Fig Jam and Lime Cordial

Sometimes, the best recipes come about purely by chance.

Last week, I put some sweet potatoes into the oven to roast. Rummaging through the fridge to find something to top them with, I combined the dregs of a jar of sundried tomatoes with the leftovers from a tin of chipotle chillis in adobo, then spread the resulting paste over the soft, roasted kumera. It was delicious…

Inspired, I tried again the following day.

We buy our sundried tomatoes from Costco – they’re julienne cut and come in a one kilo jar. The chipotle chillis are widely available (I source mine from Fireworks Foods online). Both items are pantry staples at our house…

This easiest of recipes is made by simply blitzing together:

• 1 cup  (200g) sundried tomatoes (drained, but it’s ok to leave a little of the residual oil)
• ¼ cup (60g) of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce

Pulse together in the small bowl of a food processor, scraping down the sides as needed. If your tomatoes are very dry, you might need to add a little oil, but I didn’t. Process until the paste is as coarse or fine as you prefer…

This was the perfect addition to a vegetarian plate for our garden elves, Emma and Millie, accompanied by Sawsan’s hummus, sourdough bread and dark chocolate rocky road…

That night, I spread a little of the paste under the tomato base of a focaccia pizza, then topped it with the leftover roasted sweet potatoes, cheese, onion and anchovies…

This very simple but highly versatile paste now has its own permanent tub in our fridge. The sweetness of the tomatoes enhances the smoky heat of the chipotles, and we’ve already stirred it into pasta soups, spread it on crackers and mixed it into dips. Definitely a keeper!

I had a grand plan.

I was going to use a kilo of my recent bargain buy to create a salt dough, which I would then wrap and roast a chicken in.

Only…when it came time to make dinner, it just seemed like too much work.

So instead, I dragged out my trusty Römertopf baker and sat it in a sink of water to soak.

Then I blitzed up half a loaf of stale sourdough in the food processor and squished it together with two pork sausages (squeezed out of their casings), a handful of frozen cranberries, garlic, salt, pepper, a chopped onion, an egg and shredded sage leaves from the garden. I threw the fat from the chicken in as well, for good measure…

The stuffing mixture was laid into the base of the wet Romy and topped with a free range chicken, which had been rubbed with olive oil, salt and a little pimenton (smoked paprika)…

Lid on, then into a cold oven. The temperature was turned up to 200C with fan and the timer set for an hour. And I went out for a late afternoon walk by the water…

When I came home, Pete had taken the lid off the pot and put the chook back into the oven for a further 45 minutes until the juices ran clear…

. . . . .

The Römertopf makes creating midweek dinners like these a doddle – yes, I know, I bang on about this all the time. But it took me less than 30 minutes in total to prep, and then I had an hour to stroll along the bay while it cooked by itself. Every morsel of chicken and stuffing was eaten – the addition of extra sausage resulted in just the right amount of food for the hungry wolves.

So…I’m sorry this isn’t a post about salt-crusted chicken. If you’d like to try that, here’s the recipe I’d originally planned to make (it even specifies flossy salt).

But as I plonked the dirty clay baker into the dishwasher and rinsed the breadcrumbs out of the food processor, I wasn’t at all sorry that I didn’t have to scrape up shattered salt dough or mop up leaking juices.

Some recipes require more chi.

For all the other times, there’s the Römertopf!