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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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Pickling wild garlic (Ramsons) seed pods

Posted by on Monday 28 June 2010 in eating, wild food | 1 comment

I love wild garlic. It was the first wild food I really tried and the one I’m still most comfortable with given how easily identifiable it is, and how it makes the world green when everything else is still hitting the snooze alarm after winter.

Usefully, the woods next to our house are *filled* with it, more than anywhere else I’ve seen – we’ve even got a sizeable patch growing at the bottom of our garden, which made it very easy to forage for a few handfuls of leaves at a time when I wanted to fling them in a recipe. Unfortunately though, like when you have most things in abundance, you don’t think about the time when they’re not going to be there any more – and I didn’t think about preserving any leaves until it was pretty much too late.

I’ve got a baggie full of stems in the freezer though – for using like spring onions in stir frys – and I was already thinking about how to preserve some seed pods when ManUpATree Nick Weston published a post on pod pickling. Very convenient timing!

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