I took a trip to Yorkshire last week and was given a massive bag of these giant cooking apples by my aunt, so they made the journey back to Herefordshire. Although rather like taking coals to Newcastle they were welcome as the tree in the garden has yet to produce anything like these.

Sometimes with chutney the temptation is to through a bit of everything in just to use up as many vegetables as possible. This courgette / marrow / green tomato / apple chutney being a good example.
This time I've decided to keep it simple and concentrate on just apples with a hefty helping of spices.

It's marrow time of year again, in the past I've made marrow and green tomato chutney. I enjoy growing marrows, they always remind me of beached whales as you find them washed up underneath the courgette leaves, finding something to do with them all is more of a problem.
Most years we're swamped with green tomatoes due to harvesting them all early when the blight takes hold, but this year our tomatoes didn't get blight so we're a bit short.
This recipe uses marrows and cooking apples, both of which are currently abundant, and a lot of fresh ginger, so should have quite a kick.

  See here for the marrow and ginger chutney recipe in more detail.

Like a lot of people we always seem to get a glut of courgettes at this time of year, actually most of them are more worthy of being called marrows. We're also overflowing with cooking apples, and the tomatoes are looking like we're going have to pick them green before the dreaded blight makes it's annual visit.

All of this points towards using this excellent recipe based on the one Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall calls glutney on his river cottage blog. The beauty of Hugh's recipe is in it's adaptability, as long as you use 3kg of marrows / courgettes / pumpkins / tomatoes / apples the actual quantities are interchangeable.

With the late summer fruits starting to ripen on the trees (and fall off in the wind), this recipe is great for using up a glut of apples and plums. I actually used the last of last years frozen stewed plums from the freezer, and some windfall apples. The relative quantities of plums and apples can be easily altered within reason.

  Click here for the Plum and Apple Chutney recipe in more detail.

I've been inspired to make a Chutney for next Christmas, having been given several jars of 'Christmas Chutney' this year. While in some respects obviously a marketing ploy, it got me thinking about what sort of chutney would have the required festive feel.

Delia has a Christmas Chutney which includes lots of dried fruit and  Mary Berry has one made from peppers and aubergines. The general idea seems to concoct something a bit richer than usual, maybe containing fruit associated with Christmas, which also goes well with cold meat and cheese (most chutneys do...)

Mincemeat dates from the 15th Century, when it actually contained meat and was more of a savory pie filling. Over time the meat was replaced by animal fat (in the form of suet) and the mixture sweetened by the addition of sugar, making it more of a pudding dish.

This recipe substitutes vegetarian suet for the animal fat, although I actually used baking margarine which doesn't seem to make any difference, meat eaters could use the real thing if they wished. The recipe is adapted from one on Delia Smith's website, and is also available in her many books including Delia's Christmas.

Green Tomato Chutney is one of those things that you almost hope you don't have to make (apart from that it's delicious). It would be so much nicer to eat all the tomatoes in the red and juicy state that they should be, however the recent wet summers mean that there are often green tomatoes left at the end of the season. This is an ideal way to use them up.
I've never seen green tomatoes for sale anywhere, although I wouldn't be surprised if you could get them at some larger farmers markets. The ones I used were the last stragglers from the greenhouse, there were a few orange and red ones in there as well.

Nigel Slater has written a nice article about green tomatoes, which includes another recipe.

With the sloe gin sitting under the stairs being regularly shaken, thoughts have turned to making other sorts of warming drinks which will be ready for Christmas. Also, as our neighbours have been supplying us with quantities of apples, it would be nice to be able to repay them in a few months time.

The obvious conclusion, especially after the successful making of rhubarb schnapps,  was to try and hunt down an apple schnapps recipe, maybe with the addition of cinnamon for that extra warming taste. I found just what I was looking for on the canadianliving.com website.

I still had a bowlful of sloes standing in the kitchen, and since there is only so much sloe gin you can make (or drink), have looked around for another recipe using the hard little fruits.
Pamela Michael's Edible Wild Plants & Herbs, is the ideal book for this sort of thing as it goes into great detail about the many uses of various wild plants.

One concern with using sloes to make preserves is how to deal with the stones, having had several messy experiences picking plum stones out of stewed plums I wasn't keen to repeat this with the smaller sloe stones. The basis of this jam is a pulp of apples and sloes, which means you conveniently sieve out the troublesome stones.

image source wikimedia commons

1. The latin name for the Apple is Malus domestica and the Bramley cultivar is officially know as 'Bramley's Seedling'.