A version of the pickled onion that makes lively company for meats hot or cold, and cheese.  Use small round shallots, peeled but left whole.

A Happy Father’s Day to you and yours.  I headed to my parent’s house today and made my father his favorite dessert – grandma’s banana pudding.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad.

Now, on to the update.

I picked up a few pounds of shallots at my local megamarket to start this recipe, then peeled and trimmed them.  Mr. Henderson instructs that they need to sit in a salty brine for a whole week, so into the brining bucket they went to serve out their sentence.

Seven days later the shallots had lost some of their bright purple color, turning dull and a little soft.  Next up I needed to make the pickling liquid.

Half malt vinegar, half white wine vinegar was called for, along with multiple spices like cinnamon sticks, cloves, allspice, bay leaves and peppercorns.

I rinsed the shallots with some fresh water and then added them to the same pot the pickling liquid was simmering in.  For five minutes the shallots bounced around in the pot before I removed them.  The liquid was strained to remove all of the spices, then the shallots and vinegar mixture were placed into a sterilized jar …

… like so.  The shallots needed to sit for a month to mellow and properly pickle, so I found a cool place in my cupboard for them to rest.

One month to the day, we cracked open a jar to be greeted by a pungent whiff of vinegar and shallots.  Not exactly the kinda smell one would want on their breath when interviewing for a job, or going on a first date.  The first bite was actually more powerful than I could have possibly imagined.  If the vinegar had mellowed even slightly, I couldn’t tell.  The flavor was overwhelmingly tart, with a slight sweetness showing up here and there.  My wife enjoyed them immensely, as did my father.  I’m happy to have them in my arsenal, but I think I’ll let ‘em sit for a few more months until the vinegar’s bite is softened.

One down, seventy five to go.

Another classic sauce, which has been chronicled many a time; I recently made it and found it so good, I cannot resist mentioning it.  The ingredients should expand experimentally to achieve your chosen movement in the sauce.

Before I start the post, I’d like to mention something about the pictures I’ve been posting here on the site.  It turns out that I’ve been encoding pictures incorrectly this whole time, and people who use Internet Explorer and Firefox have been seeing some very lackluster images.  I’m a Mac person, and the web browser Safari uses the correct color profiling, while IE and Firefox don’t without some futzing.

Here’s an example of the problem:

The left side is what people using IE and Firefox see, while I’ve been seeing the right side this whole time.  Big difference, huh?  To atone for my sins, I’ll be fixing every image I’ve posted as the week rolls on.  The pictures below should show up correctly…I hope.

I love lamb in its various forms, be it rack or leg or brain, but until I made this “sauce”, mint had never entered the picture.  Sure, I had always known about the paring of lamb with mint jelly, but the thought of marring lamb’s lovely flavor with something that I could only imagine as being sickeningly sweet made no sense to me.  Then I found out that this recipe is nothing like mint jelly at all, and the cogs started churning–albeit slowly–in my head.  It turns out that mint jelly is something that only Americans use with lamb, and folks from the UK joke that we should really be using it with peanut butter to make sandwiches. They might very well be right.

When I initially read the recipe, it seemed as though the amount of ingredients were off and there might have been one or two things missing.  I mean, Mr. Henderson asks for teaspoons of sugar and malt vinegar.  Teaspoons?!  This recipe is supposed to make enough sauce to be served with a whole leg of lamb?!  It turns out that this is a “sauce” in the same way that Green Sauce is considered a “sauce” and that the proportions are indeed correct, but I’ll explain that later.  The components were combined with three simple steps:

1. Finely chop the mint

2. Melt the demerara sugar with a small amount of boiling water and add malt vinegar

3. Pour the sugar/vinegar mixture over the mint and mix

That’s it!  With  a little prep you could have a mint sauce in about four minutes.  I wish I had chopped the mint a bit finer to make it more sauce-like, but the flavor was still there.  Highly minty as one would expect, but with a slight kick from the malt vinegar and a subtle sweet finish.

Shortly after I completed the mint sauce the oven timer went off as my rack of lamb had finished.  For a flavor comparison, I took a bite of the lamb alone.  Yep, that’s lamb: meaty, perfectly gamy, and just a little sweet.  The next bite had a tiny amount of the mint sauce applied to test the waters.  It was completely different, almost as if I wasn’t eating lamb at all.  Considering the minuscule amount of mint sauce I had eaten, I can understand how a little bit of this stuff goes a long way. The flavor had changed dramatically, there was no gaminess at all.  It just tasted like meat. It was nice, but I eat lamb because I enjoy the unique taste that lamb brings to the table.  Adding the mint sauce might be more important when it comes to eating mutton I suppose, but I think I’ll still be taking my lamb plain.

It is nice to know that I could whip up a batch of mint sauce in a very short period of time for guests that want it.

One down, eighty one to go.

This recipe comes from Joan Chapman, who has won many a prize with her chutneys and vegetables at the Great Bedwyn Village Fête, so we are in very capable hands. Runner beans are long, flattish green beans, often sliced on the diagonal.  The more you pick them, the more there seem to be the next day.

I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that my only real knowledge of chutney before this recipe was that one of the cavemen in those insurance commercials ordered roast duck with mango chutney.  A quick glance at Wikipedia told me that chutney is an Indian cousin to relish, and that supposedly the Hindi translation of “to make chutney” is a common idiom meaning “to crush”. This is because the process of making chutney often involves the crushing together of the ingredients.  What I do know now is that Mrs. Chapman makes a very fine chutney.  So let’s get to it!

Here’s another first for me: runner beans.  I’ve always been a fan of green beans, and they were one of the few “green” things I would eat as a child.  Runner beans however, are totally new to me, so I was flabbergasted to see them available at a local supermarket.  I had already resigned myself into trying to grow them so I could make this recipe, but luck decided to give me a little hand.

The runner beans were cleaned …

… chopped …

… and then blanched in salted water.

While the runner beans cooked, my wife chopped roughly 3/4′s of a pound of shallots for me.  I’m not sure how she does it, but the chemical compounds in onions and shallots that make me tear up just do not effect her in the least.  To say I’m jealous would be an understatement.  The chopped shallots were dropped into a pot with some malt vinegar and softened for a little while.

This is a bowl of Demerara sugar.  When I found a bag of it at the supermarket, I almost decided to just pick up a cheaper box of Sugar In The Raw since they are so similar in appearance.  To stay true to the recipe, I bought the Demerara.  After a bit of research though, I’m not really finding much difference.  Oh well.  I mixed the Demerara sugar in with the cooked shallots along with some Coleman’s Mustard Powder and some turmeric for color.

The blanched runner beans were added as well, and left to cook for half an hour so that the flavors could get to know each other.  Finally, cornstarch was introduced to give the chutney a bit of firmness.

I decanted the chutney into a sterilized jar, and then placed it into a cupboard for a few weeks to sit.  Last night, we cracked open the jar to find ourselves with an intensely sweet, tangy chutney with bits of bean that will squeak against your teeth and slightly crunchy shallots that add just the right amount of kick.

Since this is my first chutney, I’m not really sure what to do with it.  We’ve been spreading the chutney on slices of bread and eating it like preserves.  If anyone has suggestions, I’d be more than happy to run with them.

One down, one hundred to go.