Making Chutney

Even though there has been a resurgence of good weather in the last few days some of the vegetables have looked decidedly tired. The runner beans finished a couple of weeks ago and so we ate the last of them and pulled them down for the compost bin. The tomatoes are doing very well although I’m finding it hard to keep up with the watering. When the first downpour of rain started 2 weeks ago I went out and collected all the low hanging tomatoes green and red, my reasoning was the either the slugs would have them or they would just rot in the wet and I could not let either happen. I have been using organic slug pellets around the base of the tomato plants as well as a fence from heavy duty chicken wire to protect them from the Sheep. I would have liked to try the beer trap method but I thought the dogs would get it, the egg shell method but we don’t have our own chickens... so that idea was out and nematode worms are one for next year as well as I found them hard to find.

So anyway with the tomatoes I made some green tomato chutney, I made some hot red tomato chutney.

Ingredients:

• 1kg green tomatoes cut into small chunks
  
• 2 cooking size apples cut into small chunks
  
• 500g soft brown sugar
• 500ml malt vinegar
• 4cm of root ginger peeled and crushed (keep in one piece so you can fish it out at the end)
  
• A couple of red chillis, left whole
  
• 125g sultanas
• 300g shallots, chopped
  
• 1 tsp salt

Place all the ingredients into a deep cooking pot (I use the biggest Le Creuset virtual cauldron in mums kitchen) and then bring it all to the boil stirring constantly to dissolve sugar and the stop the mixture from burning. When it has reached the boil you must then turn it down to a tame simmer, (with the lid off) and then keep stirring as often as possible for 3 hours approx. The aim is to be able to stir through the chutney and the bottom of the pot to stay visible as no liquid remains. I then fished out the chillies and the ginger and decanted the chutney into sterilized jam jars. When the mixture has cooled slightly add wax discs and then lids and leave to cool completely before adding you’re labels.