Hiphopsideproject

Like last Christmas, we spent a good deal of time in our brand new kitchen in the winter of ’09 creating tastey treats for our families for part of their Christmas gifts. This year we upped the ante a little and added some new things, jazzed up old things and got bigger and better than before!

This year our gift boxes included

• Luxury Christmas Puddings (with walnuts, cranberries and stuffed full of booze and fruit)
• Spiced apple chutney
• Piccalilli (I hate, hate, hate shop bought piccalilli but the recipe we use is sooo good!)
• Green Tomato Chutney (using the last of our home grown tomatoes)
• Sweet Chili Jam
• Lime curd
• Peanut brittle
• Dark chocolate dipped cinder toffee
• Shortbread
• Pear wine (made with pears from my parent’s garden)
• Plum mead (made with plums from my parent’s garden)

Here was the labelling assembly line on Christmas eve, I designed the labels in the morning and we set to packaging everything up in the afternoon…

Hopefully I’ll have chance to write up some of the recipes before summer this time ;)

Nights are drawing in, it’s time to start preserving! Yep, we’re making loads of homemade presents again this year and started a week or so ago with the chutneys. This is a recipe we’ve not tried before, and was basically made out of necessity to use up a buttload of green tomatoes that weren’t ever gunna ripen. I think this recipe is super super simple, a great start into chutneys.

You will need

• Plenty of jars - we ended up using about 12 180ml jars and a couple of random large ones we had hanging around, too. You’ll need to sterilise these before you put the chutney in (generally, a dishwasher will suffice.. you can also heat them in the oven… google it).
• 2-3 dried chillis. I’d say add these to taste. Chop them up finely! If you’d prefer it none spicey, just don’t add them.
• 1 litre malt vinegar
• 1.5-2kg green tomatoes, chopped up.
• 250g of raisins
• 10-15g of fresh ginger, grated.
• 400-500g of chopped, peeled and cored apple
• 1 large onion, chopped finely
• 450g of shallots chopped finely
• 500g brown sugar (I used a really sticky brown muscovado for this, I just think it adds extra flavour and colour).
• 2tsp salt

You’ll find the most taxing part of this recipe is cooking everything. It’s a ball-ache, for sure, but it really is the hardest part. Right, now you have all your ingredients prepared, bung them all in a huge preserving pan (ie. the biggest, heaviest bottomed pan you have.. we have an epic pan that we use for soup, home brews and preserving. It’s amazing). Turn up the heat and simmer until it’s reached the consistency you like, ours took little over 1 hour, but so long as it looks like a chutney and everything is softened then it’ll be great. Let it cool for a little while, half an hour or so, and then fill all the jars! Put the lids on and store them in a cool dark cupboard. This chutney is best eaten a month after it’s creation, at the earliest, and like all other chutney’s the shelf life should be anything from 6 months to a year.

EAT IT WITH CHEESE!