Super easy and healthier than boiling style! (As nutrients are more preserved.) Just freeze or eat fresh. Making this sauce is just like you bake or oven roast veggies - then use a blender stick. I used feijoias and guavas from bach we were staying on. So amazing to use resources picked from the land. I had brought chillies I had grown - an ice cream bucket full, and bought bell peppers, garlic, onions. (Photo below shows all the beautiful ingredients that went into this oven roasted habanero chilli sauce.)
Homemade sauces taste so much better as they are fresh and didn't need preservatives to guarantee their safety long-term. This sauce tasted amazing and as roasting was easier/healthier - won't be boiling sauces anytime soon!
METHOD I just cut up and baked 3 glass trays of ingredients one after the other in the oven until you could smell their nice smell and were soft. First just chillies as had so many. Sprinkled sea salt and pepper. Then the onions and garlic. Sprinkled sea salt and pepper. Then fruit both kinds with a sprinkle of sugar over top to aid in caramellisation. If less ingredients onions garlic could go together. Wouldn't do fruit together with chillies actually. Didn't overcook especially chillies so nutrients intact. Allowed to cool then blended. I also added the juice of two lemons. We added about 1 cup of vinegar.
THE ONLY PROBLEM was the bloody guava pips, when your teeth find them! Would remove these next time even after cooked - or not use guavas.
PS - these are guavas - hadn't used them before - wouldn't need to remove skins as they are soft, I did, but this is optional.
INGREDIENTS
TRAY 1 (chillies) All chillies cored, deseeded, cut into roughly equal pieces (photo above - before cooking):
18 Thai chilli peppers mostly green a few red. 2 jalapeño chillies. 6 habanero chillies insides of flesh scraped (tamed). 5.5 bell peppers.
Coat with just enough oil and and sea salt and pepper and bake in glass oven tray on oven at 200 until well roasted.
Coat with just enough oil and sea salt and pepper and bake in glass oven transfer oven at 200 until soft. After cooked, I poured in to the bowl with chillies (photo below, both chillies and onions, garlic cooked).
TRAY 3 (fruit) Scoop out flesh 10-12 feijoas Cut up 25 guavas.
Chop roughly, put in an oven tray with a sprinkle of sugar, bake until caramelised.
Photo above - the glass tray I cooked everything in (with both guava and feijoa after baking)- sequentially! When all cooked put in same large bowl, whizz together with blend stick. Add juice of two lemons.
600g cut up chilllies or capsicums (peppers), any kind.
1 cup vinegar
5 cups sugar (helps preserve as bugs don't like all the sugar) 1/2 pouch Hansells Jam Setting Mix (from supermarket (pectin for thickening, made from apples). Method:
Cut up and core 600g of chillies (if I have picked a bit more I just add a bit more vinegar and sugar and setting stuff proportionally) no worries. Wear gloves or will have painful fingers.
The heat of your jam will be from this choice here. Mild - 4 med sized capsicum, 4-5 capsicum. Med - mostly Thai chillies. Moderate and divine - add a Habanero with inside white interior scraped away (tamed that is where heat us stored). etc!
Blend with 1 cup vinegar - add half chillies and all vinegar, blend, than add the other half.
Pour into large pot with 5 cups sugar in it. Stir. DON'T ADD PECTIN YET.
Boil 10 min, turn up to max then turn down to gentle boil. Put clean jars into oven at 160 degrees C to kill bugs. I wipe sides with wet scraper to avoid possible crystallisation with unmixed sugar falling in at wrong time.
Then add pectin made into paste just before adding (or gets thick) stir well and count to 60. Take off heat.
At this point you pour into hot sterile bottles, to 1 cm from top. Pour slowly as hot bottles will fizz the stuff up. USE A GLASS MEASURING CUP or something small to pour into jar. I still have a scar where sticky jam danged onto my arm. You can't get sticky boiling stuff off in time.
Pour then cap using a tea towel or something, stick on windowsill or wherever. You will hear a POP which is the oxygen leaving the bottle as it vacuum seals. When it cools label with pride.
Beeswax wraps! THE WAX I have done this before with a class of young children, grating up pure beeswax. They keep the air out, but are a bit brittle, and the grating method was NOT easy. The easiest way is just to melt down the block, and then brush it onto the wraps. Then you place a pile of the wraps in the oven at 80 degrees to further soak in. When you hang them up, just have newspapers below! The wax also needs the tree resin - to make it stickier, and more supple, and the jojoba oil is antibacterial as used for food. So if you buy already formulated wax blocks the hard part is already done. It is then just a matter of getting your fabric pieces to soak up all the wax, then hang dry. Wax is hard to get off your stuff so use sacrificial pans and things - I saved mine in a cloth bag for next time. Order perfect blocks from this website (or your local): https://www.lilybeewrap.com/collections/make-your-own-wraps THE FABRIC I found it really fun to use my own fabric, which I cut with pinking shears. The fabric - the thinner the better, a thin cotton - not a thick one! I had fun writing my own sayings on them as well. You cut the edges out with pinking shears (those zig-zag ones), so the fabric won't fray (but not essential - the wax helps alot too). That's just the proper way... I did invest in the shears. Here are the photos. This can easily be made into a creative art project if you use white, and just let your kids draw something on them... I even experimented with a watercolour painting on one, and it did work. PHOTOS
QUICK SUMMARY (from my Instagram post at the time) I just bought 2 Lilybee large make-your-own-wraps wax blocks which made it easy. It already has tree resin to make it sticky and not brittle and jojoba oil for antibacterial properties. I just melted down on stove and painted onto wraps on hot cookie tray - one one top of another ' add another paint etc - then put back in oven 80 degrees for 10 min. The only tricky bit is handling the hot sticky wraps after. Hanging them quickly before wax solidifies funny on them!
I had also written old wise sayings on them. One my son had made did leak ink through pile I would do such creative ones separately in future. And don't skimp on the wax!!! #beeswaxwraps
After returning to my life, where I actually had a life - I planted my garden to the best of my ability, even planting companion plants like basil between tomatoes - trying to establish herb areas, etc. We also added pine needles as mulch to the tomato plants - which did wonders! The clay heavy soil of our garden was balanced with acidic material. The chilli plants also did really well (also it was a very hot and dry, long summer).
Anyways, I then had to preserve the abundance, like tomatoes, and chillies.
A walk through my garden in February:
Preserving tomatoes - the easy way
Preserving is a huge amount of work!
I tried a fancy recipe by Wellness Mama, with fresh herbs, and boiling for hours, carrots, and putting a carrot in and removing it later to remove acidity. Although it was delicious, I just didn't have the energy to do that every time I had a bowl of tomatoes!
Wellness Mama pasta sauce!
Later on, a few friends had said they oven roast cut up tomatoes with garlic, onions etc. Then just freezing it. So I started doing that! Sometimes with fresh herbs from the garden, whole sprigs.
180 C for about 45 min (until done).
It was so much easier! I did freeze it usually before blending due to not having time - but when I needed to use it I could blend it. It was so delicious, and made it possible to preserve with far less energy.
Some of my tomatoes were the yellow type!
Fresh herbs from the garden - that I added, and also shared at work. I learned how to grow and harvest oregano, basil, thyme, rosemary...all things I actually wanted to use. No more growing things I don't actually use. I even was able to harvest some funny but useful carrots for some roasted sauces!
Preserving chillies
Shane and I went to a Mexican restaurant, and loved the green chilli sauce!
By far the most fun and exciting - addition to our lives, chilli sauces! Not hard to make either, just panfrying up cut up chillies, garlic and onions, and spices. USE GLOVES TO CUT UP THE CHILLIES by the way. I went without twice and not right away - became in extreme pain.)
I kept trying recipes for chilli sauces, starting with Green Gavin chutney sauce involving lots of spices like cumin and turmeric (and not blending it up after). They were all really good - but in the end although the heavily spiced sauces were amazing, realised that the green chilli sauce was probably not very spiced (I'm talking cumin, turmeric, ginger, coriander). I would still use the garlic and onion though! Going to try this later today, and will post up the results.
Here are a few versions I created, with a photo of how the cut up ingredients looked. One well liked one at the end was SPICE TRUCK that I did not photograph. (We named them so we could remember what worked better, what we liked, etc.) Basically I followed a basic recipe, amounts of chillies and garlic and oil roughly the same, and experimented with the spices.
Hot chilli chutney - from the Greening of Gavin blog.
But it involved frying for 15 min, and these ingredients: 450g chillies , 1 onion, 6 cloves garlic, 2 T ground cumin (was 4 but I reduced it), 2 T turmeric, 25g grated root ginger, 1 T salt, 3/4 cup olive oil, 3 T sugar, 1 1/4 cups white vinegar.
How it looked before frying.
How it looked after bottling! This sauce was VERY spicy and hot. Was amazing added to mayo - but extremely intense straight.
After this I realised I could blender it, and it would be more pleasant to use as a sauce - on cheese and crackers, or in cooking.
Nonnie's experimentations with chilli sauces, first one - Beauty
I carefully recorded what I did with this one, put alot of energy into it. We named it Beauty as it was delicious. This is what it looked like before we cooked it. After it was cooked, we blendered and bottled it and used it right away (in a sterilised tall bottle).
It is easy to share with you now as I recorded each version directly onto a new Google Slide, duplicating and changing the relevant details each time (well actually after scribbling on scrap paper with a vivid the changes and adding later).
Fry - 15 min
450g green chillies
1 onion
6 cloves garlic
1 t ground cumin
1 t coriander
1 T salt
3/4 cup olive oil
Boil - 10 min
½ cup brown sugar
1 1/2 cups white vinegar
Boil hard - 1 min
¼ packet pectin
Sterilise the jars and lids in an oven 120C
Finely chop chillies, remove seeds as much as possible.
Mix together the first lot ingredients (chillies etc).
Transfer to a heavy based pan and fry for 15 minutes, stirring often to prevent sticking.
Add sugar and vinegar and bring to the boil.
Cover pan and boil for 10 minutes stirring occasionally. Then add ¼ packet pectin and boil max heat for 1 min
Cool down for 20 min, then blend
Pack into jars, then seal.
Nonnie's experimentations with chilli sauces, second good one - Spirited!
Lots of spices and kick!!! Looked much like Green Gavin. The turmeric is for health, also the garlic, onion, ginger, and cumin and coriander for taste. And apparently black pepper helps activate the health benefits of turmeric! Which needs to be cooked to be activated as well...
Fry - 15 min
3/4 cup olive oil
480g green chillies
1 large brown onion
8 cloves garlic
a few chunks ginger
1 T cumin seeds
1 T coriander (ground)
2 T turmeric (ground)
Black pepper, sprinkle over
3/4 T salt
Boil - 10 min
½ cup brown sugar
1 1/2 cups white vinegar
Boil hard - 1 min
¼ packet pectin More detailed method - as above (Beauty recipe).
Last entry to come - hopefully regular Mexican green chilli sauce....the quest could be closer to its ending (the quest never truly ends as you never stop learning...)
green mexican chilli sauce (my version)
The traditional version had pork stock, and flour to thicken. Still searching for that amazing recipe I had at a restaurant - but this one I made was really good! Used pectin instead of flour to thicken.
--Fry - 15 min-- olive oil - cover pan 1 cm 370g green chillies (hot) 1 green capsicum 2 small brown onions 8 cloves garlic Ground cumin, sprinkle over Black pepper, himalayan rock salt, sprinkle over
--Boil - 10 min-- 3/4 cup sugar 3/4 cup white vinegar
--Boil hard - 1 min-- 1/2 packet pectin
Sterilise the jars and lids in an oven 120C.
Finely chop chillies, remove seeds as much as possible.
Mix together the first lot ingredients (chillies etc).
Transfer to a heavy based pan and fry for 15 minutes, stirring often to prevent sticking.
Add sugar and vinegar and bring to the boil. Cover pan and boil for 10 minutes stirring occasionally. Then add ¼ packet pectin and boil max heat for 1 min.
Posting this activity I did after I first left my full-time city job - on a hot summer morning in 2017 (February). I posted it on my fb page, but not on my (public) blog. I really want to share this for the record?
Last year I tried Silhouette dyes from CCG Industries (we had been in the shop to get materials for our terracotta style firepit). The man in the shop told me they use it in Rarotonga - they lay out fabric in the hot sun, and place stencils on the fabric, which leave silhouettes; "sun masks".
I had to try it. Then I realised I could place even leaves on the fabric and it would leave outlines of the leaves.
I shared this activity with children, but they were more involved in the dye process in general than the sun masking.
Finally shared it with the right folks, an group of adult creative women (Sharron Erbacher's local quilting group). They had fun, I had fun. They will be able to harness this method's full potential!
