Where growing, making & good living come together

Spicy pickled eggs recipe

Posted by on Thursday 18 November 2010 in cooking, preserving, recipes | 5 comments

Keen to preserve some of the summer glut of eggs and add to the super-spicy items in our store cupboard (we never have enough!), I’ve pickled a few lots of eggs over the last few months.

We finally cracked open the spicy batch earlier this week – yum! Between the tart vinegar and the spices, they’re really quite strongly flavoured – but good. We had them with bread & cheese, instead of a chutney, and they were perfect for adding a bit of bite to the proceedings.

(Apologies for the not great photo – the full jar looked ace but then we ate half of them!)


Spicy pickled eggs recipe

To fill a 2lb jar (we used an old pickled peppers jar from Lidl, kindly donated by Strowger)

Ingredients
8 large eggs (not super-fresh ones – use ones that are at least a week old so they’re easier to peel)
450ml of pickling vinegar (white vinegar, at least 6% acidity)
2tsp black pepper corns
2tsp yellow mustard seeds
1tsp dried chilli flakes

Method

0. Sterilise your jar – wash it in hot soapy water, rinse well in hot clean water, then place in the oven at 160C/gas mark 2 ish, for about 15 minutes. The lid of the jar should be washed and rinse – it needs to be a vinegar proof lid (plastic lined).

1. Hard boil the eggs using your preferred method – if you don’t have one, obey Delia. Cool them as Delia says then remove the shells.

2. Add the vinegar and spices into a small saucepan. Stir together and bring to the boil. Simmer for a couple of minutes – with a door/window open because man, it stinks.

3. While the vinegar is simmering, place the eggs in the still-warm jar then when it’s done, pour the vinegar on top of it, making sure the spices pour along with it and don’t all stick to the side of the pan. Fill the jar to the very top then seal it.

4. Leave somewhere cool and dark for at least three weeks.

Once they’re ready to eat, have them as a part of a salad, with bread & cheese like we did, or make them into a really interesting tasting egg mayonnaise!

Have you made this? What did you think? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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Week off fun: apple pressing, egg pickling, bread baking & bean bag making

Posted by on Tuesday 26 October 2010 in charity shopping, cooking, making, preserving | 0 comments

Hurrah! My week off has started well.

Last week was a busy one – working as usual during the day, then in the evenings, Tuesday through to Sunday, I was at Bingley Little Theatre for one reason or another (mostly rehearsals/show nights for the weekend’s studio productions). That ate into my fun making-and-doing time somewhat so I’m glad I’ve got the week off this week to catch up on fun stuff.

When I got back from the theatre at 10:30pm on Friday night, John had just started pressing some apples for cider. We had to give back the borrowed fruit press at lunchtime on Saturday so I was enlisted to help. We pressed until just after midnight then again for a couple of frantic hours on Saturday morning – got through about 40lbs of apples – about half-and-half from John’s Grandma’s apple tree and windfall from John B (who also provided the loan of the press). We’ve got 2 gallons of cider on the go now and there were a few litres left over which John’s drinking as juice.

Sunday was chore day – I cleaned out the chicken coop as normal and let the girls out into the wider (not fenced in) garden for the first time too. Lime and Blue were the only ones interested in exploring and they de-weeded/scratch-scratch peeked the bed nearest to their coop. I’ll definitely use them again for that before planting out time next year!

So to yesterday – my first full day off. It started slowly, stretched out in the sun with the animals and catching up on the weekend papers, but then I pickled some more eggs (this time it was garlic & pepper, recipe to follow) and tried a new bread recipe for the first time, a new dough recipe to make layered rolls. When I’m learning how to bake something new, I like to “grind” it – a video game term for doing a repetitive task over and over again to “level up” – so I’m going to make those at least every other day this week. Mmm, bread rolls.

Later on, after a walk with the Lily dog, I made a giant bean bag for said hound – using a very retro-cool single duvet cover I found in a charity shop in Guiseley on Saturday. It was easy to make but I’ll write a full how-to soon, mostly because I have several comedy photos of the cats and dog “helping”.

Today has had another slow start but I think it’ll continue with some soup making, maybe some biscuit baking, some jamming (since we did our once-every-six-weeks shop last night and had to pull some blackberries out of the freezer to make way for half price ice cream), and since my sewing machine is out, some more stitchery. Woo!

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