Cucumber pickle

This pickle is exciting for a couple of reasons. When I was in England recently, I bought the National Trust's Good Old-Fashioned Jams, Preserves and Chutneys by Sara Paston-Williams, and it finally arrived off the boat this week. Naturally, I've been itching to get into it. The other reason is that it's made with cucumbers from our garden. Our very first home-grown pickle, although I did have to buy the onions and capsicum, since the birds pulled all my onions up almost before they'd bulbed, and the capsicums aren't quite ripe yet.

So, last night I sliced up two onions, a green capsicum, and just under a kilo of cucumbers using my new favourite device ever, my new V-slicer. Took me around three minutes to slice the lot of 'em!

The veges all went into my medium ceramic bowl, with a good handful of salt, to sit overnight and draw out any excess liquid. I covered the bowl with a tea towel and let it sit on the shelves in my dining room where it wasn't going to be disturbed.

Came back to it this morning and poured around half a litre of liquid out, gave the veg a good washing, and rolled it in a clean tea towel to wring the last of the water out. I left it in the tea towel while I prepared the vinegar.

Cider vinegar, sugar, mustard seeds and a little bit of ginger. That's it. Very simple.

I heated the vinegar, sugar and spices until the sugar dissolved, let it come to the boil, then emptied the veg out of the tea towel into the saucepan.

It's important not to simmer the veg for too long, or else you end up with a slimy heaving mass of greyish ooze, rather than lovely crisp green veg. Around five minutes should do it, and in my case, worked perfectly.

The tricky part was getting the pickle into jars. Because it is essentially vegetables in vinegar, it's important to get a good balance of veg and vinegar in each jar. Inevitably, the vinegar all rushes out leaving all the veg behind, leading to a scooping rather than pouring motion being required.

These will sit now for a couple of weeks to mature before being opened.

Pickled Onions

I love pickled onions. Which is weird, because I hate onions. With a passion. But just try keeping me away from pickled onions. I have, however, been disappointed with the quality of the jarred pickled onions in the supermarket of late, and when I saw pickling onions at the market the other day, I thought I'd better have a go.

So, in the interests of full disclosure, I did not actually grow these onions, but they are from the fruit and veg market at the Vic.

This jar I bought in Kmart for around $8, the obviously saw me coming since I later bought a similar sized jar I intend to make another batch in for around $2 at the local $2 shop.

Anyway, first things first, since I only had the one large jar, I figured a good place to start was with finding out how many onions would fit in the jar. I bought around 3kg of pickling onions, because they were cheap cheap cheap and, as I already might have mentioned, I love pickled onions! As it turns out, approximately 1kg or so fit in the jar.

Once the onions had been peeled and top and tailed, which was a laborious job I managed to acheive whilst supervising the tomato relish, they were left to soak in a bowl of brine overnight. I made the brine by heating water and a handful of salt until the salt had dissolved, then allowing to cool before adding the onions.

In the meantime, I prepared the pickling vinegar. Into plain white vinegar I put a tablespoon each of coriander seeds, cloves and cardamom seeds, a couple of cinnamon sticks and a few bay leaves, and brought it to the boil. The vinegar was then left to steep for about five hours, before being sieved off and stored overnight until the onions were ready to bottle.

The next day, I drained the brine off the onions, and rinsed them well, then laid them out on a paper towel to dry off. When they were dry, I put them into the sterilised jar, and discovered that I could have fit a few more in, once I had removed the peel and ends. Not to worry.

I then sieved the vinegar again to remove all the gunk that had settled to the bottom overnight, mostly clove dust as far as I could make out, then poured into the jar over the onions. I folded up a bit of greaseproof paper and stuffed it in the top of the jar to stop the onions floating, at least for the next couple of days until they have absorbed enough vinegar to stay submerged.

These will be ready to eat in around three weeks, but I'm intending to leave them a little longer than that.