Making hay when the sun don’t shine

With winter taking hold of the garden and the appearance of heaters in the house, the days are occupied with activities that can be enjoyed indoors like researching and discovering new recipes and dusting off some traditional ones.

The pots filled with yellow daffodils and blue muscari I planted earlier this year are going to be beautiful around the cellar window next to the steps. I love the bougainvillea flower-fall cascading more than 4 metres into the orchard where the trees are looking very stark on the cold wet days.

Watching the orchard floor being covered with golden leaves from the golden delicious apple tree, I realised that it was time for the final phases of making the lime pickles and lime liqueur.

With a gust of wind making the leaves rustle towards the orchard floor, I stood still in the cellar enjoying the visual spectacle of yellow leaves raining down in front of the cellar door. Regretting not having my camera at hand to capture the scene, I decided to keep focused and took the lime pickles and lime peels on vodka back to the kitchen to complete the preserving processes.

I could not understand why, according to the recipe, the lime pickles had to wait a week before I could fill them up with the extra lime juice. Seeing the jars half full with the lime juice that had been extracted by action of the salt, I realised the importance of leaving the limes for a week on the salt before filling the jars with extra lime juice. I added the chillies, rosemary sprigs and bay leaves before filling the jars with lime juice and covering the pickles with a layer of olive oil.

I added the sugar syrup to the lime peel, lemon geranium and mint infused vodka and filtered the liqueur into bottles. The lemon geranium and mint leaves gives an interesting flavour to the subtle lime liqueur to be enjoyed, even in winter.

I took the final products back to the cellar where they can mature over the next 6 weeks in the cool dark comfort required by the recipes.