Pepper honey

Who would have thought that pepper boiled up with a little sugar, water and lemon juice could be so delicious or so useful? 20 minutes to make my latest larder must-have. And that's including time to find a jar for it.

This concoction has 101 uses: lunch was a slice of gorgonzola drizzled with this peppery nectar; the pork I'm cooking for dinner will be glazed with it. Kate Hill, whose recipe this was, says it's good stirred into mint tea - so that's this afternoon sorted.

Pepper honey

Put two handsful of peppercorns into a pan with 200cl of water. Bring to the boil and simmer for five minutes. Strain and set aside the peppers. Add 500g sugar to the water, also the juice and zest of a lemon. Bring to the boil and simmer for five minutes. Add the peppercorns and simmer for a further five minutes. Taste and bottle.

Related posts

Valvona and Crolla's gorgonzola with honey
Nigella's sticky pears with gorgonzola

Other larder recipes to make now

Spiced apricot and orange chutney
Quince liqueur
Chilli jam - I'm afraid this is such a staple in this house that I make it at any time of year if I've used up the summer batches
Preserved lemons
Christmas chutney
Home-made vanilla extract
Sticky sloe vodka - there's just time, if you can find sloes before the birds

Spring cleaning the larder

Guess what I'm doing today? And, just like Sandra, we're going to eat it all up, even if it's past its use-by date. Except for one thing - the box of microwave popcorn which Horatio bought while my back was turned. I'm going to incinerate that, with enormous pleasure. His excuse for buying it? He says that traditional popcorn mixed with real melted butter "doesn't taste buttery" ****?!!???!!

Spiced apricot and orange chutney

Looking for marmalade, I discovered a forgotten jar of this - made in 2005, matured to perfection. It's Delia, from her Christmas book. She also uses this to make a quick sauce for roast pork, so it's quite useful for cooking ahead if you've got some spare time. I made it as a Christmas present for 2005, with the sauce recipe attached.

Spiced apricot and orange chutney

400g no-soak dried apricots
1 tsp whole coriander seeds
225g soft brown sugar
425ml cider vinegar
1 chopped onion
50g sultanas
2 tbsp grated ginger
2 chopped cloves garlic
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
grated zest and juice of an orange

Cut the apricot into small pieces. Temper the coriander seeds in a dry frying pan, then bash them in a mortar. Put everything together into a large stainless steel saucepan & heat gently until the sugar has dissolved. Simmer half-covered for 45 minutes or so. You want soft onions and fruit, but you don't want it too thick, and it will carry on thickening as it cools.

Spoon into sterilised jars. I generally do this by putting them through a dishwasher cycle. Or you can put them into a hottish oven until they are too hot to handle.

Spiced apricot sauce for roast pork

You make this exactly as if you were making gravy: sprinkle a little flour onto the pan juices, mix to a paste, add white wine - enough to make the sauce - bubble and reduce, stirring all the time to keep smooth. Stir in a good quantity of the chutney, also some orange zest, and simmer for about 5 minutes, until the flour is cooked.

I think it would be just as good using a dash of wine and some stock.


Related posts:

Braised mixed lentils
Chilli and pepper chutney
Red onion marmalade

Useful links:

Delia Smith Online
Pomiane's anti-Delia rant

Pink fish

Jean's Pink Fish is the most wonderful retro recipe, a real throwback to the 1950s and 1960s ... we may think it old-fashioned, but everyone fell on it at lunch on Sunday, even those who, like me, had never eaten Jean's version. Anna was amazed, it's not her normal thing at all - she made it to honour her grandmother, and was slightly embarrassed that it didn't go with the rest of lunch.

It's a tinned salmon mousse, with rice. I've had plenty of salmon mousse, but never with rice - surprisingly, a good addition; thrifty, too.

In the '60s, everyone used to have a ring mould; setting sweet and savoury dishes with gelatine was all the rage. By the 1980s, it was a forgotten art, and, soon after I married, both my mother-in-law and my stepmother passed me on their no-longer-needed ring moulds. I've used them intermittently, mostly for cakes .... but so intermittently that yesterday, where was the small one when I needed it??? I just hope I haven't given it to Sue Ryder or Oxfam! So I made my pink fish in a small loaf tin instead - not so pretty, but just as effective. I used to have a fish mould, but I can't find that, either - and you try buying one of those now: teddy bears, numbers, stars, hearts - but no fish!

Fish mousse became fish pate (I remember making one with a lot of lemon, and stuffing it back into the hollowed-out lemons), as we all discovered how fiddly it was to use powdered gelatine. These days you can buy sheet gelatine in just about every supermarket, so suddenly it's got easy again ... you just soak the leaves in cold water for a few minutes, and then, when you're ready, squeeze out the water, and slide them into your warm ingredients, whereupon they dissolve instantly.

Pink fish is a very useful starter, because you can make it a couple of days ahead, and it's a doddle, too (I did most of it one-handed while chatting to Menna on the phone). The basic ingredients are likely to be in your kitchen - tinned salmon, rice, yoghurt, tomato ketchup, Worcester sauce, tabasco. You use the tin to measure all the other ingredients, another plus.

Jean's version is delicious, and very much of its time - lashings of cream, mayo from a bottle (it had just been invented). I've updated it to make it lighter, and find that the finished dish tastes sharper, not so sickly sweet (all that cream). Next time I make it, I'll update it again, using fresh salmon rather than tinned, and fresh chilli rather than tabasco. It could also be made with lemony-herby flavourings rather than the chilli.

Jean's Pink Fish

1 tin red salmon
1 tin cooked rice
1/2 tin mayo
1/2 tin double cream
1/2 tin milk
enough gelatine to make it set (2 leaves for a small tin, 4 for a big tin)
tomato ketchup
Worcester sauce
tabasco
salt and pepper

Soak the gelatine in a little cold water. Meanwhile, drain the salmon and mash it in a little bowl. Put cooked rice into the tin and add it to the salmon. Pour the cream and mayo into the tin, then add this to the bowl. Mix well. Season with sauces. The tk will make it pink which is good, but will also add sweetness, which may become too much in this creamy version, so go carefully.

Now measure half a tin of milk, and heat this gently in a small pan (don't let it boil). When it's a little more than blood temperature, take it off the heat, squeeze out the gelantine leaves and add them. Stir, and when you're sure they're dissolved, add them to your paste. Pour it into your prepared mould (either grease it, or line it with clingfilm). This will take a couple of hours in the fridge to set, and will keep, well wrapped, for at least a couple of days.

You get the full '60s flavour of the thing if you make it in a fish mould, and decorate the resulting mousse with overlapping scales made from finely sliced cucumber. But you may be saved from yourself by the lack of a fish mould. In Anna's case it was a tribute to her grandmother.


Joanna's pink fish

1 tin red salmon
1 tin cooked rice
1 tin 0% Greek yoghurt
1/2 tin skimmed milk
gelatine (see above for quantities)
tomato ketchup
Worcester sauce
tabasco
salt and pepper

Follow the method above. I used a mixture of white rice and wild rice, because that's what there was, but I think that white rice alone would be a better bet, as the wild rice was quite assertive. Brown rice would be worth trying.

I definitely preferred the taste of this one - sharper, tangy-er. I suspect it would be really good made with fresh salmon, and I know that you could have fun changing the flavourings.


A small tin of salmon made enough mousse to fill a small loaf tin, which would cut into eight slices.


Last week Anna made Jean's original sauce for this, but she said it was too disgusting to eat: cream, tk, tabasco ... more of the same, in other words. I think it would be worth trying a green sauce of some sort - capers, vinegar, herbs. That's what I'll do this evening, anyway.


PS if you're one of the many people who have asked for Anna's passionfruit tart recipe - I'm going to phone her tonight to get instructions - they'll be here before the weekend, fingers crossed

Roasting tomatoes

I've roasted a lot of tomatoes this year, because that way we'll have some summer sunshine in the depths of winter. About this time last year I decided that we would never again eat anything out of season, nor would we eat any more air-freighted food. I didn't then realise how boring we would find our winter diet, because I had made no preparations. By spring, everyone was longing for salad leaves, and, above all, for tomatoes (they're just not the same out of a tin, useful though those are).

This year, I am determined that we won't have such a restricted winter palate. One of the things I have been doing is roasting tomatoes for the winter. Some are stored in jars of oil in the fridge, but, this year, while the learning curve is still steep, most are in boxes in the freezer (some are frozen whole, others are already made into sauce).

I've tried several different ways with roasting, and have found that slower really is better. One problem with true slow-roasting is that taking 12 hours to cook a tomato isn't always convenient - you either have to be cutting up toms first thing when you're barely awake, or last thing at night when you'd much rather be brushing your teeth and going to bed. So I've experimented with faster/hotter.

For all these tomatoes, you prepare them the same way: cut them in half, put them cut side up in a roasting pan, sprinkle them with thyme and olive oil. If you like you can add some unpeeled garlic cloves, particularly if you're going to make tomato sauce at the end. If you like you can peel them when they're cooked, but I don't often bother.

Many many people leaving comments on my blog say that they'd like to cook from scratch but don't have time. This is an easy way to begin (and it's not too late to make a start this year, although there's probably only another week or so in southern England). When there's time and energy, a little effort - 10 minutes in two bursts - gives easy fuss-free ingredients for the days to come. You can re-heat them and use them as a vegetable (great on toast for breakfast), or snip them into salads, or onto pasta for an instant sauce.


I've written down the pros and cons of the various ways to roast tomatoes, mainly because I'll have forgotten by next summer, but also to help you with any end-of-season glut. I wonder if it would work with green tomatoes? Please let me know if you have any information on that.


Here's a list of findings:

1. Alanna's slow-roasted tomatoes are the best, the Rolls Royce of tomato roasting. Put them on at 100C max, and they'll take at least 12 hours, depending on their size.

2. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's method given in the Guardian on 18 August 2007, is to put them in a medium oven 180C for 45 minutes to an hour. This is fine if you are in a hurry, but doesn't bring out all the sweetness of the fruit, so makes a slightly uninteresting result (this is the counsel of perfection, they're fine, it's just that you can do better for no more real effort). Great for when you're going on to make ketchup or sauce.

3. Skye Gyngell says that she slow-roasts tomatoes at 100C for 3-4 hours. I haven't tried this, because I can't believe you'd get a good result after so short a time at that low temperature.

4. Nigella Lawson has something she calls moonblush tomatoes. Here, you put them into a very hot oven, 220C, and switch it off straight away. You then leave them for 12 hours. This is best done overnight, because it is really important that you don't disturb them until everything has come right down to room temperature. I did it with small tomatoes, as specified, and had to give them a bit of a blitz in a warm oven at the end. I think you'd need to use cherry tomatoes for a decent result. That said, it's a useful way of using residual heat from the oven if you've been cooking in the evening.

5. When Sarah Raven roasts cherry tomatoes for pasta (with balsamic vinegar and honey added to the usual ingredients specified above), she pricks them all so that she can skin them easily when they're cooked, and she puts them in at 180C for 20 minutes. Hmm. But in her defence, she's not actually cooking these to conserve.

6. Mary Berry's Aga-Dried Tomatoes specify six hours in the simmering oven, which should be 120C. I have done this, and it works. Not so long as Alanna's recipe, so easier to fit into your life. A good compromise.

7. 2-3 hours at 150-160C is even easier to fit into your life, and much better than one hour at 180C.



All of these can be stored completely covered in oil in a sealed jar kept in the fridge. They should last 3-4 months. The tomato-y flavoured oil can be used for cooking. They can also be stored in boxes in the freezer. You can make them into sauce and ketchup before freezing if you like.

Roasted tomato ketchup

I made this earlier in the summer, it's from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Guardian column. Compared to Heinz it was a bit of a disappointment. Not very nice on the side of your plate, mainly because of the inevitable comparison with Heinz TK, which we all know and love. I wasn't going to bother to post it, but I am doing so now because I WILL make it again next year, as I've found it wonderfully useful to add to all sorts of cooking - gravy, soup, stew, etc etc. It really needs another name, to avoid invidious comparisons.

Roast tomato ketchup

1 litre of sieved roasted tomatoes
100g soft brown sugar
100 ml cider vinegar
1 tbps ground black pepper
pinch of ground mace
pinch of cayenne pepper
1/2 tsp ground allspice
1/2 tsp ground coriander seeds
2 bay leaves

Put everything into a large saucepan on a low heat. Stir frequently - first to help the sugar dissolve, then to stop it sticking. After about 45 minutes at a gentle bubble, it should be thick enough to bottle.

You should keep this in the fridge; I imagine that it would freeze well, too, although then you might not want to put it into a glass bottle.


There's just time to make some of this with the last of the summer's tomatoes. I wonder what it would taste like made with green tomatoes?

Quince liqueur

The distinctive and heady scent of quince transports me instantly to childhood and my grandmother's kitchen in 1950s Oxford. She used to make a delicious jam from fruit given to her by a neighbour, and it was a long job cutting the hard fruit into tiny cubes.

We have a quince in our garden, planted about 25 years ago by my mother-in-law, who used to put a few slices of poached quince into her stewed apple, rather in the way you might add a couple of cloves.

I make quince jam and jelly regularly, and this year, for the first time, I'm making quince liqueur - not to drink (although it's perfectly drinkable), but to use in my cooking throughout next year. It was a quick job, thanks to the Magimix, which made very short work of grating the fruit. I used Jane Grigson's recipe from her Fruit Book.

Quince liqueur

a one-litre preserving jar
3 quinces
60g caster sugar
about 600 ml vodka

Wipe the fluff from the quince with a dry cloth. Cut them in half so that they will fit into the feeder tube of the Magimix. Grate - yes, really, the whole fruit, skin, pips and all. The scented fruit will more or less fill your jar. Add the sugar, then the vodka, making sure that all the fruit is covered. Seal. Put in a dark place for a couple of months - there's no need to turn it.

This will need straining in December or January, at which point more sugar could be added. And then it will add a useful flavouring note to savoury as well as sweet dishes; quince is not only distinctive, it is also very strong - one quince on the kitchen table can scent a whole house.

Slow roasted tomatoes

I've been slow-roasting tomatoes like there was no tomorrow ... or, more specifically, because we are fast approaching the moment of the year when there'll be no more tomatoes for those of us who try to eat only local and seasonal food.

Whichever recipe you are following, you start in the same way: cut your tomatoes in half, sprinkle them with thyme and drizzle them with oil. At this point, there's huge variation in ideas ... I've tried four or five different speeds, and the very best, Rolls Royce way to roast tomatoes, is to put them in the oven at 80-100C for 11 or 12 hours. This, of course, isn't always possible. If you don't start early in the morning, you'll have a very late night. If you start too early in the evening then you have to have an early start. So you can boost the temperature to about 120C and cook them for seven or eight hours. You'll quite quickly know how they should look when they're done, dried out but not browned - and you'll find they cook at different rates, depending on size and - possibly - variety & age.

Then, there are a number of options. Some people slip off the skins (best done while they're still warm); I don't bother. You can pack them in boxes or plastic bags and freeze them to use in soups and stews. You can put them into jars (with more thyme, perhaps a bay leaf, etc) and cover them with olive oil, then they'll keep for 4-6 weeks in the fridge, and the oil (surprisingly little) is deliciously flavoured for cooking later. Or you can sieve them to make passata (best frozen).

I keep a plastic box on the go in the fridge ... I pull them to pieces in a salad (lovely to mix fresh with roasted), I heat them quickly to have on toast for breakfast, I use them in sauces which need a flavour boost. I think they'd be great pulled apart and thrown over pasta with some oil and a few chilli flakes for a quick supper.

Really useful, delicious, quick, a fabulous way to use up a glut of tomatoes (not a real problem for us this year, sadly), and very eco-friendly.

Homemade tomato ketchup .. & caponata-ish

Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall gave this recipe in his column in the Guardian a few weeks ago, and, as I've never made ketchup before, I followed the recipe exactly. Even before we tasted it, I thought you could simplify this without loss of taste. So when everyone was lukewarm about it as an accompaniment to fish and chips, I thought it might be hard to use it up.

Not a bit of it! I've now discovered that it makes the most fantastic five-minute caponata, and since aubergine is my favourite summer vegetable, that's a bonus. To make the caponata-ish, cube the aubergine, fry in olive oil till fairly soft, add some of the ketchup, a few sultanas and some capers. Simmer for a few minutes. Best eaten lukewarm, if you can wait that long.

Back to the point, this is how you make the ketchup. It's a two part recipe, first you have to roast the tomatoes (I know a better way to do this), then sieve them. When you've recovered from this (does he have a machine? I just have a sieve, a wooden spoon, and aching arms), you simmer the passata with sugar and spice.

HFW's roast tomatoes

To make one litre, use about 2kg ripe tomatoes; the more flavour they have, the better the finished ketchup. Cut them in half, put them in a single layer on a roasting sheet, and sprinkle with finely chopped garlic (two or three cloves), some thyme, and olive oil. Roast for 45-60 minutes at 180C, until they are soft and beginning to blacken at the edges. Remove from the oven, and sieve to a pulp when they are cool enough to work.

HFW's tomato ketchup

one litre roast tomato sauce
100g soft brown sugar
100 ml cider vinegar
salt
one tbsp ground black pepper
pinch of mace
pinch of cayenne pepper
1/2 tsp ground allspice
1/2 tsp ground coriander seeds
two bayleaves

Put all the ingredients into a stainless steel saucepan and bring to the boil. Simmer gently for about 45 minutes, stirring frequently so that it doesn't stick. It will gradually thicken, although it won't be as thick as Heinz TK. Check your seasonings, then bottle. It will keep for a month and more in the fridge.

Here's a link to Guardian Unlimited which has HFW's original piece, Reddy Steady Cook (there's an art to writing headlines that bad!)


Good, but not as good as Heinz TK; really useful to use as the base for a quick vegetable stew; really useful if you've got a glut of tomatoes, as a change from slow roasted tomatoes preserved in oil. Alfred said he'd like it to dress pasta, but I thought it might be a little too vinegary for that.


I've just bought an old government-issue book on food preserving, which gives timings for boiling pickles and preserves to give them a long shelf life and keep them out of the fridge. It may take a while to get the equipment together, but I'll post as soon as I've got something to report.

Red onion marmalade

This is a sort of chutney, easy to make, very useful to have in the cupboard. It takes quite a while to boil down, but it's worth the wait, and you only have to watch it at the end, when you want to stop cooking just as it's about to catch.

The idea came from a note that's been on my desk for weeks: red onions/sugar/red wine/vinegar/port. And that's all it is. (I don't remember how I came to write the note, but was probably inspired by one blog or another, as that's where most of my cooking inspiration comes from these days, so apologies if it looks as if I've pinched someone else's idea: get in touch and I'll set up a link!)

1. Chop one kilo of red onions and sweat in olive oil

2. Add 300g muscovado sugar

3. Add one bottle of red wine (I used very cheap, probably undrinkable Rioja), 150ml port, and 250 ml sherry vinegar

4. Cook until all the liquid is absorbed

5. Bottle

6. Enjoy!

Marmalade

It's a bit late in the season to be writing about making marmalade, because you'd be lucky to find any Seville oranges at all now (although there were still a few around last week). However, I had a spectacular disaster in January, and have only just now got round to starting again. And it has turned out to be the best marmalade I've ever made, so I'm writing down what I did in the hope that I'll be able to do it again next year!

January's disaster nearly burnt the house down - I put 4.5 kilos of Seville oranges into my biggest pan, covered them with water and put them on to boil. The idea was to bring them to the boil, put the lid on the pan, and cook the oranges slowly in a very low oven all day, so that I could finish the marmalade in the evening when I came back from a visit to Bath. Unfortunately, I forgot the second part, drove to Reading, caught the train, arrived an hour later, drove to Rosie and Stephen's, and had finished lunch when I suddenly remembered the oranges on the top of the stove. I rang Amy, who lives two villages away and who has a key to the house, and she nobly went out to the rescue (it was the day of the big storm which blew over several of our trees). By the time she got there, there was an inch of black stuff at the bottom of the pan. It took nearly a week of soaking then scrubbing to get the pan back to normal!

This time I boiled 2 kg of Seville oranges in 2 litres of water; they bubbled away for about an hour, and towards the end of the cooking time I topped up the water (from the kettle, so as not to slow down the process). I left this to cool overnight.

Next day, I scooped out the oranges and drained them in a colander over the pan, and pulled them in half. I scraped the flesh (there's not much in a Seville) and pips, which I added to the liquid. I boiled this up for about five minutes. Meanwhile, I sliced the orange skins in the Magimix, which gave a pleasing variety - some huge slices, some tiny, and many in between.

Then I strained the liquid, and added 3kg of sugar (the special sort for marmalade-making, although ordinary sugar works just as well, because of all the pectin in the pips). When it was dissolved (over a low heat), I added the peel, brought the mixture up to a boil, and then boiled it hard for not quite 10 minutes, until it had been at the "jam" setting on my sugar thermometer for a couple of minutes.

I left it to cool for about 10 minutes before bottling it, which allowed the foam to subside completely.

Perfect set, not too hard, but not runny, either.

Chilli jam

This is terrific chilli jam, better than any I've made before. It takes moments to prepare, and then not quite an hour and a half to simmer before bottling. This is enough for nearly three Bonne Maman jars.

Blend 400g whole tomatoes, four chillies (seeds and all), six cloves of garlic, two small knobs of ginger (don't bother to peel them), & 30 ml of Thai fish sauce (half a little bottle). Put this in a saucepan with 450g ordinary sugar, and 8 tbsp red wine vinegar. Bring to a simmer. Meanwhile, finely chop another 400g tomatoes. Add them to the pan, and gently simmer for at least an hour, stirring occasionally. You have to judge for yourself when it's cooked, and it may well take longer than an hour to reach a set (it will set without trouble, because tomatoes are full of pectin).

I like this best of all with crab cakes, but it's also good stirred into pasta, in sandwiches, with cold meat.