The French beans in our garden are growing faster than we can use them: yesterday I harvested 1.5kg of them!

To use them up we’re going to do a piccalilli based on a mix of this BBC Food recipe and this BBC Good Food recipe. We’re also using up some early courgettes from the garden, plus a cauliflower and some onions, giving us a total of 2kg of veg

Traditional piccalilli salts the veg, apparently, so last night we did that with 350g of course sea salt. We needed two large bowls for all the veg.

Today we started by making up the pickling liquid:

• 750ml pickling vinegar (the non-malt variety)
• 1 Tbsp ground ginger
• 1 Tbsp turmeric
• 1 73g tin of English mustard powder
• 1 Tbsp mustard seeds
• 1 Tbsp black mustard seeds
• 4 tsp lazy garlic

This all comes to the boil while we rinse the veg, which has really shrunk overnight and now fits in a single bowl.

The veg gets added to the pickling stock. The recipe says simmer for 20-25 minutes… which seems way too long to us. The veg will be cooked in five minutes, and we want it to have a bite, so we only boiled for five minutes and the veg seemed nicely cooked in this time.

We then add 175g of light muscovado sugar, and once that’s dissolved thicken up with 2 Tbsp of cornflour (mixed with some more vinegar before going in the pot).

It then gets spooned into sterilised Kilner jars.

Now all we have to do it wait three to four weeks before we can eat it!