There's a small orchard behind the allotments, which means if you time it right, you can scallywag on over there and help yourself to windfalls. This is exactly what I did on Sunday, returning home with armfuls of apples. Now, I don't really like apples or that much - I'll eat them in a crumble or a pie, and just try and stop me blending them into a green breakfast smoothie, but they're not my favourite fruit. And cooking apples can just bugger off. What I do like, though, is chutney.
I feel like it's very difficult to go wrong when making chutney. You get your ingredients, your vinegar, assorted flavourings, salt and sugar; and you chop and simmer them all together into mush. Then you spoon said mush into sterilised jars, seal, and wait. The thing is, there are no wrong ingredients - or if there are, I haven't found them yet. On this occasion, I fed the following to my slow cooker: apples, fermented carrots, nasturtium seeds, onions, dried sage and brown vinegar. The vinegar is flavoured with salt and sugar (probably the only essential ingredients) along with garlic, mustard seeds, peppercorns, chilli pepper, turmeric, and cinnamon. Four of five hours of simmering, during which time I took a long and luxurious nap, turned the mixture from this...
...to this:
It was at this stage I added more apples, because I still had some, and the mixture was still quite thin. What you want is for almost all the vinegar to be absorbed by the solid ingredients. (I don't know if that's true, but it feels true. I read it in one chutney recipe and have decided it applies to all chutney recipes).
I left it for another few hours, before sterilising my Branston pickle jars, and spooning in the now perfectly goopy chutney splodge.
And there we have it. Not to be disturbed before November. The winter stockpile grows.
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