The vegie garden is looking decidedly bare and wintery now that I’ve finally pulled out the tomato bushes and collected the very last ripening tomatoes. It’s the end of a process of watching the garden build up and up in a frenzy over summer – the plants growing taller as the weather gets hotter – then watching things come down again piece by piece as the sun slips back in the sky and it starts getting chilly.

Now it’s just the ground-level plants – sage, parsley, rhubarb, horseradish, some tufty rows of little carrots and beetroots, plus me itching to find the time to scrape back the mulch, add some more compost, and put in broad beans, garlic and silverbeet. Making the changeover from one garden season to another about two months too late seems to be what I specialise in …

Likewise, this blog is running a little late! It’s inspired by our summer basil, with a recipe for a favourite eggplant, tomato and basil pasta, nonna-style. Of course you can still buy eggplants and basil, even if they’re not truly in season – or otherwise earmark this recipe for next summer. (In summer or winter, the tomatoes we use for this pasta are always the tinned or jarred variety, so in their case the season doesn’t pose a problem.)

The recipe, or at least the technique, comes from a guy called Vincenzo, a bass-player who was once in a band with my drumming husband, Leigh. It was an era in our lives over a decade ago when we were uni students, and eggplant dishes weren’t either of our fortes. Vincenzo cooked this for the band for dinner one night and it was ground-breaking stuff as eggplant suddenly became delicious! The simple but important point is that eggplant needs to be well cooked – you can’t half-cook it like you can most other vegies. It has to be soft and collapsing to reach its creamy and luscious true purpose in life.

P.S. Speaking of eggplant, recently a lovely writer called Nikki Fisher blogged my recipe for eggplant pickle from The Hungry Girls’ Cookbook Volume 2 – click here to go direct to her post. Nikki’s prolific blog, The Wholefood Mama, about cooking, motherhood and life on the Mornington Peninsula, is definitely worth checking out.

2/3 packet of spaghetti
olive oil
1 medium–large eggplant, cut into 2 cm cubes
3 garlic cloves, finely chopped
1 small red chilli (fresh or dried), split in half lengthwise
500 ml tomato puree (passata)
½ teaspoon salt
freshly ground black pepper
2 large handfuls basil leaves
freshly grated parmesan to serve

Put a pot of salted water on to boil for the spaghetti.

Meanwhile, heat a frying pan until hot, and add a generous splash of oil and the eggplant. Turn the heat back to medium and fry, stirring regularly, for around 8 minutes, until the eggplant is starting to collapse and stick to the pan. Add the garlic and chilli and fry, stirring, for another minute, then stir in the tomato puree, salt, and pepper to taste and simmer for about 10 minutes.

When the pot of water boils, add the spaghetti and cook to al dente, then drain.

Remove the eggplant sauce from the heat and stir in the basil. Taste for salt and pepper, adding more if needed. Serve on top of the spaghetti with plenty of parmesan.

Serves 3–4

In April the Hungry Girls were invited to do a guest blog for Design Sponge, and we settled on this favourite salad. It’s a jumble of soft-roasted chunks of sweet potato and potato, caramelised onion, crunchy green beans and juicy tomatoes – plus lashings of parsley and just enough Spanish smoked paprika for an element of spice. 

Sweet potatoes can a bit too sweet for my palate – but combined with the paprika they’re a revelation, the earthy and savoury flavour of the spice adding delicious new appeal. The salad is a perfect weeknight dinner, or it could be a side dish in a more elaborate meal. The beans and tomatoes make it a great thing to make in the warmer months, and I happened to make it with some purple and green beans from our garden as you can see in the photos below.

Please enjoy the stream of beautiful ‘in the making’ shots by Leah Holscher, and Katherine Bird’s gorgeous illustration at the end.

Sweet potato, green bean and smoked paprika salad

extra-virgin olive oil
1 onion, finely sliced
1 sweet potato, peeled and cut into thick wedges about 5 cm long
2 potatoes, cut into thick wedges about 5 cm long
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
2 teaspoons smoked paprika
salt and freshly ground black pepper
large handful of green beans, topped and tailed, cut in half diagonally
3 ripe tomatoes, cut into wedges
handful of flat-leaf parsley, chopped
juice of ½ lemon
sour cream or natural yoghurt to serve (optional)

Preheat the oven to 200°C. Heat around 3 tablespoons of oil in an ovenproof frying pan over medium heat. Add the onion, sweet potato and potato and pan-fry for 5–10 minutes, tossing occasionally, until lightly coloured. Stir in the garlic, paprika, 1 teaspoon of salt and generous black pepper, coating well. Transfer the pan to the oven and roast until the vegetables are tender (around 15 minutes).

Meanwhile, bring a small saucepan of water to the boil. Add the beans and simmer for a few minutes, then drain.

Put the hot beans in a large bowl along with the tomato and parsley. Add the hot roasted vegetables, lemon juice and another good splash of oil and toss to combine. Add extra salt and pepper to taste, then serve with dollops of sour cream or natural yoghurt if desired.

Serves 4

There’s a plum tree in our backyard, down on the fence next to the chicken coop. It’s a scraggly thing – nondescript with lots of thin branches and small leaves sticking up chaotically into the air. We were going to cut it down before we realised it fruited, and eventually decided that with its position right on the fence, the tree wasn’t taking up much space or doing any harm. It’s one of our only established fruit trees so we had to love it a little.

The plums are those small round ones like cherry tomatoes. Ours start out yellow and ripen through to red, although I think they’re best when they’re sunburnt orange. They’re not bad to eat at all – a little tart but still juicy and good. They make fantastic jam. After New Year I dutifully climbed the ladder and clambered over the chicken coop to pick every plum I could before they fell from the tree or the birds got them. Each small load was like a little basket full of sunshine.

Afterwards our neighbour’s plum tree started to fruit, and I remembered what a fine, fine specimen it is. It’s an angelina plum or something very similar, and its canopy is like an elegant, draping curtain that you can climb beneath, looking up to marvel at all the plump, dusky, intensely purple plums. No ladders are required as the plums drop down to your hands. They have sweet yellow flesh and taste sensational.

These plums were ripening while our neighbours were away, so I picked a few for us to eat and got busy with a little more plum cookery. I made a yeasted plum pie that was pretty fantastic but still needs a bit of tweaking, and some baby friands in Portuguese custard tart moulds that were amazingly good – all crisp exterior, buttery, crumbly cake, and a slightly tart slice of plum on top adding an extra dimension. I tried another batch reducing the sugar and butter, thinking I was being quite clever, but they were denser and not nearly as good. So I’m happy to admit that even with their use of almond meal and egg whites, friands aren’t very good for you, but that really isn’t their point!

This recipe (with a few small adjustments) comes from Jill Dupleix. Friands actually seem to be a unique thing we do in Australia, growing popular via cafes in the last decade or so. They are based on the French ‘financier’, but are a little bigger, and financiers don’t usually have fruit. We love them, I think, because they’re so much more dainty and delicious than an oversized boring muffin. Soon someone might declare they’ve joined the ranks of classic Australian foods with pavlovas, lamingtons and roast lamb with mint sauce.

180 g butter
180 g icing sugar
60 g plain flour
120 g almond meal
5 egg whites
1 tablespoon amaretto or other liqueur
plums, such as blood plums or angelinas

Melt the butter, then brush some of it inside your friand moulds. You can use proper friand trays or mini muffin trays, or even smaller trays with rounded bases that are used for Portuguese custard tarts, or madeleine trays. (I used one of each of the last two trays, making about 20 baby friands.) If the trays aren’t non-stick, I would dust them with flour after buttering as an extra precaution.

Preheat the oven to 200°C. Sift the icing sugar and flour into a bowl. Stir in the almond meal. Add the egg whites and amaretto and mix well, then stir in the melted butter.

Spoon the mixture into the moulds, filling to three-quarters full. If you are using small moulds, be extra careful not to add too much mixture as the friands rise in the oven.

Slice your plums in half and remove the stones. If your plums are particularly large, or if you are using small moulds, cut each slice of plum in half again to give thinner slices. (Too much juicy fruit on top will make the friands too moist and you won’t have any fun getting the friands out of the trays.)

Bake in the oven for 15–20 minutes, or until golden. Turn the trays around halfway through cooking. Leave to cool for 5 minutes before removing from the trays.

The Hungry Girls had a guest blog on The Design Files last week. We included a recipe from each of our books with a story, photographs by Leah, and illustrations by Katherine. Follow these links:

Monday – the story of the Hungry Girls

Tuesday – Cherry tomato, herb and chilli fish (Volume 1)

Wednesday – Chinese peanut and celery salad

Thursday – Quick Spanish dinner (Volume 2)

Friday – Yoghurt and white chocolate pannacotta (Volume 3)

The Wednesday recipe was a new one, so we include the blog here as well.

We’ve eaten our fair share of dumplings. There is an eatery near us – I don’t think it’s flash enough to call a restaurant – that does a mean trade in food from north-west China near the border of Russian and Kazakhstan. Spicy lamb skewers; ‘the big chicken plate’ with potato, green capsicum, cabbage and hand-made noodles; and gorgeous boiled dumplings with wafts of ginger and sichuan pepper. These days we have to order two large plates of dumplings to share between our family of three, as our two-year-old daughter can put away a frightening eight or so. With only one plate, this leaves my husband and I going rather wanting.

We made a trip to China about four years ago and tried not to be too ambitious with our one-month visa, covering just a small corner of the south-west rather than cramming in the whole country. Our appetite for dumplings went into overdrive, especially in towns in Yunnan where we found rustic little dumpling houses opening onto the street, steamer baskets stacked up in the doorways. Pork dumplings for breakfast – sometimes in hot steaming soup – was the stuff of our dreams.

A great surprise was the cousin of the dumpling – the larger steamed bun. No filling of sickly sweet barbecued pork to be found, but interesting vegetarian versions with spicy tofu, salted greens or mushrooms, to be washed down with a cup of hot soy milk while you waited for a bus.

Our favourite filling when making dumplings at home is with pork, a little salt and a bucket load of sliced spring onion tops. You can easily buy ready-made skins, but a quick mixture of flour, a pinch of salt and water is so easy to mix up and gives you rustic, authentic dumplings.

In my time of slowly getting to know the dumpling, I think they’re best served with a cool, crisp Chinese salad fresh with rice vinegar, and I’m slowly growing my repertoire. I make a smashed cucumber salad, a cabbage salad, and this fantastic peanut and celery salad. Cook it whenever there’s a call for a Chinese salad, such as with spiced skewers or steamed fish.

1 cup raw peanuts in their skins
1½ tablespoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon Chinese rice wine
1 tablespoon black or white rice vinegar
1 tablespoon sesame oil
1 teaspoon sugar
1½ tablespoons oil for stir-frying such as peanut or sunflower
1 large garlic clove, finely chopped
½–1 teaspoon dried chilli flakes (depending on their heat)
4–5 celery stalks, wide bottoms cut in half lengthwise, sliced

Boil the peanuts in a saucepan of water for around 15 minutes, until they have softened a little.

Meanwhile, combine the soy sauce, rice wine, vinegar, sesame oil and sugar in a bowl. When the peanuts are cooked, drain them and toss immediately in the dressing. Set aside for 30 minutes or longer to soak up the flavours.

Heat the oil in a wok over high heat and add the garlic and chilli flakes. Sizzle briefly, then add the celery and stir-fry for 2–3 minutes. Add to the bowl of peanuts and mix well. You can serve the salad immediately or leave it to cool to room temperature.

Serves 4

On the 7th December 2011, we officially launched The Hungry Girls’ Cookbook Volume 3! The venue was a shop called Melbournalia Home, located in a gorgeous old warehouse down a laneway near the Queen Victoria Market.

Dale Campisi of Melbournalia and Arcade Publications kindly introduced us, then Rachel offered some insight into the Hungry Girls project – from a tiny print run of our first book in 2006, which was intended as a Christmas gift for friends and family, the Hungry Girls have now made over 3000 books! Each one is hand-bound with cloth, which amounts to quite a lot of PVA and cotton, and love that has gone into every copy.

The lovely folk of Melbournalia manned the drinks table at the launch, while the Hungry Girls weaved around the room (between the tables of locally made products) offering delicious nibbles. There were pastries with mushroom pate and roasted cherry tomatoes (from Volume 1), and others with crushed peas, broad beans and pecorino. There was some cheesy baked polenta to be had – ingeniously heated in a sandwich toaster in lieu of any kitchen facilities – and for sweets, some cute spotted cups filled with yoghurt and white chocolate pannacotta (from Volume 3), and chocolate mousse spiked with Frangelico. No one felt like going out for dinner afterwards!

Volume 3 is now stocked in shops in Melbourne and across the country, and can also be purchased through the Shop page of our website. It is beautifully photographed by Leah Holscher and playfully illustrated by Katherine Bird. As for the recipes inside, this is another collection we hope you will want to cook from again and again. Think squid, orange and rosemary pasta; mapo tofu; homemade Italian sausage; Persian carrots; lemon curd cake … Mmmmmm.

The Hungry Girls’ Cookbook Volume 3 has been sent to the printer, and we can’t wait to unveil it to you all at the end of this month.

More than three years have passed since we released Volume 2, and the three of us – Katherine Bird, Leah Holscher and Rachel Pitts – were just itching to do it again! It’s been such an exciting project; a real collaboration with each of us bringing our individual skills in food, photography, design and illustration. From the middle of the year we set to work gathering props and organising a series of photo shoots at Hungry Girls’ homes in Melbourne and Warrnambool – on front verandahs, in backyards and on kitchen tables to make the best use of natural light.

At the beginning of the process, our best hope would have been for Volume 3 to be a quiet little step up in quality – not because we felt it was needed, but just to show our own progression over the past few years. Without getting too ahead of ourselves, we think we may have managed it! Leah’s photographs are simply stunning – lush, bright, bold at times, and eclectic. The recipes, too, are diverse and interesting, roaming from South-East Asia to the Middle East and Italy. They are rooted, as always, in cooking with seasonal produce. On top of this, Katherine’s illustrations and collages add another rich layer, so that we hope Volume 3 is a book to inspire, delight and cherish.

Below are some photos of the production over the last few months. Now we just need to bind and sew, sew, sew, to get the books into shops by December!

The Hungry Girls’ photographer, Leah Holscher, recently snuck back into the country after three years of life in Europe. There she based herself in England and The Netherlands and travelled just about everywhere she could – Turkey, Portugal, the Ukraine, Africa – taking pictures, pictures, more pictures.

As well as being a food photographer, Leah is a passionate travel photographer with a unique eye for windows, doorways and openings onto hidden worlds, and the beauty to be found in everyday objects. Many of her pictures have a playful sense of irony or quirkiness – an old telephone hung above the bed in a hotel room; a hand-sewn cover in patterned fabric drawn over a car in dusty Mali.

Leah worked at architecture practices in London and Rotterdam, The Netherlands, but photography was really what the trip was all about. In Rotterdam Leah had an exhibition at De Aanschouw and also contributed photos to a piece about the city’s unlikely image of itself as a tropical hideaway – strange but true. Below are highlights of Leah’s inspiring travels.

For the Hungry Girls, the good news is that with Leah back in Australia, work has begun in earnest on Volume 3! The recipes, photos and design are all taking shape and we are so excited about how it is coming up. The book will be ready for Christmas. Stay tuned!

I thought we’d well and truly missed mushroom season this year. For pine mushrooms it’s autumn, and now it’s July and we’ve only just managed to rustle ourselves out the door and in the car and down to my dad’s place in South-West Victoria, where we have a secret mushroom spot nearby. We found it about five years ago and going back has been a highlight every year since. I jump out of the car and skip around like a schoolkid, way too excited. My husband is the stealth hunter and gets straight to business, finding and cutting the best and most beautiful specimens over the hills.

The first year we had no idea what we were doing and jammed our massive harvest into a few calico bags, only to get home and realise that with all the mushrooms stacked on top of each other, so much dirt had fallen into the gills, and every meal was crunchy. Now we’re much cleverer and lay them out flat on trays or in wide boxes, almost dirt free. At times like this, with mushroom boxes laid all over our luggage, plus props and food for a photo shoot with Katherine and Leah for the new Hungry Girls Cookbook Volume 3 (due out before Christmas), my husband likes to refer to our car as the ‘Subaru Pantry’.

Pine mushrooms are the gorgeous orange ones that you see at a select few market stalls in autumn. When you cut or bruise them, the area goes blueish green, which has people like my dad running a mile! (While he likes to come pine mushrooming, he hasn’t tasted one yet.) In the beginning the mushrooms were new to me too, and although I was convinced I’d identified them correctly, something in my heart still jumped whenever I served them up – a dark feeling that I could actually poison people. Thankfully I never did.

This year we’ve made another discovery – wood blewits. They’re purple! In eggplant and cabbage this is okay, but in mushrooms I have to say it does look a bit crazy.

Wood blewit season seems to be a little later than pine mushroom season, running into winter. While pine mushrooms sprawl out from the pine trees (and are mostly finished by July), wood blewits lurk directly beneath, hiding in the long grass like mauve goblins. We took a whiff of our find and the smell was good – and one loose rule of thumb is that if mushrooms smell good, they are most likely edible. We thought we had seen them before in the Complete Mushroom Book by Antonio Carluccio, so we picked a trayful and waited until we got home to double check.

Pine mushrooms have a fairly classic mushroom smell – rich and old socks-y – while the smell of wood blewits is bright, fruity and aniseedy. When you cook them, pine mushrooms are actually mild and have a firm, dryish texture, whereas wood blewits go silky and slippery like other mushrooms and their flavour is more mushroomy – delicious I think. According to Antonio, you can’t eat wood blewits raw because of toxins they have, but these disappear when cooked.

Antonio paints a picture of such an abundant mushroom world in Europe, where pine mushrooms and wood blewits are well known. Wood blewits are even farmed. By comparison, it feels like Australia hardly knows mushrooms save from buttons, fields, Swiss browns and a few Asian varieties. Pine mushrooms and wood blewits only scrape the surface of the many other mushrooms on offer, and we’re lucky that some of them grow in Australia too.

Each year after our mushrooming trip, I make this very simple soup without stock or cream or other common culprits. It’s chunky, deeply flavoured and satisfying, but not too overpowering. Carrot and celery are added to soften and sweeten the mushrooms, rendering the soup like a silky Bolognese. You can add herbs such as sage or parsley if you wish, although I quite like it paired right back.

splash of olive oil
generous knob of butter
1 onion, diced
1–2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
2–3 carrots, diced
2–3 celery stalks, sliced
200 g mushrooms (wild mushrooms or any mushrooms)
1 teaspoon salt
freshly ground black pepper

Heat the oil and butter in a saucepan and add the onion, garlic, carrot and celery. Sauté for around 10 minutes, stirring every so often. Meanwhile, clean the mushrooms (if they are wild mushrooms and there is a little dirt, wash the tops of the mushrooms under running water, and brush any dirt from the gill side with a pastry brush). Roughly chop the mushrooms and add them to the pan, sautéing with the vegetables for another few minutes. Pour in enough water to submerge the vegetables and add the salt and some pepper. Simmer for 20 minutes or so, adding more water towards the end if it seems to be getting low. Blend the soup to a chunky puree with a stick blender and taste for seasoning. Serve with dollops of yoghurt or sour cream, or just as it is.

Serves 4

This year was a first for me – I tasted feijoa. Life is short and I can’t believe I have wasted so much time already! These dusky green globules are just beautiful to cut, with a creamy yellow interior and a swirling flower pattern made up of translucent yellow-green flesh speckled with a few tiny brown seeds. Their exotic smell wafts all over the house – if you’re not a fan, you might describe it as ‘Deep Heat’, but that’s a bit unfair I think … The taste has a definite sarsaparilla twist, but after having a few my daughter and I found them irresistible. Sweet but with an interesting tang, and such a nice change from the pears, oranges and apples of late autumn and winter. We spooned out the flesh one feijoa after another, the table littered with empty shells.

We came into feijoas via our neighbours, who have an amazing and clever garden with all kinds of interesting edible plants growing in many nooks. They’ve hedged their feijoas and they almost look native Australian to me, with the same greyish green foliage of correa. Our neighbours went away for a few weeks and we collected their mail and looked after their chickens. Each day I walked past the feijoa hedge and couldn’t help but get down on my hands and knees and scurry around to see if any more fruit had dropped. It wouldn’t wait on the ground until they got home, was my thinking!

A quirk of our houses is that our backyard actually has a gate onto their driveway – we guess that the old owners of the houses were friendly. It’s very handy for us at the moment as we’re renovating and the gate is the only access to our yard. Sometimes kids and chickens stray through to see what life is like on the other side.

The acidity of feijoas, which you might compare to passionfruit, makes them perfect for baking, and I’ve found that even people who’ve never eaten a feijoa before think this pie is delicious. The idea came from a recipe for papaya and lime meringue pie that will appear in a fantastic upcoming Balinese cookbook by Janet De Neefe, that I worked on recently as an editor. (Thanks Janet!)

shortcrust pastry (your favourite recipe)

Filling
300 g feijoa pulp
110 g (½ cup) sugar
1/3 cup cornflour
pinch of salt
90 ml lime juice
40 g butter
3 egg yolks, lightly beaten

Meringue
3 egg whites
pinch of salt
75 g (1/3 cup) caster sugar

Brush a 26 cm tart tin with melted butter and dust it with flour. Roll out the pastry until large enough to cover the tin, but not too thinly, and lay it inside the tin. Trim off the excess pastry. Chill in the refrigerator for 30 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 180°C. Line the pastry shell with baking paper and fill with baking weights or rice. Bake for 15 minutes, then lift out the baking paper and rice and bake for another 5 minutes, or until lightly golden.

While the pastry shell is cooking, make the filling. Blend the feijoa pulp until smooth. Put the sugar, cornflour and salt in a saucepan and stir to combine. Stir in the feijoa pulp and lime juice and place over gentle heat. Bring to the boil, stirring regularly so the mixture doesn’t catch on the bottom. The mixture should become quite thick. Once boiling, remove from the heat and stir in the butter. Add the egg yolks and stir well. Return to very gentle heat and stir for a few more minutes, until the mixture is quite hot to touch and steam is rising from the surface. Remove from the heat.

To make the meringue, put the egg whites in a bowl and beat to firm peaks. Add the salt and sugar and beat until very thick and glossy.

Spread the warm feijoa filling inside the baked pastry shell. Cover with the meringue and use the back of a spoon to make decorative swirls through the meringue, or pull it up into mini peaks. Bake in the oven for around 10 minutes, until the meringue is lightly golden. Leave to cool to room temperature before serving.

Serves 10

Last weekend was the final hurrah for our old kitchen and bathroom. Now our weatherboard worker’s cottage has been stripped of its lean-to addition and reduced to four very cosy rooms, each one really having to pull its weight. We have a study/kitchen, two bedrooms/storage, and a living room/everything else. We’ll be spending the next few months building a new kitchen, bathroom and larger living space, and I’m aiming to be very calm and graceful and to take our chaos in my stride! (A wry smile from my husband.)

If you’ve ever read the book Peepo by Janet and Allan Ahlberg to a child, then our house feels like that family’s house more than ever. Every nook has something tucked into it. Towels hang over the backs of chairs, dishes get washed in a tub on the kitchen table, and boxes have been shoved on top of wardrobes and under beds. In this new renovating life I make many trips a day to get water from the tap in the front garden, and to take dirty washing-up water to the shed in the backyard that is now our bathroom/laundry and has our only drain. The narrow shed has a washing machine, bath tub, laundry trough and toilet in a line, and the wall above features a unique display of DIY plumbing combining recycled copper pipes, lengths of garden hose and washing machine tubes. Strangely enough, the shower under the mini instant hot water service is fantastic, and I kind of love the indoor/outdoor ambience in the shed. Walking back to the house wrapped in a towel feels like the best camping – probably because it’s not winter yet.

So on the weekend, knowing that we would soon have just a small electric cook top, I went all-out making the most of our oven and all its free-flowing gas. The oven was rather old and had an occy strap to keep the door shut, but it cooked beautifully and I loved it all the same. I wrote myself a list and worked my way through it, enjoying every minute – hot cross buns (it was Easter), some biscuits using up leftover dough in the freezer, a few loaves of bread, a batch of kasoundi with the last tomatoes from the garden, a bottle of lime cordial using up a few limes, and a lemon cake. We made some borsht for the week ahead and roasted a piece of pork belly that was in the freezer. It was like a long last supper, then a signing off. Soon after the cake came out of the oven, the plumber came and turned off the gas. The next morning the oven was in the front yard in a pile of hard rubbish and the demolition had begun.

The kasoundi was my second batch for the year. Kasoundi is an Indian relish that is much lower in vinegar and sugar and higher in spices than a chutney, so it’s more like a curry – a richly flavoured one to have in small portions. I think it’s one of the best things you can make with an excess of tomatoes. Normally I’d use red tomatoes, as I did for the first batch, but with a pile of green ones on my hands, I thought, why not? It worked really well – with a bit more tang than the red version, but still delicious. Kasoundi is addictive in toasted sandwiches with cheese and avocado, and on scrambled eggs.

¾ cup chopped ginger
20 garlic cloves
8 long red chillies
250 ml vinegar (I used apple-cider vinegar)
170 ml oil (I used olive oil)
4 tablespoons cumin seeds, ground
2 tablespoons coriander seeds, ground
2 tablespoons brown mustard seeds
1½ tablespoons turmeric
30 curry leaves
2 kg red or green (or a mixture) tomatoes, chopped
1 tablespoon salt
220 g (1 cup) sugar

Put the ginger, garlic, chillies and vinegar into a food processor and blend until finely chopped. (Alternatively, chop by hand.)

Heat the oil in pot and add the cumin, coriander, mustard seeds, turmeric and curry leaves. Fry until the mustard seeds begin to pop, then add the tomatoes, salt and sugar, and the ginger, garlic and chilli mixture. Bring to the boil, then reduce the heat to a simmer and cook for around 3 hours, until reduced by about a third and starting to thicken.

Ladle into sterilised jars while hot.

Makes 1–1.5 litres