Mango & Chilli Hot Sauce

Mango & Habanero Sauce

Posted on by

I’m embarking on my 3rd batch of this sauce since the summer, it has definitely become the sauce of choice in our household.

This fruity recipe will make what most people would consider to be a hot West Indian or Belize-style sauce. Some aficionados will think it is a little weak though, so there is no harm in adding more chillies, even doubling or tripling the number of chillies used without changing the quantities of the other ingredients.

Ingredients

200g mango
100g grated carrot (preferably small or
baby carrots)
100g white onion, chopped
50g white sugar
5 x orange or yellow habanero or scotch
bonnet chillies
150ml water
200ml cider vinegar
2 cloves of garlic, chopped
1cm cube fresh ginger, chopped
½ tsp salt

Method
Use baby carrots if you can get hold of them, or at least small ones that aren’t woody and tough. If you are using fresh mango, remove the flesh and chop it into pieces. One large mango should do, but buy two just in case, you can eat the leftovers. You can alternatively use a tin of mango pieces; if you do so, use the stuff tinned in juice rather than syrup, a
400g tin should give you just over 200g of flesh with a few pieces left as a snack.
Chop the onion, garlic, ginger and chillies and grate the carrot. Add to a pan with the salt, water, mango pieces, vinegar and sugar. Bring to the boil and simmer with the lid on for about 30 minutes. Keep an eye on it, don’t let the mixture boil dry or thicken beyond a watery slush, add a little more water if need be.
The mango should break down quite quickly, and eventually the onion will soften too. Transfer to a blender and blend this
mixture to a smooth thick creamy liquid. Alternatively use a stick blender to do this in the saucepan. Don’t be shy, you are after a perfectly smooth finish and you can’t blend it too much; the more you do it the less likely the sauce is to separate into solid and liquid. If you use a separate blender, rinse your saucepan while it is empty, you will be returning the mixture to boil again so you need to make sure that stray lumps don’t mess up your smoothness. You may find there are some persistent stringy mango threads too, so remove these using a fork, they probably won’t break down much further and will only clog up your bottles.
If the liquid looks too thick, you can add a little extra water during the final simmer. You then need to bottle it in sterilized bottles, clean them, boil them in water for 10 minutes, then drain them. There are lots more tips and instructions on bottling and sterilization in my ‘Cooking Chillies’ Book, together with other hot sauce recipes.

Mango & Chilli Hot Sauce

Green Chilli and Green Bean Salad

Green Chilli and Green Bean Salad

Posted on by

Another recipe from ‘Cooking Chillies’ book. I made this probably for the last time in a while as I have picked what are probably the last of the dwarf beans from my greenhouse until the spring. There are still some green chillies to pick too, but the ones i used today were pre-skinned and came out of the freezer.

The thick flesh of the chillies, the filling beans and the avocado together with a mouth-watering dressing make this not just a side salad, but a hearty meal that stands on its own merits. Serve it while the beans and chillies are still slightly warm from steaming for the best flavours.

250g fresh dwarf French beans

3 large green chillies (New Mexico, Anaheim or Romano peppers)

1 avocado

1 large beef tomato, chopped

50g parmesan cheese, grated or crumbled

2 spring onions, finely chopped

1 small jalapeno chilli, finely chopped

2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

2 tbsp white wine vinegar

1 tbsp fresh coriander, chopped

Juice of ½ a lime

1 tsp dried oregano

½ tsp salt

Grill the green chillies and remove the skins, stems and the seeds inside.

Prepare the dressing in a small bowl using the vinegar, oil, coriander, oregano and salt. Add the finely chopped spring onions and jalapeno.

Steam the beans until they start to go limp, normally around 4-6 minutes depending on how big they are. Cut the chillies into strips and just at the point the beans are starting to bend easily add the pepper strips and steam for another minute. Be careful not to steam the beans to the point where they start to lose their dark green colour and go pale. Transfer the beans and chilli strips to a serving bowl and leave to cool for a few minutes while you chop the avocado and tomato.

When the beans and chilli strips have stopped steaming, but while still slightly warm, stir in the parmesan, followed by the avocado, tomato and dressing.

Green Chilli and Green Bean Salad

Green Chilli and Green Bean Salad

Spicy squash chilli soup

Spicy Squash Soup

Posted on by
Spicy squash chilli soup

Spicy Squash Soup

This is one of the most regular things I cook so I thought I’d share the recipe. Spicy, warming, smooth and creamy; a warming and filling winter soup, the ancho powder gives a great depth of flavour without making this too hot.

Ingredients

1 large or two small butternut squash (about 1kg
of flesh)
150g white onion, chopped
500ml water
200ml double cream
100g carrots, grated
25g salted butter
1 clove of garlic, chopped
10g ancho powder
1 vegetable stock cube
1 tbsp olive oil
½ tsp cumin powder
½ tsp salt

Method

In a large saucepan, soften the onions, garlic and carrot in the butter and oil. Cut the flesh of the squash into small cubes and when
the onions have softened, add the squash, water, stock cube, ancho powder, cumin and salt.

Bring to the boil and simmer for about 30 minutes. Transfer to a blender and blend until smooth, alternatively use a stick blender

directly into the pan.

Transfer back into the pan if need be, add the cream and bring back to a simmer before serving.

You can find this one alongside lots of other delicious things in my new book, ‘Cooking Chillies – Recipes and Ideas to Make the most of a Chilli Harvest.’

Sliced Poona Kheera Cucumber

Poona Kheera

Posted on by
Sliced Poona Kheera Cucumber

Sliced Poon Kheera Cucumber – This looks a little over ripe, but the seeds are soft and edible, and it is super juicy

A quick post to sate my enthusiasm for something quite humdrum.

I find myself getting excited about a lot of unusual vegetables these days, so here is another ramble about new favourite veg of mine. It is called Poona Kheera and it is an Indian cucumber.

I had few cucumbers rambling around the greenhouse earlier in the year but they were past their best and I thought I would try something different, even though it was quite late in the season. So when I ordered some weird herb seeds from The Real Seed Catalogue I bought some Poona Kheera seeds too.

I’m really really impressed; tasty to the point at which you might confuse them with a ‘not quite sweet enough’ honeydew melon, and really quick growing. The seeds were planted in the middle of July, and after a pretty cool and unimpressive August, the first ones were picked on 10th September, so less than 8 weeks from seed to fruit, pretty amazing.

We chop these into triangles and eat them on their own, more flavoursome even than more traditional varieties, and prolific too.

There you go.

The Poona Kheera Indian cucumber

The Poona Kheera Indian cucumber

Chillies – So what’s with dfferent varieties of the same thing?

Posted on by

Chilli growers hear and talk a lot about different varieties. There are, after all, only 5 main species of chilli and many thousands of varieties within each. But that’s not what I am talking about today. Today I’m dealing with different types of the same chilli, and is it worth paying extra for new and exciting ones, or alternatively spending time seeking out the traditional old ones?

Firstly, I will say that, as a former commercial grower, I think a lot about things like increased yield per plant, uniformity of fruit, and ripening time. But shouldn’t we all? It isn’t necessarily a bad thing; even somebody who only has a single plant in their window would still like to see it produce better, bigger, hotter, quicker or tastier.

So when we go online at the start of the year to shop and dream, we are hit with lots of information. But is the sales patter all true? Phrases like ‘heavy cropper’, ‘bumper yield’, ‘continuous fruiting’ draw us into paying a bit more for a newly developed variety. Conversely, we are also told that looking backwards to old ‘heirloom’ varieties will give us a better flavour, the way things used to be. So is backwards the way forward?

To digress a little, let’s thing about the supermarket tomato. We all know that with tomatoes, what the shops feed us is bigger, quicker and juicier, thinner skinned, but rarely tastier than the ones we grow at home. Tomatoes are grown in such bulk that the growers’ choice of variety has become so influenced by commercial gain that flavour has definitely been sacrificed.

But are chillies affected in the same way? I’m not so sure. Even in areas where they are grown in bulk for a commercial market, increased productivity doesn’t usually lead to a reduction in flavour. Big peppers are different, and they suffer as tomatoes do, but not so much hot chillies.

All these thoughts were prompted by my comparison of two Jalapeno plants last year. They were grown side by side, one was bought as a seedling from a garden centre, grown for an anonymous market at minimum cost. The other grown by me from seed, the variety is ‘Chichimeca’. The results of a comparison are obvious. They both get the same amount of light and plant food, and enjoy the same temperatures, (which were great last summer).

Jalapeno Comparison
This picture has the first few chillies off of the two bushes, the basic Jalapenos are at the top and at the bottom is my favourite variety, Chichimeca.

From an industry insiders point of view, let me explain why the plants the garden centre supply are inferior. This is down to seed price, and the unfortunate fact that the grower of the seedling is so far removed from the eater of the chillies that they have no vested interest in growing something that will be big and bountiful, and this is such a tiny part of the garden centre’s income (compared to the cafe, imported tat, Christmas decorations, BBQs etc. etc.) that they aren’t too bothered either. Basic Jalapeno seed (probably Jalapeno M) will probably cost the wholesale plant grower about fifty quid for 20,000 seeds, so the seed part of their overhead is minimal. New varieties, like Chichimeca might cost them up to a few pence per seed, and suddenly that would have a knock on effect of the price of the seedling they sell to the garden centre, and therein lies the problem. Most garden centres are price-led, so the results aren’t as important.

You will see another illustration of the difference in seed price if you go to a specialist seed seller online. You might find somewhere that sells a wide range of chilli seeds, possibly a range so huge that making your choice becomes a daunting process. These guys will undoubtedly have a few really cheap ‘loss leaders’ they might even give these packets away for free if you buy enough of something else. But is it worth filling your greenhouse with these plants?

I think there are a few varieties where it is worth paying more for something better, greenhouse and window sill space is valuable and shouldn’t be wasted, and our time is valuable too, so we want to make our space as productive as possible, and preferably without too much effort.

So here are a few varieties where you can really benefit greatly by shopping around to find something a bit better.

Jalapeno – Steer clear of anything advertises simply as Jalapeno, Jalapeno M, or Early Jalapeno. These are older varieties, less prolific, and no uniformity of size, which means many will be undersized and lacking in heat where the seeds and placenta inside haven’t formed properly. Instead go for Chichimeca, Ixtapa, Summer Heat, Mucho Nacho, Tula or Mitla.

Orange Habanero – Instead of the standard variety, go for Chichen Itza; it is earlier to ripen, more prolific and bigger.

Serrano – The standard version is slow to grow, and with very few fruits per plant, instead go for ‘Senor Serrano’ They are Longer, more uniform, quicker and hugely prolific.

Ancho/Poblano – The standard plants can be quite rambling and often only the first few off the plant are full size. Instead try the ‘San Martin Hybrid’ it is bigger, more prolific and stronger more compact plants. Beware of hybrid Poblanos that claim huge oversized fruits. There are some crossed with sweet peppers to give a huge fruit, but they start to lose their distinctive flavour if they are bred too big.

And here are some where you can pick up a bargain that is still prolific and worthwhile.

• Hungarian Hot Wax
• Long Slim Cayenne
• Santa Fe

Samsung Galaxy S3 picture of Jalapeno slice.

My Amazing Smartphone Macro Camera

Posted on by

I have long been a fan of my smartphone camera, I remember when I first got it I was amazed by the quality of the pictures generally, but didn’t realise how brilliant the macro setting is.

Smartphone MAcro Yellow Chilli Slice

Samsung Galaxy S3 Macro Chilli Picture

This picture and the one below are back-lit, but the camera is hand-held, such amazing detail. You can pick out the plant cells around the inside of the chilli and see the light shining through the vascular tubes.

Samsung Galaxy S3 picture of Jalapeno slice.

Samsung Galaxy S3 macro picture of Jalapeno slice.

My first and still my most appealing macro picture taken with my phone is quite an old one, and it did such a good job of illustrating how caterpillars munch away on chilli plants that I used it in my book. Again handheld, Samsung Galaxy S3, and with a moving target too.

Caterpillar eating chilli plant

Caterpillar Eating a Chilli Plant, taken with Samsung Galaxy S3 on Macro setting. From the book ‘Growing Chillies’

A few pictures from my book

Posted on by

I just realised there aren’t any nice pictures from my book on this blog, so here are a few to tempt you.

Jalapeno Chichimeca

Jalapeno Chichimeca

 

Jalapenos and Beer

Jalapenos and Beer

Mixed Habaneros

Mixed Habaneros

Bulgarian Carrot

Bulgarian Carrot

Khung Pao Cayenne

Khung Pao Cayenne

 

Sliced Jalapeno

Sliced Jalapeno

 

Oh, and one not so nice one.

Slug Eating Chilli

Slug Eating Chilli

.

 

Fungus Gnats (or Sciarid Flies)

Posted on by

I have never really had a problem with these before, occasionally I have seen them in chilli plants that are overwintered indoors, or other house plants. But mostly they tend to stick to indoor plants with old neglected soil.

For those that don’t know about them, they are a tiny black fly that hangs around the soil in a pot, you often don’t see them until you water it and they all fly up in a panic. Their even tinier grubs will be living in the soil, feeding on algae, rotting organic matter, and according to some experts but not others, the roots of your plant.

This year, however, I seem to have been inundated with them in the greenhouse. I think this is most likely due to the very mild winter. Where I live in South Devon we only had a couple of very light frosts, and the greenhouse never went below zero, hence poor sterilization of the soil. I had a couple of chilli plants out there which developed fungus gnats in their pots but I wasn’t too worried, normally they would die and be discarded before spring. I also had a bag of compost left over from the previous year which had a few in. I didn’t want to use it for potting so I dug it into the beds in the greenhouse. I foolishly thought the flies wouldn’t survive in natural soil because other bugs would kill them off. This was wrong, and before I knew it the beds were crawling, along with some other pots.

I am a big fan of biological controls, Nemaslug etc. and I urge people to use them whenever I can, but it is only recently that I have seen a control for Fungus Gnats. In my Growing Chillies book I deal with Fungus Gnats, but don’t mention a biological control for them as, at the time, there didn’t seem to be one available, hence this update. I have always used the old fashioned method of sticking a piece of potato in the soil which attracts the grubs and can later be discarded. Luckily now there is a biological control widely available, it is inexpensive, easy to use and very effective. It is microscopic nematode worms that infect the fly grubs. It comes as a light powdery substance in a small sealed tray. Dilute it in a watering can and water it into the soil of infected pots. It seems to me that the results are obvious within just a day or two. I suppose the grubs are infected almost immediately and the adults don’t live more than a day or two, so their life cycle is immediately halted.

This will be my first port of call in future, I might even order it as a matter of course every spring when I order my Nemaslug, you can get them shipped together from ‘all good purveyors biological controls’ I use www.greengardener.co.uk 

Aaaaaah – Flatworms!

Posted on by

This is part of my therapy, but I already get the feeling it isn’t going to work.

Warning, this article contains a lot of Flatworm information and a picture; reader beware.

Firstly I will say that I am not usually squeamish about creepy crawlies, in fact from a very early age I have chosen to seek them out. I was a keen amateur entomologist as a young teenager, and still am. I kept giant cockroaches as pets, and have always wanted to know what lies beneath rocks and stones.

Apart from one experience when I opened the lid of the compost heap and momentarily confused half an avocado skin with a giant slug I don’t remember being too repulsed by invertebrates, although a 7 inch giant centipede did run over my foot in Australia once, so I have a bit of a thing about those, and that is fair because they do bite.

One thing, however, that has always sent shivers down my spine is Flatworms, and flatworm-like things in general. Until last week my only experience of such creatures has been horror films, The X Files, and the like, in which they generally cause mayhem beyond what you would expect from the average squishy thing.

Oh, and I don’t like leeches either. There is a pattern emerging here, soft shiny wet things that are wider at one end than the other and move, sometimes quickly.

This therapy isn’t working.

Most gardeners have probably heard of the New Zealand Flatworm but have probably not experienced them, so their knowledge is limited to the fact that they are an unwanted import, they probably came to this country in the pots of imported Tree Ferns, and they are a pest we don’t want or need.

They have been around for a while, taking hold in the great gardens of Cornwall where Tree Ferns and similar plants thrive and Victorian enthusiasts built great collections of imported fora from around the globe.

So anyway, last week I was on my nightly slug hunt, the weather has warmed, though still damp and they are emerging ready to do damage. I was mooching round one of my new raised beds, scissors in hand, snipping the odd slug here and there. Suddenly something caught my eye, something out of place, and the beam of my head torch landed on a slippery orangy-yellow thing. I knew what it was instantly, luckily it wasn’t very big, maybe an inch and a half. But I winced and I could feel the blood rushing round my ears. Then there was another one, this time wriggling, wrestling with an earthworm.

This is what they do, they eat earthworms by digesting injecting them with a poison which dissolves their insides and then they suck out the juice.

This therapy definitely isn’t working.

The two worms were each snipped into four pieces, all of them still wriggling quickly. I hope all these 8 parts don’t carry on living, the consequences aren’t worth thinking about.

I took a picture and tweeted it, all the time trying  not to look and I hoped that someone might correct my misdiagnosis, but all I got was confirmation and one lady who put the final nail in the coffin of my Flatworm phobia. ‘They can escape from a sealed jam jar!’

I don’t know for sure if mine are New Zealand Flatworms, I never made a positive identification. I don’t want to look at any more pictures. There are also Australian Flatworms which, I imagine, are slightly larger, a bit more aggressive and in your face, and care a little bit less about the environment around them. I hope, at least, that mine are from New Zealand.

That night I had the worst nightmare I have ever had. A proper ‘you only ever see it in the movies’ type nightmare. I can’t go into the details of it but it involved lots of Flatworms, dozens of them, and huge, much like Indiana Jones in a pit of snakes, and I awoke with a proper scream. My wife thought I was dying.

My slug hunting expeditions have abated for a while. Hopefully my Nemaslug treatments, and general plant protection are doing their job. I think that the flatworms only live at the bottom of my garden where there is a strip, sheltered by a tall fence, that never sees the sun. This is where the compost area is and I think this is how the Flatworms came to be in my raised beds. The household compost goes in a big bin which is really a wormery  and when I built the beds I emptied all the bin into the bottom of the beds.

We have barely had a frost this winter, in fact where I live I suspect ‘This has been the warmest winter on record’ and I think this provides a perfect habitat for Flatworms to thrive.

Flatworms can’t tolerate frost, and luckily they can’t live in temperatures of over 20c, so maybe this summer and a cold winter will see them off. I don’t know where they came from, I have never brought plants imported from New Zealand, maybe my neighbour has, or maybe they are just gradually spreading. I don’t think Devon is the best place for them, although it is generally quite wet, things do dry out in the summer. From what I have read, (which is very little, as most internet articles are accompanied by photographs), I gather they prefer Scotland, where they escape frost by burrowing down, and enjoy constantly damp summers.

Worse has happened, yesterday my nightmare nearly came true. I was repairing a path along the bottom of the garden, in the shady area. I lifted the edge of some weed control stuff that lay under the path, and through a hole in it, from underneath, a bigger more orange Flatworm wriggled, half way out, fatter and the visible part was an inch and a half without what lurked beneath. I couldn’t kill it. Where else are they? In my wellies? around my radishes? In my hair? Aaaah.

This therapy hasn’t worked. The path is still unfinished and this article won’t be proof read so apologies for any errors. I don’t even know if Flatworms are one word or two, I’m not going to look it up and I anyway I can’t read this again, at least not for a while. I don’t expect others to read this anyway, it isn’t the sort of subject matter people go out of their way to find.

 

This is one of my flatworms, before it was chopped. I held my hand in the way of the picture while I was editing it, so I don’t even know if it looks OK. You decide.

Flatworm

Flatworm

 

 

 

Do Horticultural Shows Need to Modernise?

Posted on by

I live in a village which holds an annual horticultural show, the likes of which you see in villages and towns all over the UK. Many years ago I used to participate, but when I became a professional grower I wasn’t allowed to compete any longer. Twelve years has passed and as I am now ‘retired’ from professional chilli growing I am eligible to compete again so recently one of the village elders gave me the application booklet, apparently these days they are struggling for participants. Why is this I wonder? With the boom in ‘grow your own’ that can’t have eluded anybody you would have thought there would be lots of eager takers.

Now I am probably not a typical veg grower, I lean towards the unusual, challenging or bizarre. I obviously grow lots of chillies and I don’t have huge amounts of space, so I mostly steer clear of potatoes and the bigger root vegetables. Even so I would say that from what I hear from my humble list of followers, and what I glean from the press, those that have recently taken to veg growing, and in particular younger growers are a little more Thai basil than turnip.

On my local show list there are 32 classes in the vegetable section, and I am currently growing , even if you count chillies as 1, 24 different vegetables or herbs and yet the overlap between the two is only 4, not including the ‘Any other vegetable’ and ‘Any other fruit’ classes. They have runner beans, I grow dwarf french beans, They have turnips, parsnips and beetroot, I have asparagus peas, mouse melons and aubergines. They have marrow, I have squash.

I know of another local show which, when some new organisers took over the reigns, did amend their class list slightly to reflect changes in taste, but this didn’t go down well with the traditionalists. If you have grown prize turnips for decades you might be slightly miffed if your category is culled to make way for’ Hot Pepper’ or ‘Ornamental gourd or squash’. I am interested to know whether anyone has opinions on this, and if so how should horticultural shows reflect changing trends? Some of them go back hundreds of years, with cherished cups presented in memorial to past members, so tradition stands in the way of modernisation. I am inclined to kick things off with an offer of a new cup to my local show for ‘Tropical or Oriental Vegetable’ or some such thing, but would that preclude me from winning it? I’m not too worried.