Homemade Present

My favourite recipe is Cucumber Relish. Not for how it tastes, although it tastes amazing. Not for how easy it is to prepare and cook, although that gets easier every year. It’s my favourite because of what it represents.

A few years ago at work I was trying to decide what to get my colleagues for Christmas and, to be honest, I was drawing a blank. Everyone seemed to get something sweet for each other, and I have something of a lower threshold for sweet things than most. (Not to say I don’t enjoy sweet things, but I have to be in exactly the right mood to eat them.) I was looking up pickling recipes when I came across cucumber relish for the first time. I looked at the contents and the instructions and thought, ‘I can do that!’ so I asked who was interested in trying some. I think I got about a dozen testers and they really enjoyed it. So, a tradition was born! Every Christmas I asked for interested recipients and every October you would find me in the kitchen for four or five hours preparing my Christmas gift. As I tend to do, I played around with the recipe. The main change I made which lifted it to another level was the substitution of paprika with cayenne pepper. This gave it more of a kick and blended in beautifully with the rest of the ingredients.

Once the cooking was done I would put the mixture into jars and write labels for each one to give it that personal touch. I loved the reaction every time I did this, because I could tell that they really appreciated the gift. When I announced that I was leaving the job I had a number of my colleagues saying how much they would miss my cucumber relish. So, I made a special batch in June and the label this time proclaimed that I was ‘Resigning with Relish’!! 🤣🤣

I think I will miss the tradition of making jars of relish for my colleagues as much as they will miss the taste, but I will continue to make relish on a smaller scale as I can’t imagine Christmas without it.

I know that at least one of my former colleagues reads this blog, so if he or anyone else wants to try their hand at this recipe, here it is!