the jars. To do this you’ll need to heat the oven to 180ºC. Wash all in hot soapy water and rinse well. Place all jars on a oven tray facing up and not touching each other and pop them in the oven for 20 minutes. After this time, take them out of the oven and let cool to the same temperature as the chutney. Never add cold chutney to hot jars or vice versa!

Moroccan Preserved Lemons

By On 15/08/2011 In condiments, Food With 2 Comments Permanent Link to Moroccan Preserved LemonsPermalink

 The very first tagine I had was in Marrakesh in a small restaurant just off Jamaa el Fna, the main square. It was stinking hot and me and my friends were starving after flying in that morning on a 6am flight…from Stanstead. This was the first time I’d ever been to a Muslim country and I was loving every minute of it. Everything from the busy markets, the food, the smells from the spice markets :) and tannery :( , the riad style houses, the noises (calling to prayer) – were all so foreign and new to me; I couldn’t soak it all in quick enough.

Anyway, I will always remember that first tagine I had that day. I had no idea what it was but I was looking forward to it all none the less. I was so confused about what to order because cous cous was the extent of Moroccan cusine I knew. I decided to order the Lemon Chicken Tagine and to this day it is still listed in my top 5 food moments of all time. I’ve discovered that lemon plays quite an important part in Moroccan cuisine (along with pomegranates, mint, lamb and loads of spices) and thanks to Jamie Oliver, I’ve now discovered what gives their dishes the fresh zesty flavour- preserved lemons.

Last week I went Op shopping and bought a big bunch of lemons for 20c each – bargain. Then later in the week we met up for dinner with Seb’s aunty who gave us about another 10 from her garden. It was very tempting for me to make all sorts of different lemon cakes, biscuits and slices (all my favourite) but I knew I’d want to eat them all…not good for the waist line. So, preserved lemons. A must for Moroccan food and according to Jamie, once you start adding them to dishes, you can’t stop. All I have to do now is wait a good month.

 

Recipe by Jamie Oliver
 

Moroccan Preserved Lemons

10 small unwaxed lemons
200 g coarse sea salt
2 fresh bay leaves
7 black peppercorns
2 sticks of cinnamon
 

1. First you’ll want to sterilize a 1 litre jar. Wash it in warm soapy water and ensure you rinse it well. Take off any rubber seals and place it in a 100°C oven for 20 minutes. Meanwhile, put the seal in a bowl of boiling water. After 20 minutes remove the jars from the oven, taking care not to touch anywhere near the opening of the jar and leave them to cool.

2. Squeeze the juice from 5 of your lemons and put to one side. In your other 5 lemons, cut a deep cross into the top and keep going until you’ve cut 3/4 of the way through. They should stay joined at the base. Pack a teaspoon full of salt into each one and place in the staralized jar.

3. Layer the lemons up with the cinnamon sticks, bay leaves and peppercorns. Once all your lemons are in the jar, pour in your lemon juice and top up with water.

4. Seal up the jar and leave it for a month in a dark space. Give the jar a gentle shake every couple of days to move the salt around.

After a month the lemons are ready for using. Jamie has a few different recipes in his book “Jamie Does” where he uses these Preserved Lemons. After a month I’ll try to make one of them to use the lemons I’ve made. Yum.