Chutney

Look, I don’t claim to be a Gordon Ramsay or a Jamie Oliver but I can turn my hand to a bit of gastronomy if I have to. At this time of the year I like to make my own recipe winter vegetable soup and when I came to assemble the ingredients for the last batch I found that it was actually much cheaper to buy a 5 kg ‘filet d’oignons’ (5 kg of onions in a string bag) than the much smaller quantity that I actually needed. After I’d made the soup, I was then left with something of a problem – what to do with all of the onions left over so they didn’t go to waste?

Then I had a bit of a brainwave. As I’ve just bought a new gas barbecue for the summer, what if I made some lovely onion chutney that I could treat my guests to with their bangers and burgers? So then I poked around on the internet and came across just the recipe I needed on the Tesco web site, and the answer had to be, ‘Yes!’ Well, to cut a long story short, I got the ingredients together, most of which apart from the brown sugar and fresh garlic I already had, and made a batch according to the recipe on Sunday. I don’t have such things as weighing scales so I have to do a lot of things by eye but I was fairly gob-smacked when I’d finished to find that the resulting product was delicious! And not only that, after being kept for a few months, it’s supposed to get even better with age.

The only disappointment was that after starting with what looked like a ruddy great pile of onions, I only came out with just over a single largish jar of chutney. But not to worry – I still had at least the same amount left in the ‘filet’ as I’d just used, enough for another run. And that’s when my mind started to go into overdrive. If chutney is that easy to make, why not try adding a few extra ingredients – like for example figs and tomatoes? So off I went this afternoon to buy some more sugar, as most of the last 500 gm bag of brown had been used in the first run, plus some dried figs (fresh much too expensive) and some large tomatoes.

I used the original as the basis for my new own-recipe Onion, Fig and Tomato Chutney. It was time-consuming chopping up all of the ingredients but I found after the first run that it was better and less hectic to have everything prepared and ready to go into the pot. It took a couple of hours or so and this time, with the extra ingredients, I ended up with a heck of a lot more product than after the first time. Luckily I’d anticipated that and got all of the old jars that I had clean and ready, even resorting to tipping some old jam in the bottom of one away and emptying the marmalade in another into a cup. Here are a couple of shots showing the results of my labours.

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The chutney I made on Sunday is in the large jar over the back on the left in the first shot. All of the other jars contain the new recipe from today. The second shot shows a close-up (slightly out of focus, sorry) of today’s batch, which tastes great just out of the pot and will be lovely with cheese or cold meat, for example. I don’t have another sealed container for it so I’ll just have to eat it over the next few days – a tough job, but someone’s got to do it. All in all, I’m pleased with what I’ve come up with and quite proud too, in a way. The real test though, will come in a few months time and I just hope that it proves to be up to the job when my guests give it a proper trial run.