Monday 22 May 2017

Monday night preserves - Asparagus in oil 

On Monday nights I aim to preserve something that is in season throughout the growing season. This is to allow us to prolong the growing season and try our fruit and veg in a variety of ways.
Tonight I was going to do asparagus and also leathers. However the asparagus was such a faff on that I am keeping the leathers for another night.
We cut the asparagus that has flew up since we had the rain just a couple of days ago and I set about trimming them to fit the jar size stated in the recipe. 500ml. There was my first mistake, my jar is more short and fat than tall and slim (sounds familiar 😂) so I had to trim the asparagus a lot shorter than I would have liked. I kept the cut offs to make a soup or such.
I boiled vinegar and water then set aside and kept warm. The asparagus I charred in the frying pan as I don't have a griddle and plunged into the vinegar and water whilst I chopped 2 shallots. Placing the shallots and a tsp of peppercorns in the sterilised short, fat jar I set about fishing the asparagus out of the vinegar. This in itself was a task as I didn't want to pour it out. Then you're supposed to stand the asparagus up in the jar. This takes patience and I was losing mine.
Once it is stood up, in a fashion, I put 75ml of lemon juice in and topped up with olive oil and added some home grown herbs.
 
It looks nice and now needs to sit for 6 weeks before we could use it. It'll keep for 4 months in the pantry and then once open will last another 6 weeks. So in theory we could wait until winter to use these up, which will be a nice treat.
Although it was a faff on, it's done now and looking back, it wouldn't be as hard the second time. Incidentally, the oil it's preserved in wkill be used for cooking once the asparagus is used. It is however fairly expensive unless you have olive oil and cider vinegar in bulk.

4 comments:

  1. great bit of preserving will be interested when you try it to see how it tastes, I am making soup with ours, I was looking at the asparagus bed yesterday and want to add a few more rows of crowns to it.

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    1. Thanks Dawn, I'll report back when we eventually use it. I have no idea how old ours are, seem to be very productive though

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  2. Well done on that Tracy, and great that you can use the oil, too. The thought of enjoying the fruits of your labour later in the year must be fab. I was thinking that when eating some of my beetroot on my salad yesterday!

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    Replies
    1. Thank you - yes, trying to make sure we end up using everything as I don't like waste even though sometimes we do have some. I can't wait for this year's beetroot!

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