Chunky Pumpkin and Orange Marmalade

I decided it was time to make use of my Galeuse d'eysines pumpkin. It had successfully stored in our (cold) hallway for about four months, but I fancied some pumpkin soup and really wanted to try to preserve the rest - or at least some - of the pumpkin and make it last a bit longer.

I found this delicious recipe on Nigella.com and altered it ever so slightly

Ingredients
2 kgs pumpkin
4 oranges (sweet & juicy)
1 lime (juiced)
1.5 kg sugar
2 cm fresh root ginger - shredded
Gelatine

Cut the pumpkin into large chunks (remove the seeds) and simmer in water for about 20 minutes until soft 

As my kitchen scales only goes up to 5kg, I had to wait until I'd managed to halve the pumpkin before I could weigh it... it came in at a fine weight of 7.5kg

Peel the oranges and remove the white parts from the skin – it will take at least half an hour to scrape all (well, most of...) the pith from the skin, much longer than I had anticipated! Chop the peel into small shreds

In a separate pot, mix ½ glass (I used a pint glass) of water with two spoons of sugar and cook the orange peels in it, until they are soft, this will take about 15-20 minutes. Cut the peeled oranges into pieces

When the pumpkin is soft, removed the skin and mix/smush the pumpkin – do not puree! I peeled the pumpkin into a large bowl, then roughly sliced it into chunks with a sharp knife.

Cook the pumpkin chunks, oranges, orange peels and lime juice for 20 minutes

Add the shredded ginger, rest of the sugar and some gelatine (I used one leaf) and let slowly boil for another 20 minutes. Pot into sterilized jam jars.

I initially thought 1.5 kg of sugar was far too much for this recipe, so I just used 1 kg, but after the marmalade had cooled, I realised it hadn't set properly and was quite...tangy. So I emptied all the jars back into the saucepans, reheated the marmalade back to a simmer and added the remaining ½ kg of sugar and another gelatine leaf and that seems to have done the trick! The pumpkin has stayed a bright orange colour and has turned almost translucent through cooking. The marmalade is still quite tangy - especially compared to the shop bought marmalade - which tasted sickly sweet after I’d sampled my homemade batch - and it has a lovely strong orange flavour and aroma and I think the chunks of pumpkin and orange work really well together.

Fig Preserve with Vanilla and Ginger

I found this gorgeous recipe for fig and vanilla preserve in my book Wild Sourdough – by Yoke Mardewi -this is a really fantastic book with lots of easy to follow (and tasty!) sourdough bread recipes. Myself and M went to one of Yoke’s workshops in basic sourdough bread while we were living in Perth - there will be a post on this soon -we had such a fantastic experience with Yoke and really enjoyed her classes, please click here for a link to Yoke’s website.

Ingredients

1kg figs

750 g sugar

1 vanilla pod

1 lemon

5 cm/couple of chunks of preserved stem ginger

Helpful Tip - Try to buy the figs the same day you intend on making the jam, otherwise (if you’re me) you will need to pick out all the lovely figs that have somehow turned soft and slightly furry overnight.

Start by carefully picking through your figs, discard (or compost) any figs that have turned soft or furry or if it’s not too mushy, cut out the bit that’s gone bad and use the good bits

Reweigh your figs. Realise that you now only have 600 g of figs rather than 1 kg. Recalculate and reweigh your sugar (it should now be 450 g) so your sugar to fig ratio isn't going to leave you with a preserve so high in sucrose it makes your teeth squeak.

Cut the remainder of figs into chunks, open the vanilla pod with a sharp knife and scrape out the seeds and place both vanilla pod and seeds into the preserving pan (heavy based saucepan) with the figs. Add the juice from the lemon. Simmer gently over a low heat until the figs have turned soft and gooey, stirring occasionally.

In the meantime, finely chop the preserved ginger into small chunks – sample a few chunks of the ginger while waiting for the figs to soften. Chop up more ginger

Once the figs are nicely soft, add the sugar and chopped ginger and cook on a rolling boil for approximately 7-10 minutes. Test the preserve for a set using the wrinkle test.

Bottle the fig preserve in sterilized jars, label and date. This preserve should keep for a year if the jam jars have been sterilized properly and bottled while still hot.

Because I had just over half the quantity of figs the recipe calls for, I ended up with just one and a half  jars of fig preserve. This isn't a huge quantity for the amount of effort, but the preserve is quite rich so a smear of figgy preserve on brown toast with brie is just divine and less is definitely more as the vanilla and ginger make it a very fragrant jam. The smell alone of the warm vanilla infusing with the almost spicy ginger while the figs simmered was well worth all the effort.

Fig, and figgy are some of my favourite words, alongside noodle and pudding...I am aware most of my favourite words are food related but that’s just how I roll.  

Sweet Tomato & Ginger Chutney

I found this fabulous recipe on the lovely Life in Mud Spattered Boots blog and it worked beautifully on using up some of the glut of tomatoes we had after the "harvest"

You will need

1 kg red (cherry) tomatoes – I mixed a few yellow tomatoes in with the red ones and the chutney had a lovely reddish orange colour when it was finished

1 clove garlic

1 piece stem ginger

250g granulated sugar

500ml vinegar (I used white wine vinegar, but you can use cider vinegar otherwise if you like)

1 tsp salt

Optional – finely chopped fresh chilli if you have it, I didn’t but I used a small pinch of dried chilli flakes instead

Finely chop ginger and garlic and roughly chop tomatoes

Place into a large pan with the vinegar and the salt, sugar and chilli (if using), bring to the boil and then simmer for 2 hours until thickened

Bottle as usual

I'm looking forward to trying this with some cold sliced ham and potato salad, yum!