Home Preserved Pickled Garlic

   For the first time in many years we have achieved a decent quantity and quality of garlic!
    We bought the garlic bulbs at the Chutney Festival at Barrington Court last year, from a local farmer who has grown them for years, even supplying River Cottage.
   No matter what we always end up with a few garlic bulbs that won't keep, not that there is anything too wrong with them, just not nice enough to keep all winter long, so instead of trying to use 5 garlic bulbs up in a couple of weeks I pickle them. They are best put into smaller preserving pots as you never get huge amounts...and you don't really want to eat your way through a large jar full when you open it as you will get objections from your friends.
 This is a recipe i first tried last time we had a big crop...about 5 years ago. It's adapted from a book called "The Food Lover's Guide To Canning" by Rich and Crawford, 'canning' being the American term for 'bottling'. It's a must if you want to bottle soups, fruits and vegetables as it takes you through both boiling water bottling and pressure bottling so your produce will keep for longer.
   I always use one or the other method as it really does mean the produce will keep well, and it stays perfect without any shrinkage or spoilage for many months.
 
Pickled Garlic

8 oz of garlic cloves, pealed and the rough bit at the end cut off
a sprig of fresh thyme
a sprig of fresh rosemary
4 crushed peppercorns
1/2 cup white wine vinegar(or just white vinegar)
1/2 cup of mead, or white wine
1 dried chili pepper, of the hotness you prefer, de seeded and sliced 
1 tbs of honey
1 tsp of sea salt

Put the thyme, rosemary and peppercorns in a muslin bag and tie up the bag. Put it in a smallish saucepan and add the prepared garlic cloves, vinegar, mead, chili pepper, honey and salt.
   Cover and bring to the boil, boiling for only five minutes. place somewhere to cool, keeping it covered.
   Prepare your preserving jars by washing out the glass jar and placing into an oven heated to 80 degrees C. place the lids in a saucepan of boiling water.
  If you are going to have a boiling water bath to preserve the jars, get this, and all your preserving bits ready.
  The boiling water bath needs to be hot (82 degrees C) when you place the hot jars into it.

   Now you have everything ready, put the saucepan with the garlic in back onto the hob and boil again, for another five minutes.
   Remove the muslin bag from the saucepan.
  Ladle into the hot jars leaving 1/2 an inch between the top of the garlic and it's juices, and the top of the jar. Make sure the rim of the jar is very clean. Screw on dried, but still hot, lid.

  If you aren't going to boiling water process the garlic, place all the hot jars together and wrap tea towels around them, so they cool down slowly, this will seal them but they need to be eaten within a few months.

  If you are going to boiling water process them, put them into the boiling water bath for 20 minutes. After the 20 minutes are up, remove them from the water and leave to cool.


Please use sensible precautions when using boiling water!
If you intend to boiling water or pressure process your preserves there are loads of very good American books out there, please read one of them before doing any pressure processing!

Home Grown New Potato Salad

 There is plenty coming in from the garden at the moment, mangetout and sugar snap peas, plus the traditional garden pea(though these don't often get cooked, they are just lovely to pod and eat as they are. We've even had the first boiling of broad beans. Some people are already getting courgettes in, though ours are far too tiny to eat.

   One garden product that has surpassed everything else this year is the humble potato. We grew Lady Crystal and Charlottes this year and they are abundant and very tasty, helped by the dry weather keeping off the blight I think.

  This is my mother's recipe for potato salad, it's a great way of using up new potatoes if you have a heavy crop as you simply boil up double the amount for a big dinner, leave half to cool and they become your potato salad for the next day.

Potato Salad mostly made from garden produce

Ingredients:

1lb of new potatoes, boiled until firm but not mushy

1 pickled gherkin, or if you don't like pickled things about 1/4 of a cucumber.

3 medium sized spring onions

2 tbs of mayonaise of choice


Chop up the potatoes into 1 cm cubes
Cut up the gherkin into little chunks about 0.5cm
Slice the spring onions into small rings
Put all the ingredients into a bowl and mix thouroughly, add more mayo if there isn't enough
Dust with paprika to make it look pretty and serve.

perfect with schnitzels and garden salad

Foraged Wild Strawberry and Wheat Free Shortbread

   Unusually there seems to be an abundance of wild and alpine strawberries this year. There is a bumper crop of the bigger cultivated ones, but for an intense burst of stawberry flavour you can't beat the tiny wild ones.

   Usually we leave these jewel like berries for the birds and mice to devour but as there is so many of them we feel a little less guilty about having a handful for our pudding.

Alpine Strawberry

For the Shortbread:

Shortbread (Wheatfree)

 

2 oz Rice flour 

2 oz Potato flour 

2 oz sizzed oats (break down size of oats in processor)

4 oz butter 

2 oz Demerara sugar 

   After you have sizzed your oats, place all other ingredients into processor. Once the mixture comes together, put into cake tin with a removerable base, making sure all sides and bottom are greased first so the shortbread doesn't stick to the sides.

Cook for 40 minutes at 150 degrees C.

Once baking is complete, slide out base of cake tin, then cut shortbread into a wheel of six and then leave to cool still on the base. 

  This Shortbread is a lovely melting moment with a handful of strawberries and cream, or yogurt

Recipe provided by Maria

June 2011

We are already a week into June!

 The spring has been so dry I think gardening time is spent mostly in watering, though it has highlighted the benefits of a good number of water butts and simple irrigation systems.

 The new potatoes are coming in thick and fast, the dry spring has at least kept the blight at bay for the moment.

   Herbs are also growing well, with watering. Something we started doing last year was chopping herbs when they were at their best and freezing them in little pots or ice cube trays. They were a great bonus for soups and stews during the winter months as they add so much better flavour than dried herbs.

  One handy trick to help keep plants safe from pests and add a bit of extra fertilizer is to surround plants like melons, courgettes and cucumbers with sheep's wool, most people with a small flock will happily sell you a fleece, you may even get one for nothing if it's poor quality and matted up. There is no need to wash it. simply surround the plants. I've even tried this around the base of young trees to keep the grass down for a bit. The birds love it as they can steal some to line their nests.

 Courgette plant all tucked up in fleece blanket