Which brings me neatly onto the last of this year’s crop preserving. This is a great recipe for using up all the tomatoes which are never going ripen and the last few apples (or pears) from your trees. It’s not quite the chutney equivalent of gumbo, but it’s pretty flexible. For the batch I’ve got going Gloop I used:

1.5kg green tomatoes
1kg cooking apples
500g onion
300g granulated sugar
500ml distilled vinegar
2 gloves of garlic
1 tsp salt
2 tbsp (30ml) pickling spice
3 3″ cinnamon sticks

Peel the apples, roughly chop (editing as needing) the tomatoes, apples, onion and garlic. Put it in a large pan and start to simmer it. It doesn’t need additional water, there’s more than enough in the fruit already if you’re patient enough. After about 20 minutes, add the rest of the ingredients, boil it all up and simmer for as long as it takes to reduce to a nice, thick consistency. 1.5 to 2 hours is about right, depending upon how much water you need to remove.

The colour of the finished product is quite important, in this case I’m aiming for a fairly clear light yellowy green with the flecks of spice visible, so I’m making sure it doesn’t burn, and made sure my preserving ingredients were as clear as possible, refined sugar in large crystals, distilled vinegar etc..
If you like your chutney fairly bland, then the spices can be added in a muslin bag for ease of removal. I like my chutney to fight back, so I snapped the cinnamon into halves and cracked the spices with my marble mortar and pestle.
Mmmm, tasty, even though the house will smell of vinegar for days..