Preserving the Harvest and Nursing a Knee

This week I've been laid up with a spannered knee.  Years of abuse plus skiing and snowboarding injuries and subsequent surgery appears to have left my right knee with almost zero feeling.  Well, that's the only reason I can think of for waking up the morning after a few hours of not very aggressive walking, with a knee the size of a watermelon.  Yet oddly without any pain!
A week later and the swelling is much reduced, but alas replaced by pain and quite a lot of instability in the joint.  A life-time of dislocating kneecaps makes me assume that it has just gone big style this time and will eventually all settle back down.  It better had; we are now into September and I expect to be hitting the slopes of Grand Tourmalet at the end of November.
Anyway, not being able to comfortably stand or bend at the knee has made harvesting and preserving this years not so bumper crop of gherkins and Jalapenos a bit of a trial.  Oh, and the local supermarket have all run out of cider vinegar, you cannot get white wine vinegar for love nor money and the clear crystal vinegar renders most pickles inedible.  As the twice pickled vat of radish pods sat at the back of the cupboard will testify.  We'd better try them again soon.

They have not been a bad crop of Jalapenos this year, despite the dreadfully late start to the season - they spent May and June in the ground and didn't grow a single leaf, simply losing the ones they had to the greedy slug squad.  I have five plants with the aim of producing enough pickled fruit for the year.  You can't have a pizza without them!

Sliced and ready to go.  Last year, I just halved them, but this year I thought I'd do the slicing first.

And here is one of the first three jars, along with some gherkins and the first batch of passata.

I try to pick the gherkins one jars worth at a time, hence the range of sizes.  There are two still on the worktop which were missed (blame the knee) and wouldn't fit in a jar.  Happy compost heap. They are brined for 24 hours before going into sterilised jars and being topped with the boiling spiced vinegar.

The chillies have gone in a water bath for twenty minutes, as they can take the cooking better than gherkins. They then take on that characteristic, slightly grey hue.  We had a jar of inedible spicy mush two years ago after water bathing the gherkins in the fire-water crystal vinegar.  Ghastly.

More on the passata and also some truly wonderful sun-dried tomatoes, soon.