I usually don't have the time or patience to make pickles, but
once I planted chillies on my dacha and they were very successful. The plants
produced a steady supply of fruit for about three months but at the end of the
season I had to pick all the fruit at once, ripe and unripe, before the frost
spoiled it. I had hundreds of green chillies and I decided to pickle most of
them. This recipe is good because you don't have to be too
fussy about measuring the ingredients. 'Approximately' will do nicely for
everything.
Adding a few herbs and spices is a good idea for any pickle recipe and again
you can be flexible with the ingredients. Use whole seeds and dry roast them
for the best result.
Use any kind of glass jars - old jam jars etc. - but the one thing you should take care over in this recipe is sterilising the jars. It's not difficult. Put the jars in a large pot and half fill them with water. Fill the pot around the jars to the same level. Throw the lids from the jars into the water and put a lid on the pot. Boil vigorously for about 20 minutes. Leave the jars in the pot with the lid on until you need them but get a pair of oven gloves or something similar ready for lifting the hot jars out of the pot.
Ingredients
A load of green chillies
A few cloves of garlic
1 teaspoon of black mustard seeds
1 teaspoon of coriander seed
1 teaspoon of black peppercorns
1 litre of water
Half a litre of 4% vinegar
2 or 3 teaspoons of salt
40 - 50g of sugar (About 2 dessertspoons)
Roast the spices together and leave them to one side. Boil the water and vinegar together and dissolve the sugar and salt in the mixture. Leave it simmering gently while you wash the chillies and blanch them in boiling water. That means you drop them into boiling water for a minute or so.
Drain the chillies then lift a hot jar out of the pot, empty the water out of it and pack it with whole chillies. Put some spices and a clove of garlic on top and pour over pickling liquid until it reaches the top of the jar. Screw the lid on tightly and repeat the process with another jar. The pickles will be ready after three weeks but they will keep for months and probably longer.