Pickling and Preserving

Continuing with the preserving theme, I shall seriously think about making pickled onions, pickled eggs and mixed pickle with carrot, cauliflower and cucumber which seem to be very easy to make and there are quite a few recipes which have a less salty brine, in fact the Waitrose piccalilli recipe does without brining at all. I may experiment to see if I can forego the salty bit. I need to get some large jars for these. Apparently fish and chip shops sometimes part with their pickled egg jars for a small sum so I may have a go at this. I wonder if Bookers have them. I would rather have a plastic screw top cover if possible. Today I shall put the cherries in the rumptopf.

I put the cherries in and there is room for a bit more before the final sealing and wait. Had a rather good venison dish at Lye Torng before venturing to the shopping centre. I have been assured that when buying Piccalilli, Haywards is the only brand to purchase. The lack of pickling spices and cauliflower at Tesco's at the Elephant has proved a temporary deterrent to my home pickling efforts. However I managed to buy some Haywards mixed pickle, and some whole baby pickled beetroot. I also went upstairs to the Lithuanian shop and found huge containers of pickled things: gherkins, garlic, tomato and so on all mixed up. When I have the strength to carry one of these as they are rather large, will definitely have a go. They had whole apples preserved somehow which looked interesting, and about nine different kinds of mushroom in jars, some tiny wild looking ones, but think they might have been in oil. Very interesting.

I shall now have a little rest and recover from my shopping effort.