The last of our homegrown chillies for the season were too few to make up a batch to be dried in the oven but too numerous to be used up in a week of cooking our meals.

So, I found a recipe for ‘chilli jam’. Turns out this is a cheffy term for sweet chilli sauce, as found at your supermarket.

The recipe worked well; we are very happy with the flavour and we have enough jam/sauce to meet our needs until at least the end of next year’s crop of chillies. In our application of the recipe, we found that 30 minutes was sufficient cooking time; of course, it will vary depending on how vigorously you simmer the mixture.

Also, the recipe specifies the juice of one lime, rather than an exact measure. I tasted our mixture after it came to the boil and decided to add a little more lime juice. But only a little – the flavour of lime juice is very intense. We also noticed that, as with jams generally, the flavour was coarse initially, and perhaps a bit too much chilli, but it came together well as it reached the ‘setting’ stage.

Now all I have to do is find a new owner for the unopened spare bottle of sweet chilli sauce in our pantry, having already ditched the open-and-close-to-empty bottle that was in the fridge door!