Green Chilli and Lemon Pickle/Marchanu Athanu..

Its time for RCI-Gujarat hosted by Mythili and Green chilli and lemon pickle is my contribution to it. Again its Madhur Jaffrey’s ‘Flavors of India’ that I referred. Have twisted the original recipe to suit our taste, but nonetheless followed her procedure. In Gujarat, pickles are eaten with snacks and all meals. The chillies that you get in Gujarat are pale green in color and milder in heat. But I used the long green hot chillies that we get in the Indian stores.

Ingredients

Salt – 1 tbsp
Turmeric powder – ½ tsp
Ground Cumin – ½ tsp
Fresh hot green chillies, wiped clean with a damp cloth and dried off – 10. (The original recipe says 16-24)
Limes – 2, each lime to be cut into 12 pieces
Mustard oil preferably – 2 tbsp
Hulled, Split mustard seeds – 3 tbsp
White vinegar – 1 tsp (I did not use it).

Method

- Mix the salt, haldi and cumin.
- Make a shallow slit along the length of each chilli. Fill each chilli with the salt, haldi and cumin mixture.
- Put these chilies into an air-tight container or jar. Add the cut limes and shake and mix well. Now, seal this container and leave un-refrigerated for 2 days.
- After 2 days, heat oil in a small pan. Cool this oil and add the mustard seeds and mix well. Add the vinegar also and beat well.
- If there is any water or liquid in the jar of chilies, discard it. Then, empty the drained chillies and limes into the pan of oil, vinegar and mustard seeds. Mix well and put the mixture back into the jar. At this point, the mixture looked like the picture below.

- Leave this for at least a week, shaking the jar now and then.
- This pickle will keep un-refrigerated for long for many months and the taste improves more with maturing. After a week of maturing, the pickle looks like this. I think it needs to mature a little longer before we can eat it.

P.S: I have tasted pickles with mustard oil and they truly taste different and nice. But I didn’t have mustard oil at home, and didn’t want to buy a bottle just for this and then not to do anything else with it. So I just used the normal cooking oil.
The original recipe calls for lime but I used lemons.

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