Tomato chutney

Oh, what a dark and stormy morning with sideways rain beating on the windows. Unfortunately the worst weather isn't coming until tomorrow afternoon.  I hope the scary "epic windstorm" we're hearing about fizzles, but it should be an interesting weekend in Seattle. 

I was glad to stick close to home and kept busy yesterday with this box of leftover tomatoes from Amanda's garden.  I oven-dried and froze two big trays, and then decided to try a new chutney recipe. I thought I was done with chutney-making for the year, but dragged out all my canning stuff again.

I found a simple recipe on a BBC cooking website with tomatoes, fresh ginger, wine vinegar, sugar, garlic, peppers, etc.  Typical chutney.  But they know their chutney in England and are opinionated about it, so there were lots of comments on how to tinker with the basic recipe.  My kind of slap-dash cooking.

I've canned gallons of chutney, but I usually follow my recipes pretty closely.  The acid to vegetable ratio is important for safety, but I should know what I'm doing by now.  I "went rogue" on this recipe like a certain unmentionable person in the news.  Ha! The only downside is I can't make it the same way again.  Oh, well.  With some things in life, once is enough.

For starters, the BBC recipe was too sweet-- almost 2 pounds of sugar for 2 pounds of tomatoes.  I'd call that jam.  So I cut the sugar and added extra hot peppers and more spices. Tomatoes are bland. Once all the peeling and chopping is done and everything is in the pot, chutney makes itself as it cooks down and thickens.

By 11 am I was starving from smelling that delicious mixture, and made myself scrambled eggs with mushrooms. Very British. I spooned some of the hot chutney on top.  Chutney is not usually that tasty right out of the pot, but this was great.  And should get even better when it ages a bit in the jar.

So-- one stormy morning well-spent.