Rhubarb chutney!

The exclamation mark in the heading is because this is the first time I've made any kind of preserve since around 2005, when we were still in Farm Road. But both Jonathan and I are very keen on home made chutney. Usually I pick up jars of it at various fairs. One day I asked the nice lady who sold jams and chutneys at the little Karori Sunday market if she ever made kasundi, a delicious Indian chutney I'd found at the big annual Save the Children fair at Homewood. A couple of weeks later she turned up with two different kinds, tomato and eggplant. But with no fairs and no markets, we were running very low.

On the phone to Lesley, I talked about wanting to try making some chutney, but not having any handy surplus produce to make it with. She pointed out that I did: I had my magnificent set of four rhubarb crowns in a big pot. The originals were given to me by Ali some years ago. They somehow managed to survive my inconsistent, cack-handed care, and this year all four are flourishing better than ever.

I hunted around on line and found various recipes, but I wanted something I knew would work. My Auckland friend Rosemary, who regularly embarks on chutney and pickle making, passed on her recipe, so I used that. It's different from the others because you don't put the sugar in until near the end of the cooking, but I could see why: doing it this way makes the mixture less likely to catch and burn.

Rosemary’s rhubarb and ginger chutney

Slightly adapted, and with two quantities, depending on how much fruit you have. I think it would also work well using some firm pears or nashi. For the smaller quantity, I used about 10 sticks of rhubarb weighing around 700g, four small apples, and one and a half large onions. 

1 ½  (3) apples

1 ½  (3) onions

15 (30) g root ginger

1 (2) cloves garlic

750 (1.5) kg rhubarb

½ (1) tsp paprika

1 (2) tsps whole pickling spice

1½ (3) tsps salt

¾ (1½) cups white wine vinegar or cider vinegar

1/4  (½) cup balsamic vinegar (I used a bit more than this – it needed a little more at the end)

juice of ½ (1) orange

1½ (3) cups sugar (I used half white and half brown)

1. Assemble jars and lids and get them ready to use for short-term keeping. The easiest way is to put jars through a hot machine wash, and boil metal lids gently in large pan of water for 5 minutes. (Check methods here.) 
2. Peel, core and chop the apples. Peel and chop the onions. Dice the ginger and garlic (easy to chop these together in the food processor).
3. Slice the rhubarb thinly (I used the processor slicing blade).
4. Put all the ingredients except the sugar in a large pan and simmer until thick and pulpy. 
5. Add the sugar, turn up the heat, and cook until thick and darker in colour, stirring frequently to stop it catching (especially if it's a small quantity). Also check flavour and adjust if necessary. (This is quite a jammy chutney, but should still have a bit of texture.)
6. Fill the jars almost to the top with no gaps, and put the lids on firmly. With any luck, the lids will go down in the middle to seal them. But to be on the safe side, keep the jars in the fridge - they will keep perfectly well for at least a few weeks. 

 Mine all cooked right down to make just 3 jars (not very large ones) plus a small bowl of chutney to have with sausages for our dinner - and it really was good.

Strawberries and rhubarb

When I was growing up, we did of course eat both strawberries and rhubarb - but never together. Strawberries were cut up and sprinkled with icing sugar. Rhubarb was stewed or cooked with apple under a crumble topping.
          So the first time I saw a recipe for cooking them together, I was a bit dubious. But I shouldn't have been. They truly are a delicious and beautifully coloured combination, with the rhubarb adding an invigorating sharpness to the familiar sweetness of the strawberries.
           Hunting online for some kind of summer cooked fruit to serve with slices of lemon cake for dessert, I found a strawberry and rhubarb compote. I had a punnet of strawberries which needed using, and my pot-grown rhubarb (yet another successful garden item I owe to my friend Ali, who brought me a superb plant) was flourishing despite the drought. I do love plants that behave as they should, despite my less-than-zealous care, and don't give me any trouble. (Well, okay, I do need to give it a handful of Nitrophoska about once a month, watered in, make sure the soil doesn't dry out, and feed it a weak Epsom salts solution if the leaves go a bit yellow - but that's all perfectly simple and straightforward, because I was told exactly what to do.)
         Experimenting with the easiest way to slice a stalk of rhubarb, I've discovered it's best to rest the stalk on the chopping board so that the side facing away from you is rounded and the one facing you is flat with the two edges, and cut across it in that position - the knife seems to cope best with its odd shape that way.

The recipe is quite flexible - it depends on how much fruit you've got. The oroginal was for a rather large quantity, 500 g of each fruit. My punnet of strawberries had about 260 g of fruit in it, so I picked enough stalks to make up roughly the same weight of rhubarb and adjusted the other ingredients to fit. This gives enough cooked fruit to serve 4 to 6 people, depending on what else you serve with it.

Strawberry and rhubarb compote

        260 g (one punnet) fresh strawberries, neatly topped

        260 g rhubarb, trimmed and cut into 2 cm pieces
         3 Tbsps sugar
             (depending on how tart the fruit is - 

                taste when it's half cooked and see if it needs more)

  Pinch of salt

  Zest from 1/2 a navel orange

  3 Tbsps rosé wine or port

  OR

  3-4 Tbsps triple sec or Cointreau (you can then leave out the orange peel)

Combine all of the ingredients in a medium saucepan and add a scant 1/4 cup of water. Set over medium heat and bring to a simmer, stirring gently to dissolve the sugar. 

Cook gently, uncovered, for about 30 minutes, stirring occasionally and adding a very small amount of water (or a tiny bit more alcohol, but taste-test - don't overdo it) if the mixture seems too dry. You want most of the liquid to evaporate and the fruit to cook through and soften, without completely losing its shape and texture.

Put into a glass or china bowl to cool. If not serving immediately, cover and put in the fridge (the flavour does seem to deepen if you cook it a few hours before serving). Take it out of the fridge an hour before serving, so that it isn't too chilled. 

You can serve this with a piece of dessert cake, as I did, or with cream, plain yoghurt, sorbet, or plain vanilla ice cream. 

A fruity New Year to you

Blueberries
New Year's Eve: dinner at Lesley and Paul's. Lesley is (unlike me) a talented gardener, and every year - even in Wellington - she gets a great crop of blueberries. For our dinner she'd cooked them with red wine and balsamic vinegar to make a beautiful relish for her succulent ham (which followed Paul's home-smoked salmon). I didn't get the recipe, but it would be easy to experiment.

Cherries

New Year's Day: dinner with my French friend Diane. French cheese and an enticing variety of cold cuts with salad. The dessert was my contribution: a wide shallow dish of tiramisu, with cherries poached in red wine (the last of the third box I've managed to eat my happy way through this year). This is a distillatin of various recipes. In some you're supposed to destone them, but I don;t have the correct implement (does anyone???) and after trying one I decided it wasn't worth the trouble. Besides, they look so much prettier left whole - and it meant we could play the French equivalent of "tinker, tailor", though it turns out to be a bit more cynical: "marié, pendu, cocu" (married, hung, cuckolded").

Cherries in red wine

500g fresh cherries (destalked and, if you insist, destoned)

1 cup red wine (grenache is good)

1/2 cup white sugar (I used a little less, I think it's better less sweet)

A little vanilla (a pod with scraped seeds if you have it, or a 1/4 tsp vanilla paste, or a dash of essence - I had some vanilla syrup, so I used a splash of that)

Heat the wine and dissolve the sugar in it. Add the vanilla, then the cherries. Poach over a gentle heat for about 5 minutes (they should be cooked but not squishy). Remove the cherries with a slotted spoon.

Raise the heat and reduce the liquid to a syrup (be careful not to overdo this stage). Pour the syrup over the cherries and leave to cool. Delicious with any light creamy dessert (lemon mousse is good) or just with vanilla ice cream.

Rhubarb
Because the rhubarb Ali brought me has been doing so well in its pot, she told me I was allowed to start picking it now, instead of leaving it for another few months. So I very cautiously twisted off the two biggest stalks.

Not enough on their own, so I added an apple and put them at the bottom of the oven in a ceramic backing dish, with port and brown sugar, while I cooked something else. When the oven needed to eb turned off they were cooked, but there was too much liquid, so I left the dish in the oven to attend to later. Mistake. Next evening I turned the oven to 200C for roast veges, forgetting all about the fruit until I smelt burning sugar. Out came a sad-looking dark brown lump of amalgamated fruit.

I was going to throw it away, but first I broke off a bit and tasted it. Amazing - a sort of chewy fruit toffee. So I added a bit of water to soften it and tried a lump next morning with my muesli, milk and yoghurt. It was sensational, still slightly sharp but with a rich caramel flavour. I'm going to do it again, only better controlled this time so it doesn't look quite so much like a burnt offering. There are six more stalks waiting in the fridge...