Pages

Friday 1 October 2010

Friday Plan B

We awoke to torrential rain and wind, so had a late breakfast and a leisurely morning while I played with photos for TP 117 ' Parallel'.     After a quick trip to the supermarket we came home for lunch and then spent the rest of the afternoon making Quince Chutney.  Oh and while it was cooking I sneaked some time to create The Scotsman ;-)

We have a quince tree in the garden (you might have seen the photo in my short tour of the garden) which this year yielded just over 50 good sized fruit.  Half of them went to a friend to make quince jelly - I refuse to make anything that involves an upside-down chair and a muslin bag - and after baking a few we were left with enough for a few jars of chutney.


It is a pear chutney recipe adapted and includes: green tomatoes, onions, raisins, demarera sugar, malt vinegar, cayenne pepper, ground ginger and salt'n'pepper. The tomatoes and onions came from the garden, I found a lovely little heart shaped tomato:


Mr H. nobly took on the job of peeling and chopping the quinces; they are very hard on the hands, I know this from previous years of doing it all for jam and chutney.


This mixture looked tasty enough to eat raw!



After about 5 hours of simmering, it was cooked and the liquid boiled off:


Out of just over 6lb of quinces we made 11lb of chutney.Yum.


So it wasn't a wasted day at all :-)

10 comments:

  1. I'm kinda confused...What is it that you made?

    http://theadorkableditzmissteps.blogspot.com/

    ReplyDelete
  2. You're confused? I'm confused! What do Americans call chutney? Pickle?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Pickle is what we refer to a cucumber that has been sitting in a brine of vinegar, spices...Chutney to me is sweet and it would be like a thick preserve in my opinion.

    ReplyDelete
  4. What perfect rainy day excitement and yumminess too! Chutney is chutney in America too, if you enjoy Indian cuisine! We seem to have specialities from every corner of the world, one just has to try new places!...each photo of your preparations made my mouth water! Your quince tree intrigued me, (I googled it) and what a beautifully lovely tree! I'll have to view your Friday Scotsman! oops almost forgot, love that heart shape very unusual! TY - Karen

    ReplyDelete
  5. KBF: yes this is thick and sweet-ish and delicious! I used to make quince jam but quickly got bored of that (and horrified at the amount of sugar that went into it!) Chutney is much better.

    We will be getting a couple of pots of the quince jelly my friend is making as well, and possibly a pie!

    ~Juniper~

    ReplyDelete
  6. Karen, the quince tree is lovely; and my friend raves over the fruit because they are hard to come by / expensive. It took a few years for our tree to become really productive but it's amazing now. I was advised to keep it pruned and take out the middle branches, so as to retain air flow, and it seems to like that.

    ~Juniper~

    ReplyDelete
  7. Love the photography, not so sure about the end product though! :D

    ReplyDelete
  8. Are you not a chutney fan, Joe? ;-) that's fine, all the more for me!

    ~Juniper~

    ReplyDelete
  9. I like chutney--but I don't have a clue what quince is.

    I'll ask himself!
    I'm sure he'd like the end product. Personally, I was liking the thought of that first raw lookin' mix!

    ReplyDelete
  10. Mel, they look like pears but are really solid; you can't eat them raw unfortunately!

    ~Juniper~

    ReplyDelete

If you'd like to leave a comment, I'd love to hear it.

If you prefer to just read, appreciate and then move on, that's fine too :-)