Fiddly little shallots

A couple of weeks ago we harvested our entire shallot crop from the allotment.  They have since been drying out and taking up quite a bit of space on the dining table in a large bowl. 

Last week at work, Liz our cleaner, who is always keen to taste my new pickles and curds etc, asked me if I was planning on making any pickled onions for Christmas.  Now, Christmas is something that has been playing on my mind a little bit recently.  Although it is still August and Christmas seems a million miles away, it is just around the corner really, and if pickles are required then they need a bit of time to mature.  So I had better get my skates on!  I asked Liz if she fancied pickled shallots for a change, instead of onions, and she said that would be marvellous!

So this morning I soaked the little clusters of shallots in boiling water briefly to loosen the skins and then rinsed in cold water to refresh.  I then started arranging my kitchen worktop into a one man production line.  A big bowl full of the clusters, another bowl for the topped and tailed separated shallots, another bowl for the skinned shallots and a food recycling bag for the waste. 

An hour later, with eyes watering like made and really sore fingertips and thumb nails, I have half filled my favourite bowl, which I inherited from my nan, with peeled shallots, which are now sitting in the fridge with a covering of salt, ready for rinsing and bottling tomorrow.  I reckon I can get two good sized jars out of this little lot.

The jar for Liz will be spiced vinegar, black peppercorns and dried red chillies, and the other will be pickled in a piccalilli mustard sauce for my own consumption.  Yum!  I just hope that they will be delicious enough to warrant my having to walk around today with the overpoweringly strong smell of shallots wafting from my vigorously scrubbed fingertips!

We have pickled onions !!

After brining the small white and red onions from our allotment overnight last night, I came home from work this evening and rinsed them in plenty of cold water and then followed the basic pickled onion recipe from a booklet that I picked up from somewhere a few years ago.

I added a recommended twist to the jar along with the onions and the vinegar - black peppercorns and a sprinkle of some really hot little dried chillies that we were given as a gift and which seriously blew my head off the first time I used them in my cooking!  So I went really careful with those! 

Here are the little darlings resting on the Welsh dresser until around the end of October, when I shall be cracking into them with glee! 

How, I ask myself, am I going to be able to resist until then???

Fresh onion pickle & some potatoes

I decided that this fresh onion pickle would go extremely well with our BBQ this evening.

Mamta's fresh Indian spiced pickled onion. 

So, not wanting to wait until we have an Indian meal later on in the week, I eagerly made a batch using a mix of our home grown white and red onions and Sarson's spiced pickling vinegar.  Here is the dish, marinating in the lovely, spicy vinegar ready to be chomped later on. 

I can see this working really well in a bun alongside a Linda McCartney sausage, with some salad leaves and a splodge of Heinz tomato ketchup, which if you ask me no BBQ should be without.  Yum!

Not only have I been playing about with onions all day, but I have been scrubbing our newly dug Pink Fir Apple potatoes too.  These were dug fresh this morning.



So far this season we have had four or five loads like this to munch our way through, and bearing in mind the minimal amount we paid for them from the local garden centre in the first place, we have more than had our money's worth from this crop and then some, and they are so delicious!  Tonight some of these will be bagged up in foil with olive oil, a splash of white wine, salt & pepper and some mint leaves picked fresh from the garden.  Then on the BBQ for 15 minutes or so............

I am dribbling at the thought of how I just know that they are going to go all sticky and caramelised around the edges as they cook in their little tin foil package.

A perfect Sunday for pickling

I was having a tidy up of the garden this morning and had a quick squeeze of the onions and shallots that have been drying out in a big cardboard box in the shed, and decided that they are now ready for pickling.  Well, the larger ones will be kept in the larder for everyday use, some shallots, which I adore using in cooking, will stay in a paper bag in the fridge, but the rest will be bottled in spiced vinegar.

Here they all are.

We are quite please all in all, because this is our first ever crop from our allotment, and the best thing is I only had to sling about half a dozen in the bin because they looked either diseased in some way or had gone chalky or rotten. 

Having never pickled onions before in my life, although I have probably eaten my whole body weight of the things over the years, I consulted 'Pam The Jam's recipe for pickled onions in the preserving River Cottage Handbook.  I don't think I can go wrong if I follow her basic pickled onion advice. 

I also fancy making this recipe, passed to me by Mamta, next time we have an Indian meal, probably one day in the week.  A fresh and zingy Indian onion pickle.  Sounds delicious.

http://www.mamtaskitchen.com/recipe_display.php?id=13115 

Thanks Mamta.

Keep an eye out of photos of the finished pickles in the next day or two.  And that Indian pickle too.