La Recette du Jour

I managed to buy a jar of chilli jelly on a recent trip to the UK, but I’ve long fancied trying Fiona’s recipe and making my own; this stuff is too tasty and versatile to be reserved for special occasions. So I bought a couple of kilos of apples and eventually tracked down a selection of chillis in Carrefour (they can be difficult to find, since the French don’t do hot as in chilli).

The first lot didn’t look much like chillis I’ve seen before; they were relatively large and bell-shaped. “Do you think I should use one or two?” I asked Steve. He looked at them and scoffed. “Pah! They’re so big they can’t be hot, and they are French after all. Those small pointy ones will be hotter.” Boldly, he cut a bit off one of the bell-shaped ones and chewed it. A moment’s silence, then: “AAAAARGH!” Quickly, I handed him the antidote, a spoonful of yoghurt, and he swallowed it gratefully. “OK,” he croaked after a minute, “I’ll try the small ones.” Bravely he nibbled one: “Humph! Not hot at all!” Armed with this information I added one cut-up bell-shaped pepper, seeds and all, to my simmering apples.

The next day, I tried the disappointingly scanty juice that had dripped through the cloth. ‘Phwoarhhhh!” Luckily there was some yoghurt left. Well, maybe the sugar will tone it down. Hmm, only 400 ml of juice from 1.5 kg of apples? I did the maths in my head with difficulty, added the requisite sugar, and boiled it up — result, half a jar of jelly, admittedly a beautiful colour. This didn’t seem like good value, so I tipped the pulp back into the pan with more water and managed to get two more jars of pale, translucent jelly from it. Their innocent looks belie their ferocity though; I think I’ll have to put health warnings on them.

Later, a bit of googling suggests that Steve might have inadvertently scored a further point in the Omnivore’s Hundred: raw Scotch Bonnet pepper … if you try this recipe, I recommend you use less virulent chillis than I did, or at least remove the seeds!

As usual at this time of year, we have a glut of grapes; our plot of vines is for making wine, but in the old days people often planted a few table grapes amidst the others. So every now and then when harvesting you come across heavy bunches of sweet, greenish-gold grapes instead of the deep red Carignan.

The trouble with grapes is they don’t keep long, and you’d better believe you can’t give them away around here at harvest time. So we often end up throwing many of them away. This year I was determined not to, and grape jelly was about the only way I could think of for preserving them. A bit of googling turned up a site which looked interesting and had not one but two recipes for preserving grapes. And unlike many sites it was clear that they really had tried the recipes, repeatedly.

So these two recipes come from The Cottage Smallholder; I’m only copying them here because it would be unfortunate if next time around their site had disappeared! It looks well worth bookmarking if you are interested in home-grown food.

Recipe for Preserving grapes »

We are fortunate enough to know someone with an organically cultivated apricot orchard, and at this time of year we take delivery of a 10kg crate of golden, red-tinged apricots. Unlike the under-ripe, tasteless apricots you get in shops, these are actually a pleasure to eat raw. Still, we can’t eat 10kg of apricots in a weekend, so time to get the preserving pan out.

Last year I made the best apricot jam I’ve ever made with these apricots, but I made so much we still have some jars left, so this time I “only” used 2kg of apricots for that. Another excellent and very easy way of keeping apricots is to preserve them raw in a mixture of syrup and alcohol. The resulting apricots are delicious in any cooked apricot dessert, or just as they are with cream or ice cream. And of course the preserving liquid makes a very nice digestif.

Recipe for Preserving apricots »

Home-made lemon curd is so quick and easy to do, and so delicious, that there’s no excuse for not making it when lemons are cheap and plentiful. Keep in the fridge and consume within a few weeks. This quantity makes about 2 jars.

It can be done in the microwave, but I make it in a double boiler; it’s just as quick and you can see exactly when it’s ready.

Recipe for Lemon curd »

For when you have so many tomatoes you don’t know what do do with them, the freezer is full, you are eating tomatoes at every meal, and still they come!

Recipe for Dried tomatoes »

You can use green or red tomatoes — red tomatoes result in a lovely colour, but the jam is very sweet. All the usual rules for jam-making apply.

Recipe for Confiture de tomates »