Pickling nasturtium pods

Meet the contents of my pockets.

The daily collection of French beans picked en route to opening up the pool; camera, lesser secateurs (no, not the favourite ones) and my nasturtium pods.

I did a quick weed of one of my vegetable beds and it happened to be the one you might call a nasturtium forest.

There are dwarf French beans in there. Truly. You just can’t see the details from my poor photography.

I have always let the nasturtiums self seed here in the vegetable garden. I love the colour and the zing and there is the added benefit of making your salads look artful.

But as I was weeding, I kept coming up against endless dropping pods of nasturtiums from the spent flowers.

So this year, it’s pickling time.

When you start trawling for recipes and pickling recipes on the internet, you come across a world that is just not quite normal. The artfully designed, the perfectly styled, the ‘I just threw it together’ simple prose of so many of these blogs can make your heart sink.

I know it’s not real and many of the American sites I quite like stay in existence because they derive income earners from sponsors.  So life is glorious and neat and effortless. And there is product placement galore.

Even my favourite morning chuckle – Karen at www.theartofdoingstuff.com has to appease her advertisers.

But with all these caveats, I found the recipe I was looking for on gardenbetty.com. And hey, she just threw it all together.

The best bit? Action shots of all the recipe steps in full sized colour. I recommend you visit if you are looking for rather zippy salad ideas.

http://www.gardenbetty.com/2013/01/poor-mans-capers-pickled-nasturtium-pods/

I’ll be making her nasturtium pesto next.  Especially as the entire yield of those nasturtium pods was just one paltry jar. See, we blogsters can mislead; even if we mean well.