Choice Chutney

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Posted on April 24, 2024

I recently encountered a new ‘problem’. Here in central Victoria the weather had definitely turned quite cool. Summer is well and truly behind us and I was left with an abundance of green tomatoes. This never happened in Queensland as tomatoes literally ripened all the year round.

It was time to remove the tomato bushes so that we could reuse the garden bed so I harvested the tomatoes and found that I could use them to make chutney.

The first step was to wash them thoroughly.

I then sliced the tomatoes and layered them with the diced onion and sprinkled with salt. Then I covered the bowls and left them to stand overnight.

This morning it was time to make the chutney.

GREEN TOMATO CHUTNEY

Ingredients

2.5kg green tomatoes, sliced
500g onions, finely diced
1 tablespoon salt
500g sultanas
500g sugar
500g apples, peeled, cored and chopped
1100ml vinegar, I used half white vinegar and half apple cider vinegar
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
30g ground allspice
30g ground cloves

Combine all ingredients in a large stockpot/preserving pan. Simmer gently for about 3 hours. I used a stick blender sparingly to mash the tomatoes a bit more. I kept the pot covered for about 2 hours and then removed the lid for the final hour.

The mixture should be rich, thick and caramel coloured.

Spoon into hot, sterilised jars. This recipe yielded 12 jars so the pantry will be well-stocked.

Bits and Pieces

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Posted on December 4, 2020

Many of my meals are really not recipes but simply creations which utilise whatever happens to need using up.

Tonight is a perfect example. This is the selection of ‘ingredients’ I decided to include.

At the back of the photo is some leftover mashed potato to which I added a small amount of tuna that I had not used when making tuna mornay. In addition to the 2 main ingredients there is some flaxseed meal which helps to bind the mixture together as well as nutritional yeast, salt, pepper and Dijon mustard. This mixture became 4 tuna patties.

The sliced vegetables at the front are small quantities of 2 different varieties of zucchini and a button squash. I sauteed these in a little olive oil. The mushrooms were cooked with the garlic cloves (chopped) along with some parsley (not shown) and finished with a spoonful of sour cream.

Served with fresh cherry tomatoes and strips of capsicum.

The cherry tomatoes, garlic and parsley are from our garden while the zucchini and button squash were gifted to us from a friend’s garden.

Corn Collapse

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Posted on January 12, 2014

It would be heartbreaking – not to mention an economic nightmare – being a farmer. It was bad enough when my lovely little crop of corn was just about flattened almost a week ago. We had a 40C + day with hot wind followed the next day by wild thunderstorms, gale force winds and rain.

This was the result.

The following afternoon I managed to add some extra soil/mulch to the bed and propped them back as upright as I could. I was not overly optimistic but it appears to have been reasonably successful.

Here is the same bed 5 days later.

Meanwhile, we continue to manage to harvest something from the garden almost every day. This is quite an achievement since we devote almost no time to it and a lot is actually self-sown. Today’s bounty included blueberries, cherry tomatoes, pumpkin, figs, avocadoes and eggs from the chickens.