Pickles, Pesto and Pollution

 As September gallops by I thought doing some forward planning for Covid part 2 would be prudent so I've been gradually adding an extra bag/packet of this and that to my shopping rather than doing the 'oh my god' apocalyptic shopping that everyone seemed to be doing back in March.

To this end I thought I'd try my hand at pickling to cope with the multitude of runner beans we still had coming off our mutant bean stalk. I came across this recipe for Spiced Pickled Runner Beans in one of my old Delia's.

I've never pickled before, but thought I'd have a go. I didn't have any malt vinegar - it doesn't seem to be a thing here, so decided to use Apple Cider Vinegar instead and a shit load of beans (that's an official Canadian measurement!)

One of the things that took me aback on this recipe was that it used a tablespoon of turmeric which made the liquid look a little like cat sick, but hey ho, I soldiered on. Then I added the sugar (demerara sugar isn't common here, so I had to use raw cane turbinado sugar, which is similar, but the crystals aren't as big as with demerara). At this point it went from yellow cat sick to brown and sludgy...

Finally came the really fun part (not). I had to get it into jars, and bearing in mind there was a shit load of turmeric in this, and I've just renovated my kitchen and have nice quartz counters I was kind of paranoid. So the whole jarring process took place in the sink with me being hyper-vigilant every time I transferred from pot to jar. Phew, I made it in the end, but I don't know if my nerves will stand doing this again, but hey, in a month we'll see how they turned out once they've festered a bit.

And still with my forward planning hat on and not wanting to waste anything that we'd grown over the summer I decided to tackle my mutant basil plant and make pesto.

I went to get pine nuts until I saw the price of them, so decided to make the pesto without - so it's more pestoesque. So basil, garlic, oil, parmesan and black pepper assembled and added in stages because I only have a baby processor. The end result isn't particularly pretty, but it smells good and made a pound of pesto, which will freeze nicely and give me basily goodness through the coming months.

Finally, we've doing a different type of 'Confined Kitchen' at the moment. As we've all seen on the news the wildfires in Oregon, Washington State and California are horrendous just now. While I'm glad that we haven't got any wildfires at the moment, what we do have is 'smokey skies'. The wind direction is sending the smoke northwards into BC, and also eastwards across other parts of Canada. Vancouver currently has the second worst air quality in the world after Portland Oregon, and here on Vancouver Island we're getting major drift. This is a photo from one of our front windows at 4 pm today - you should be able to see the three major forested ridges above us and you can't see any of them because of the haze.

We'll definitely be staying indoors over the next couple of days, so I'm thinking I may have to do some happy-making cooking - there may be strawberry muffins in our future tomorrow, and tonight it will be salmon cooked in the panini pan because we're not going to venture out on the deck to BBQ. 

That's it from the West Coast. I hope everyone is doing well.