Courgette and tomato Chutney. It’s that chutney time of year and one of the things I look forward to in the Summer / Autumn crossover is making my preserves to see me through to the next crop of fruit and vegetables. There is something comforting and rewarding in bringing in food from the garden or gathering wild berries and turning them into something to be savoured through the winter. I feel a bit like a squirrel stashing away my treats for later.

Garden progress.

I had intended to start these blogs earlier in the year to reflect our progress in the garden. But like all well made plans it didn’t quite work out. As you will hear, I’m not really a gardener, I like to cook it, love to eat it, but the growing side of things is still a bit of a mystery to me.

Over the past two years we have put in raised beds and erected a polytunnel with some success, and a few disasters. I hope you can learn from more from my disasters and experiences, but more of that later, let’s get into the kitchen.

Preserving the crop.

People have been preserving food for centuries. At first out of necessity, now it’s for the pleasure of the tastes and textures these techniques give us. Smoking, salting, pickling, bottling, fermentation, drying, chilling, they all still have a place in the kitchen and quite often with more than one technique been used together. Over the series of these blogs, I hope to cover all these techniques and use them in some unexpected ways.

My first offering uses salting to remove some of the bitterness from courgettes as long as you don’t leave the vegetable exposed to the salt for too long it shouldn’t make them taste overly salty. Try it prior to roasting courgette or aubergine on the BBQ, or oven.

Courgette and Tomato Chutney

500g                      courgettes plus 1tsp salt

500g                      ripe tomatoes, imperfect ones are fine

250ml                    cider vinegar

275g                      light brown soft sugar

120g                      red onions (roughly 2)

2                            granny smiths’ apples

100g                      sultanas

¼ tsp                     salt

¼ tsp                     chili flakes

1tsp                       yellow mustard seeds

¼ tsp                     garam masala

Salting the courgettes.

Wash, top, tail, and dice the courgettes roughly 1cm thick. Place the dice into a colander set over a bowl and sprinkle the 1tsp of salt over the dice and mix in. Leave the colander to sit for about 20 minutes for the salt to suck some of the bitterness out from the vegetable.

Peel and cut the onions into 1cm dice and set aside. Repeat this with the apples, discarding the core.

Peel and chop the garlic, then crush to a paste using the salt to break down the garlic and release the oils.

Pour the oil into a wide shallow pan and pop over a medium heat. Add the onion and cook slowly for about 10 minutes or until soft. Chop the tomatoes and add to the pan with the vinegar and sugar then turn up the heat a little. Stir the pan until it simmers, and the sugar has dissolved.

Wash the courgette under running water and drain well. Add them to the pan with the balance of the ingredients. Turn up the heat stirring to the boil.

Cook on a rolling boil stirring from time to time until the mixture has thickened and when a spatula is scraped across the bottom of the pan liquid does not flow back into the gap.

Using a jam funnel fill warm sterilised jars with the hot chutney to the lower rim, cover the mix with a disc of waxed paper then seal with the lid. Let the jars cool completely then store in a cool dark place for at least a month before use.

Now go to The Golden Rules of Home Preserving page to get tips on safe preserving and how to sterilise your jars prior to filling.

Enjoy life !

John.

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©John Webber. 2023