Nana Poohah's Green Tomato Pickle

My nana was an amazing woman. Aside from being a generous, loving, witty, intelligent and strong woman, she was amazing in the kitchen.

And she certainly had her specialties...the best raspberry jam you'll eat, the most moreish Louise cake (that always went down a treat with a Milo after a walk around the Picton foreshore in the evenings), the tastiest vegetable soup and the world's best tomato sauce (which I have now made twice, and by made, I mean slaved for eight hours each time to do it). Knowing the time and effort that goes into these things now that I have ventured further into kitchen, I admire her even more (especially seeing as she did it all while having to raise my mother and two uncles!).

She has been missed for the past two and a half years but her memory certainly lives on in the food our family makes, eats and enjoys, especially at those very special family get-togethers.

And she certainly passed on her cooking skills to my Mams who is the most amazing cook and does her mother's memory and food very proud.

Nana, Mams and some random (nah, just kidding Girly... you better be reading this)

I credit any sort of skill or talent I have in the kitchen to both these wonderful women.

Nana shared her life, kitchen and amazing garden with my grandpa. Grandpa Poohah is the most wonderful man you'll ever meet. There is absolutely no one with a bigger heart of gold.

At Christmas time this year he managed to dig out from his shed (the most wonderful treasure-filled man haven) Nana's preserving pan which has seen many a jam and pickle produced in it's time, but of course is spotless and in immaculate condition.

Nana and Grandpa Poohah with my sister Hayley and I
in Dunedin a few years ago

Because of the abundance of Christmas presents I had to haul back from Picton, Grandpa insisted on sending the fairly heavy pan up to me and so it arrived not long after I had returned home, packaged to perfection, and ready for some creations.

This is the first real chance I have had to use it and it was fabulous. Elliot and I decided we had seen the best of the tomato plants this season, and I was sick of giving those pesky birds a free feed, so we decided to pull them. That left me with a kilo and a half of green tomatoes.

Green tomato pickle was one of Nana's creations that I unfortunately never got to try but I asked Mams about it in the weekend and was told it was served with cold roast beef and in cold meat sandwiches with white bread mmmmmm.

The recipe was given to me by Mams who said Nana had copied it out of a recipe book many moons ago. It used pounds and quarts (who knew there was UK and US quarts??) so thank god for online weight converters and the fact I had roughly half the tomatoes so could simply halve the other ingredients (saying maths is not my strongest point is a gross understatement).

So calculations and conversions done, away we went. This is a pretty easy recipe and the only thing you need to really plan in advance is the salting overnight.

Ingredients (this is the recipe halved and converted into metric measurements):

• 1.5kg green tomatoes
• 700g apples
• 700g onions
• 700g sugar
• 1 dsps salt
• 1 tsp pepper
• 1 Tb mustard
• 1.5 dsps curry powder
• 2 Tb flour
• 1L vinegar (didn't specify what type and turns out I didn't have enough of one type of vinegar so went with a white/malt/cider combo)

Method:

• Cut up the tomatoes, apples and onions. Sprinkle with the salt and leave overnight (in the middle of the night - well, 7am on a Sunday morning - I realised that because the pickle is not blended or anything at the end that I probably needed smaller pieces of the fruit as no one really wants half an apple covered in pickle do they? - so cut them fairly small).

I cut them smaller than this

• Next morning add the vinegar and sugar and boil for half an hour.

• Combine all the other ingredients with a little vinegar and stir into the mixture.
• Boil until thick (took about 1.5 hours).

• Put the pickle into steralised jars. 

• And eat. Eat with cheese and crackers and just try and stop yourself from eating it all. It is SOOOO good. Thank you Nana for a fabulous recipe and for everything else xxx

Pickled jalapenos

I love jalapenos. I love jalapenos with cheese and crackers, in wraps, stuffed, on nachos, by themselves, the list goes on.

Unfortunately I find most of the ones you get at the supermarket are too vinegarie (that's a word now despite what spell check tells me) and not hot at all. The best of the bunch are probably Old El Paso ones.

Then there are the La Morena red jalapenos in morena sauce (a kind of salsa type sauce) which are really good. They are hot and make a nice change from the ones in the vinegarie solution.

You can get the La Morena stuff from Farro Fresh, Nosh and limited stuff from Pak n Save (Paul - who I am told I have to refer to as "my good looking lawyer friend" but I just call him Paul - is bound to jump in here and tell me you can of course get them from Albany New World, like the Blair's range of stuff. There, happy Paul?)... or... you can pickle your own jalapenos.

Elliot and I did this once right back when our very first jalapeno plant gave us about four jalapenos, and they were fab.

We now have a fair few jalapeno plants with a fair few jalapenos on them so we pickled some of the green ones we have. You have to make sure when picking green ones to use that you get the ones with "corking" on them - you will see in the picture below what I mean. This basically means they are starting to ripen. You don't want to pick them before that - they are shiny and hard and not good at all.

If left they will ripen fully and turn red - which is what we will do with the rest and then dry and smoke them to make chipotles.

Corking

To pickle jalapenos is very simple; all you need is:

• 2 cups white vinegar
• 2 cups water
• 2 Tb salt

Bring the ingredients to the boil and boil it for a couple of minutes.

In the meantime cut the tops off the jalapenos and slice them down one side - this will let all the liquid get in them. Leave the seeds in.

Put them into a sterilised jar (sterilise by putting in the oven for 20 minutes at 120°C) and pour the boiling liquid over. Make sure you have just sterilised the jar as you need to pour hot liquid into a hot jar. Fill to the top.

Try and get as much of the air out as possible and push the jalapenos down so the liquid starts to get in them.

Screw the lid on and leave for at least a month.

They look awesome! So even if you don't want to eat them they look cool in the kitchen.

Just a wee note to my avid readers (yes, all two of you) - I apologise for the lack of posts. There has been slight trauma and grief at the Sunset household due to three of the aquaponic fish meeting their untimely demise.

El is working hard to try and make sure the two that are left last a while longer and that the system is 100% before we look to get more.

Definitely no photos about that update :(