I decided to try my hand at making preserves - something I have never done before! My organic vegetable garden has been completely overtaken by my tomato plants and as the weather has been much warmer after winter - my garden was filled with tomatoes.
I made some relish a few weeks ago - just a basic tomato and onion mixture which is perfect for pastas, but as you can see.. I have a LOT of tomatoes - about 5kg's so I decided to make some tomato chutney!
I found a recipe called Autumn Tomato Chutney on the BBC Good Food website, that looked easy enough for me to give it a try!
Ingredients:
1kg ripe tomatoes, peeled and chopped
750g cooking apples, peeled, cored and chopped
375g light muscovado sugar
250g onions, chopped
250g raisins
1 green pepper, de-seeded and chopped
2 tsp salt
½ tsp ground ginger
350ml cider vinegar
I changed it a bit, because I had sooo many tomatoes, so I added another 1/2 of all the ingredients. The recipe is so simple - because you basically just need to chop chop chop everything and put it into a BIG pot. (I went through 3 smaller pots before I finally brought out the biggest one we have)
Peel, core and chop the apples and put them into a HUGE pot.
Chop the green peppers and onions - I used a hand chopper thingie, which was much quicker.
Peel and chop tomatoes and add everything into the pot.
I didn't have muscovado sugar so I used regular white sugar and I used apple cider vinegar.
Bring everything to the boil slowly then let it boil for about 45 minutes - but I let mine cook for just over an hour..
I had to mash the chutney with a masher because I cut the apples far to big - but it actually worked out perfectly because everything came together really well with the mashing.
And finally.. ta daa! I had enough for 8 x 350ml bottles that I bought at Helgas for R4,00 each, and let me tell you - this chutney is really very very good!
