Tomatogedden

 

So the tomato harvest that I was expecting in September is happening now – in November. Cheers for that, and I really am wondering why I thought it was such a good idea to plant so many cherry tomatoes  instead of normal ones. I did plant at least two plum tomato plants and have had a grand total of 4 micro fruits (very tasty but I’m not going to get fat on them) luckily the beef toms seem to be doing a bit better.

Look at this bad boy

actually ripening!

But the winners are definitely the cherry toms who are finally fruiting away

What to do with them? Well I’ve had a go at pickling, so the next obvious choice was chutney, and I found a recipe for green tomato chutney by James Martin that I thought I would have a go at.

As it turns out I had to modify it a bit as I only had a green chilli, pickling vinegar (not white wine vinegar) and no shallot, so substituted half a sweet salad onion instead.

Now it’s important to bear in mind that good old James is fond of sugar work, thats what he’s known for, so when the recipe starts by caramelising the brown sugar, you would think alarm bels might go off in my head – but oh no I just plough on anyway and to begin with all is well.

Going…

Going…

Gone!

The next step is to add the vinegar and the other ingredients, but this instruction came with a minimum of detail. Now if I had any sense, I might have worked out that pouring a load of cold vinegar on molten sugar is going to cool it down very fast, and when that happens it solidifies. That reality however, only set in afterwards; isn’t hindsight a marvellous thing? What a pillock! Suddenly my lovely caramel was a block of hard toffee drowning under a sea of vinegar with chopped garlic floaters. Thoroughly disgusting!

With strains of Clive Dunn shouting, “Don’t Panic, Don’t Panic” in Dad’s Army, I thought of the Home Front and held my nerve. It might look awful, but sugar will always dissolve, just give it time. So I kept on and added the other ingredients.

Look at the shine on my cooker!

As you can see, it didn’t look too bad after a while – those brown bits are sultanas, so thats grand. Now all I had to do was simmer this for an hour without burning the backside out of my frying pan. While this was cooking I sterilised the glass jars.

After 45 minutes I was pretty happy that it was complete, another 15 minutes would give me something really nasty and inedible and when I want that, I’ll start eating cottage cheese.

 

It is actually supposed to look like this

Ideally, you would bottle the chutney using a funnel, for two reasons. Firstly, it’s cleaner and you keep the neck of the jar clear; secondly hot chutney burns like a bastard when it drips on your hand, and is inclined to bring on unladylike language. Good job I’ve got good aim (and a wide vocabulary).

So for 600 grams of tomatoes I’ve got 3 little jars of chutney. With all the boiling vinegar, the house smells like its been fumigated again, but it makes a change from smelling of ‘boy’ or ‘wet dog’ or any of the other malodorous pongs that greets your nose on entry. 

Just as if I had planned it, there was a teeny, weeny amount left over that I couldn’t fit into the bottles – and would you look at that, it just fell onto to some crackers and cheese, what were the odds?  My excuse is quality testing, you may think what you like!

The verdict? Not at all bad! I sort of thought that worse case scenario, I could give a bottle and a fixed smile as a present to someone I don’t particularly like, but actually, I’ve paid for worse, and I’m more than happy to eat this myself. I think a month or so in a cupboard (if it lasts that long) would definitely help the flavours mature and blend, just in time for Christmas, but all in all, I’m going to chalk this up as a success.

This recipe is featured on BBC Good Food, and appeared on Saturday Kitchen

Ingredients

• 175g/6oz light brown sugar
• 150ml/5fl oz white wine vinegar
• 1 shallot, peeled, finely chopped
• 1 garlic clove, peeled, finely chopped
• 2cm/¾in piece fresh root ginger, peeled, finely grated
• 1 red chilli, finely chopped
• 125g/4½oz sultanas
• 600g/1lb 5oz green tomatoes, quartered

Method

1. Heat the sugar in a frying pan until the sugar melts and caramelises.

2. Add the white wine vinegar, shallot, garlic, ginger, chilli, sultanas and green tomatoes and bring the mixture to the boil. Reduce the heat and simmer for 1 hour, or until the chutney has thickened and you can draw a wooden spoon across the base of the pan so that it leaves a channel behind it that does not immediately fill with liquid.

3. Spoon the chutney into sterilised jars.