A short and sweet recipe for Mustard Pickles.

It is  a glorious day here in Adelaide. Today, I plan on doing some painting and getting my art on before I host a drawing group tonight at Suzie Wong's Room.
Yesterday, I had a mad cooking day in case you didn't see all of my Facebook status updates. Myself and my lover had moseyed on over to the Torrens Island markets where we bought a ridiculous amount of food including a box of mushrooms, 14 punnets of strawberries and so much of a whole bunch of stuff for a lowly $30.
Yesterday I made mushroom stroganoff, mushroom pate, mushroom soup, mixed vegetable curry, a saag paneer for my lover, strawberry and vanilla bean jam, strawberry gin, apple chips, dehydrated strawberries and what will hopefully be rum and raisin chocolate fudge. I'm still working on the fudge recipe. I think I added too much milk initially. It's a work in progress at this stage but I swear I will get you the recipe as soon as it works.
I also made these Mustard Pickles. I love them because they remind me of picnics on sunny days with cute little sandwiches and bike rides along the river.
They are super easy to make.

Time: 15 Minutes prep. A night for the cucumbers to get all soft. A day to sit and get all pickle like.
Makes: 3.5 standard pasta sauce type jars full. 

Ingredients:

• 5 Cucumbers, sliced.
• 2 Red onions, halved and then sliced.
• 1 Tbs Salt.
• 1 Cup of raw caster sugar. 
• 2 and a half cups of apple cider vinegar.
• 1 Tbs of mustard seeds.
• 1 teaspoon of turmeric. 
• 1 teaspoon ground coriander.

Method:

Place the cucumbers, onion and salt into a container with a lid and leave in the fridge overnight. The next day, wash the salt off in a colander and then dry with paper towel.

In a saucepan, add the vinegar, sugar and spices over medium heat. Heat through until the sugar dissolves. This should take about 5 minutes. Add the cucumber and wait for little bubbles to start appearing in the liquid. Take off the heat and place in sterilised jars. Place the lid on and set aside for one day for all the ingredients to get to know each other. Keep in the fridge once opened. 

Serve on sandwiches, toast, in a salad or with your favourite nut cheese.  

Marinated Eggplant (Aubergine)... Vegan MoFo Day 16.

Is Australia the only place in the world that calls an eggplant an eggplant? It's a pretty funny name. I suppose it is an egg shaped fruit on that plant. Aubergine just sounds so much more... sexy.
Let me know.


Makes one small jar.
Time: Ten minutes prep, thirty minutes cooking time.


Ingredients:

• Two eggplants, sliced into strips about 2 cm wide (a bit smaller than an inch) but keep the length as long as you can.
• Enough olive oil to cover the eggplant when in the jar. Maybe half a cup.
• Salt and pepper.
• 2 Fresh garlic cloves.

Method:

Add the strips of eggplant to an oven tray and drizzle a small amount of olive oil over it. By a small amount, I mean about a tablespoon. Use your hands to get the oil to cover the eggplant. Sprinkle with salt and pepper.

Pop in an oven at 180C or 340F for about half an hour or until slightly browned.

Take the eggplant strips and garlic cloves and put them in a clean, sterilised jar. To sterilise a jar, pop it in a saucepan of boiling water for a few minutes and then drain. Be careful not to get any of the boiling water on you.

Cover the eggplant in the oil right to the top and seal the jar. Let sit for a minimum of a week to marinate. The longer you can leave it, the better.

Serve with crackers, in a salad or pasta. Delicious! And yeah, let me know what you call an eggplant. :) xx

Onion and Tarragon Jam/Chutney- Vegan MoFo Day 15.

This is spectacular. It's sweet and goes really well with the Baked Cashew Cheese I have just made. You can call it jam. You can call it chutney. Hell, you can call it Martin. Just don't call it bland because It's anything but.

This recipe also sees the last of my giant $3 onion bag. There are a few onions that started to grow stalks. I think I may pop them in the garden and see what happens. Oh. Yeah.


Time: 5 Minutes Prep, 30 Minutes to cook, 5 Minutes to bottle.
Makes: 2 Medium size jars.


Ingredients:

• Four cups of onions, sliced very thin.
• Two tablespoons of olive oil.
• One star anise.
• Half a teaspoon of powdered mustard.
• One teaspoon of tarragon.
• Two bay leaves.
• Half a cup of sugar.
• Half a cup of brown vinegar.
• Three quarters of a cup of water.
• One teaspoon of soy sauce or tamari. 

Method:

Heat the oil in a saucepan over medium heat. Add the star anise, powdered mustard, tarragon, bay leaves  and the onions. Saute for about a minute and place the lid securely on the saucepan. Reduce the heat to low and leave to cook for twenty minutes, stirring only once. You shouldn't need to stir it that much.

Add the sugar, the vinegar, the water and the soy sauce/ tamari. Bring to the boil and let simmer for 10 minutes. It's now ready to bottle. Spoon the mixture into sterilised jars. To sterilise the jars, put them in boiling water for a few minutes. Be careful. It's hot.

Serve on crackers or on burgers or in a salad. Actually, serve it however you want it. xx

Sliced Pickled Onions- Vegan MoFo Day 11.

 

It's day 11 of the Vegan Month Of FOod (Vegan MoFo). Are you just loving it? I took some of my chocolate truffles to work last night and my fellow workers loved them. They couldn't believe that not only were they vegan but they were also healthy! Delicious. The recipe is here, however instead of dates, coconut and agave, I used currants and apricots. So good.

I bought a huge bag of onions from the Torrens Island Markets a few Sundays ago for the grand old price of $3. Bargain.
So what to do with that many onions?
Make Sliced Pickled Onions, of course!

Time: Twenty minutes prep time, three days soaking and then three weeks marinating time.
Makes: 4 cups of onions. (I tripled this recipe and so made masses of jars).

Ingredients:

• Four cups of onions, sliced.
• One cup of salt.
• Four cups of water.

Put these ingredients into a large sealed container for three days. After the three days take the onions out of the brine and give them a good wash.

For the vinegar:

• Four cups of brown vinegar.
• One cinnamon stick.
• One tablespoon of fennel seeds.
• One tablespoon of mustard seeds. 
• One tablespoon of minced garlic.
• Two bay leaves. 
• One teaspoon of chilli flakes (optional).

In a saucepan, add all of these ingredients and bring to a boil. Lower the heat and simmer for an hour.
You could use a slow cooker for this. Add all the ingredients and cook on low overnight.

Once you have gathered all of the ingredients, pack sterilised jars with the onions and vinegar. To sterilise your jars, boil them in water for a few minutes to kill any nasties. Take out of the water and fill with the mix immediately. Pop the lid on.

Leave the onions to sit for three weeks to marinate and then add to sandwiches, wraps, salads or crackers with some hommous or almond ricotta. Delicious! xx

Mandarin Marmalade

I love how nature provides us with everything we need, such as a tree full of the vitamin c goodness that are mandarins in the middle of winter. Our tree is crammed packed with the delicious little suckers and I have been eating them practically everyday.

Then I got to thinking, how do you preserve a mandarin, exactly? They can be juiced, sure, but they aren't the best for freezing or drying. Perhaps jarred in syrup? Then it dawned on me- marmalade!

I don't know if its because I'm getting older and can appreciate it more but I really am starting to adore marmalade. Honestly, this mandarin marmalade is really so delicious, I could eat it with a spoon. I don't often use spreads. I still have fig jam in the cupboard from 2 years ago. I have, however, used half a jar of mandarin marmalade in the last two days. That is obviously saying something.

Time: About an hour and twenty minutes. Seems like a long time, but an hour of that is just the syrup bubbling away on it's lonesome.

Makes: Three medium sized jars.

Ingredients:

• 8 Mandarins.
• 3 cups of raw sugar.
• 3 cups of water.
• 2 Cardamom pods, for fun (Optional).

Method:

Take the peel of the mandarins and julienne the peel of four of them. Dispose of the rest of the peel.

I wouldn't worry about removing the pith, because mandarins have so little pith anyway and it helps in the setting process as it contains a lot of pectin.

Chop the mandarin flesh into small pieces. Keep the seeds. They also contain pectin.

In a saucepan over medium heat, add all of the ingredients. Stir them continuously until the sugar has dissolved.

Bring the syrup to the boil. Reduce the heat and let it simmer away for about an hour.

You will know that the syrup is ready to become jam by putting a small amount on a saucer that has been sitting in the freezer. It should gel immediately.

Skim out all the seeds and the cardamom pods. They should have all risen to the surface.

Pour into jars that you have had boiling in a separate saucepan. Be careful not to burn yourself. Boiling the jars will sterilise them.

Seal two jars and eat the contents of the other.

Green Tomato Chutney

This is super delicious. I have literally been eating it all day with fresh pieces of bread. My housemate grew some tomatoes in the backyard and they are getting to the point where the vines are starting to die off but there is still green fruit hanging from them. I picked a bunch and made this. You could make this with red tomatoes, I'm sure. Give it a go and tell me how you went. xx

Time: Half an hour.

Makes one jar.

Ingredients:

• Ten green tomatoes, chopped.
• Half a cup of raw sugar.
• Half a cup of red wine vinegar.
• One teaspoon of fennel seeds.
• One teaspoon of cumin seeds.
• One teaspoon of mustard seeds.
• One teaspoon of chili flakes.
• One tablespoon of soy sauce.
• One teaspoon of oil.

Method:

In a saucepan, heat the oil over a medium heat. Add the spices. It's a good idea to crush them with a mortar and pestle prior if you have one.

Then add the tomatoes, sugar, vinegar and soy sauce. Stir.

Leave the mixture for about half  an hour, stirring occasionally.

Eventually, it will look a lot more like chutney.

At this point, it's ready to jar.

Make sure that you sterilise the jar first. You can do this by putting it in a saucepan of boiling water for a few minutes. This will ensure that you can keep the chutney for a long, long time in the cupboard as long as you don't open it. Once it's opened, store it in the fridge.