Saturday, March 13, 2010

March is for Alliums


Alliums are onions and garlic and shallots and leeks and the like. When Alliums were announced as the item for March in the Tigress Can Jam I was excited to investigate what we could do with some of the 600-750 species, making it one of the largest plant genera in the world. Strangely, the one item we did not end up using was your standard red or yellow onion. Instead we: pickled garlic and green garlic and pickled cipollini, green and pearl onions. Because it is just in season here and we had purchased Weck jars specifically for that purpose, we also picked some asparagus. In all, a busy day.

The recipe I will share is for pickled green garlic, if you would like one of the others please leave me a comment and I can send it out.

Pickled Green Garlic
(note that this recipe was originally for ramps but green garlic is much more available on the west coast and was in my Mariquita Mystery Box)

6 bunches Green garlic, cleaned, white parts only
1 cup water
1 cup cider vinegar
1/4 cup kosher salt
1/2 cup sugar
1 tablespoon mustard seed, black peppercorns, and fennel seeds
pinch red pepper

Prepare brine bringing vinegar, water, sugar and salt to a boil. Meanwhile, blanch green garlic for about 2 minutes. Drain and cool in ice water.
Pack green garlic into jars and cover with brine. Clean and finger tighten lids. Process for 10 minutes in a hot water bath. We ended up with three 8 oz. jars.

6 comments:

  1. Lucky you for having asparagus already available; we won't have it locally here in Toronto for weeks yet!

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  2. Perfectly simple and straight forward. Sounds like I'll be hitting up my pals for scapes soon...

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  3. Though I have to admit that I wasn't all that excited about this month's can jam being alliums, one of my jars of cipollini didn't seal so I ate them right away. And I do mean right away. Once I tasted one, I had a few every night until they were gone. A great accompanyment to cheese, and an almost traditional accompanyment to tacos. This is one of the pleasures of the Can Jam: being "forced" to can something I wouldn't necessarily have been drawn to on my own.

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  4. I would like to know what you did with green onions - I will have tons later and we can only eat so many.

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  5. We must be in the same CSA, because this week I got Green Garlic in my Two Small Farms CSA box (one of which is Mariquita farm); As I also have my own row of garlic in the yard which needs to be thinned, this pickle is mosdef on my radar!

    The can jam is groovey, n'est-ce pas?

    Regards,

    Tengrain

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  6. Daisy
    We canned the green onions essentially the same way as the green garlic. I have not tried it yet but am a bit worried it might get mushy.

    Tengrain
    I get the mystery box. I assume the contents are similar. I have thought about the regular CSA but am worried it might be too much for me.

    Amy

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