Moroccan Preserved lemons

Moroccan preserved lemons are pickled in brine and have a salty taste and texture which is difficult to describe.  The peel loses its bitterness and adds a very distinctive flavour to many dishes like chicken and lemon tagine

Preserved lemons are widely used in Moroccan cooking, and essential if your dishes are to taste authentic.  You can buy them, but they are hard to find in Canada and rather expensive.

Preserving your own lemons is not difficult, though you have to think about doing it 3 weeks before you need them.  But having a jar of home preserved lemons in your fridge to use any time is a good thng.  The recipe below comes from Robert Carrier's A Taste Of Morocco, unfortunately now out of print.

Enough for one jar

4 small ripe lemons, thin skinned if possible
Coarse salt
Lemon juice

Scrub lemons with a stiff brush, then place in a large glass container.  Cover with cold water and allow the lemons to soak for 3-5 days, changing the water daily.

Drain lemons.  Then using the point of a sharp knife, insert knife 1/4 inch from the bud end of each lemon and make four incisions length ways to within 1/4 inch of the other end.  Then cut through incisions in each lemon so that the lemons are cut completely through both sides, but still held together at both ends. Insert 1/4 tsp coarse salt into centre of each lemon, squeezing them open.

Green tomato chutney

My house faces due south and therefore my back yard is due north, in the middle of summer this is often a good thing as there is always some shade and it does not get too hot.  On the other hand it means that it is not very good for growing vegetables, especially tomatoes. My front deck however is not only good for growing tomatoes, it is also a good place to display my first jar of green tomato chutney.

As well as facing south there are no trees shading it, and the glass front on the deck shelters all the plants and works almost like a mini green house.  This extends the growing time as well as the sitting out time to almost any sunny day in the year.

Up to now I have grown only cherry tomatoes, but this year I bought a plum tomato plant as well as some other variety of larger tomato.  The plum tomato plant has been very prolific and I will certainly plant more of these in the future, I have eaten many beautiful red tomatoes off it this summer, but now in late September I am afraid those green tomatoes are never going to ripen.

So fearing the worst, Connie I decided to turn the remaining unripened tomatoes in to green tomato chutney. I have never made this before so I had to hunt on the Internet for a suitable recipe. I found one on the River Cottage website which is from England and is all about less dependence on the outside world, food integrity, and the consumption of local, seasonal produce.

All the green tomatoes left on the deck

I have changed the recipe a little as I wanted more spices and I did not have enough raisins or malt vinegar, but any way this is what we did and it turned out beautifully. We made 4 times the recipe, but I have given the ingredients for the original quanaties.

Preserving summer, roast tomato sauce

I saw this idea on pinterest, which appears to be the newest way to suck time from my productive life. having said that I have seen several ideas that I want to give a try along with far too many that use packages of this and packages of that. Any way I happened upon this idea last week and thought since we are in full tomato season this along with canning would be a good way to preserve the wonderful taste of in season tomatoes to use in the in depths of winter.

I can not really give measurements, but I will give approximately what I used. I would normally not have sliced the onions so thin for this but I had a large ziploc bag of sliced onions that needed using up.

8 large field tomatoes cut in to chunks
1 large onion cut up
4 cloves of garlic peeled
bunch of basil torn in to large pieces
3 tablespoons of olive oil
salt and pepper.

Place all the ingredients in a large roasting tin toss together and drizzle the olive oil over.

Preserving summer pesto

At this time of year when everything is so abundant, it gives me a lot of pleasure to preserve some of those wonderful fresh flavours to enjoy in the dark days of winter.  There is nothing better than pulling something out of your pantry or freezer on dark rainy January night that is redolent in the freshness of a sunny August day.  I managed last year to have a enough home canned tomato puree to not have to buy a singe can of tomatoes the entire winter.  I am starting to can again this year now that the tomatoes are in season, but I grow a lot of herbs and wanted to preserve some of those as well. Pesto seemed the best way to preserve my summer basil.

My basil is at it's height right now and often I find that before I have had a chance to do anything with the remaining leaves at the end of the summer it is gone.  So I realized this weekend that there was enough basil on my deck, that I could cut enough to make some pesto and still have plenty to use fresh.

One of my patches of basil

I froze mine without any Parmesan in it as this could be added later. So I gathered my ingredients together.

Quince cheese or Dulce de Membrillo

I found these beautiful looking quinces at the farmers market and could not stop my self from buying them.

They look like a cross between an apple and a pear, and though they are related to these fruits they are quite different.  They really can not be eaten raw as they are extremely hard and dense and are very sour.

Quince

I have never cooked with quinces before, but I have had quince cheese before and enjoyed it so I thought I would have a go at making it. What we call quince cheese here is a traditional south American treat called Dulce de Membrillo which is served with manchengo cheese.

I peeled the quinces cored them and chopped in to small pieces.  This was much harder than it sounds as they fruit is so dense that it is hard to cut the core out.  I was ready to give up at one point but I persevered.

Preserving summer - Blackberry Jam

I spent the Labour Day long weekend at my friends house up at Pender Harbour on the sunshine coast. The weather was the best we have had all summer and the blackberries were epic.

I have never seen so many, and another friend could not stop herself from picking for hours at a time with no thought to her own safety.  By the end of the weekend we had buckets and buckets of blackberries and she was covered in scratches all up her arms and legs.  Some were frozen but 12 cups were turned in to jam.

Into a large pot went 12 cups of blackberries after carefully washing and removing all the bits of blackberry bush.

Pickled red cabbage

Pickled red cabbage is something that I remember from my childhood in England.  This was something we had mostly at Christmas as it goes very well with cold meat, left over turkey or ham perhaps. Any way My husband bought this beautiful big red cabbage at the farmers Market in Penticton.

 The only thing to do was make pickled red cabbage.

I had never made this before but it fit in to my eating local and in season as advocated by Barbara Kingsolver's book "Animal Vegetable Miracle". In order to eat seasonally all year round, you have to preserve some things to be consumed in the long cold days of winter when there is very little grown locally.  So armed with my computer and google I searched the Internet for recipes for pickled red cabbage.  I found quite a few and the one I liked the sound of the most was on BBC.co.uk this seemed simple and I followed the instructions. There were very few measurements, I guess it really depends on the size of your cabbage.