Chutneyfication!

Summer is definitely on it's way out, and with autumn rapidly advancing Newhouse Farm is a hive of harvesting activity. James and I had got a little carried away earlier in the year when we sowed tomato seeds, which meant that we'd ended up with a whopping 198 tomato plants! I can't do the maths, but I know that that equals one heck of a lot of tomatoes. Over the summer months we gave away a few tomato plants to visiting family and friends, but we were still left with a polytunnel virtually bursting at the seams with succulent tomatoes of many shapes, sizes and varieties.

Recently I've been kept busy tending to the multitute of tomato plants, pruning and trimming off dead bits and unwanted stalks, whilst harvesting all the tomatoes. After my activities in the polytunnel the kitchen table at the farm was soon piled high with bowls and colanders teaming with juicy tomatoes: red ones, green ones, even yellow ones. In addition to this I'd harvested onions, courgettes (some of which had grown into marrows), beans, and even masses of grapes from the vine in the polytunnel. Plus over in the orchard the apples were ready. Dick took one look at this mountain of fresh produce, turned to me and said, "Holly, it's time to make chutney".

I'd never made chutney before, so we pulled out a stack of recipe books and started to identify recipes that we liked the sound of. 'Red Tomato Chutney', 'Shooting Party Chutney', 'Nellie's Harvest Chutney'... they all sounded tasty. As the recipes we selected started to mount up I suddenly remembered my grandmother's cook book, which as well as some top secret cake recipes also included some Dig for Victory pamphlets that my great-grandmother had used during the 2nd World War. These pamphlets, now yellowing with age, contained tips and recipes for different methods of preserving fruit and vegetables, including a section on making chutneys. One of the recipes was for 'Green Tomato Chutney', and as I had a mini-mountain of green tomatoes due to a couple of tomato plants I'd had to pull out of the polytunnel, I decided to add this recipe to the list.

Preparations and celebrations for Dick's 50th birthday halted my chutney progress for a couple of days. But early one morning I headed with a purposeful stride to the kitchen, pulled out a large chopping board and a knife and set about preparing to make chutney. All morning long I chopped and chopped, slicing up the tomatoes and weighing them to ensure I had the correct amounts. The executive decision had been taken earlier on to ignore the instructions of a majority of the recipe books which said to peel the tomatoes, as it would simply take too long and life was too short to be fussing about bits of tomato peel in one's chutney! Yet my progress was slowed by the hundreds of fiddly little cherry tomatoes that I'd harvested, and on several occasions Dick walked through the kitchen and said, "Not still chopping tomatoes are you?!" Next up on the chopping block were the onions, which caused stingy onion tears to pour down my cheeks and blur my vision. Marrows were next to hit the chopping board, followed by apples. I knew I had to peel and chop the apples swiftly to prevent them from going brown, and fortunately I had a trusty tool to help speed my progress... the apple peeler/corer/slicer! Newhouse Farm seems to be filled with magical little gadgets such as this, and within no time I was whirring the handle of the peeler/corer/slicer which processed each apple in no time. But despite the fact it was taking me a long time to prepare all the ingredients, I actually found the process very relaxing. It was a meditative activity, and as I got into a rhythm of chopping and tossing the ingredients into various bowls my mind emptied as I focused on the task in hand. I find weeding relaxing for exactly the same reason, although this is certainly a sentiment that James doesn't share!

Once I'd measured out raisins, sultanas, dates and seasoning for the first recipe I was ready to begin cooking. Soon the stove was covered in huge pots, each one bubbling and steaming away like a cauldron. Each recipe had a different method for how to create the perfect chutney. Some favoured cooking the vegetables for 2 hours first and then adding the vinegar and sugar, whilst other suggested whacking all the ingredients in at the same time, whereas another one instructed me to salt the tomatoes and leave them overnight before I began cooking. The kitchen was a whirlwind of activity, steam wafting up from the bubbling ingredients of the pans, the room filled with the aroma of wholesome vinegary goodness. And meanwhile I continued chopping, dicing, quartering and whirring away like a human-chutney-making machine.

As the afternoon started to draw by I began to realise that the process of making a good chutney was actually fairly simple. It wasn't the same as baking a cake, where it's important to measure the ingredients exactly, and too much or too little of something can cause the cake to become a disaster. Chutney on the other hand seemed to be more of an abstract art, and if you plonked your ingredients in a pan and gave them a good stir over a few hours you couldn't really go far wrong. With this mindset I began to feel a little adventurous. What if I created my own chutney recipe?! Ooh, now this was an exciting idea. I mentioned it to Dick and he suggested I try to make a recipe that exclusively used Newhouse Farm ingredients. We'd had to substitute the ingredients of some of the other chutneys I had bubbling away with local, shop-bought ingredients as we didn't want to use up our entire supply of onions and apples. But a Newhouse Farm chutney could only use ingredients grown at the farm.

I sat down at the kitchen table and started to devise my chutney recipe. Tomatoes, onions, apples and marrows were no problem... we had heaps of these. But what about vinegar, raisins and spices? Dick suggested that I use homemade cider instead of vinegar, and grapes instead of raisins. We even thought about using honey harvested from the Newhouse Farm bees instead of sugar, but with honey being in such short supply due to the bad times the bees had been facing the past year we decided against it. I started chopping once more, weighing each ingredient and deciding how much of it to add to the recipe. Red, green and yellow tomatoes, apples, onions, marrow and grapes were all thrown into the pan, plus cider and sugar and a few generous pinches of spices. It was an odd looking but colourful concoction, and as it began to bubble away I wondered what on earth it would taste like.

Hours went by and one by one the chutneys started to become ready. First up to be bottled was an intense red tomato chutney, thick and slightly sweet. I warmed some glass jars up in the oven and lifted the huge vat to pour the chutney inside. It oozed into the clear glass jar, and for my first chutney I've got to say that it looked like the real deal! Slowly but surely the other pans became ready and the warm jars began to fill with the glug, glug, glug of molten chutney. Last but not least was the Newhouse Farm special recipe chutney. It was a lighter, almost orangey colour, and I started to feel more hopeful as the mixture came together and started to thicken. Finally I poured the special chutney into 3 large glass jars and licked a bit from off the wooden spoon. "Hang on" I thought, as I took another lick, "I think that might actually be pretty good!" I took a small sample of the chutney and went outside to find Dick and James, who were inside the workshop customising Dick's toolbox. They tried the chutney and I waited for the verdict. "That's bloody good!" Dick cried, with James nodding in agreement. Success! I'd created my first ever recipe, and it had turned out surprisingly well. It was 8pm, I'd been through 12 hours of intense chutneyfication and smelt like I'd been dunked in vinegar, but this was one of the best feelings of job satisfaction I've ever had!

Now my appetite has been whetted for chutney I'm keen to create jams and preserves for some more unusual ingredients that are growing at the farm. In the orchard a small tree is weighed down with crabapples which are crying out to be made into crabapple jelly, whilst a few trees away from it is a medlar tree. This usual fruit can be used to make medlar cheese and even fudge, which sounds a little odd but I'm willing to have a go. Plus there's rosehips, figs, and even black tomatoes for me to play with. If anyone can recommend any recipes I'd love to hear from you!