George and Mary's tomato chutney recipe.

This year has been the first year ever that me and Paul have successfully grown tomatoes.  Maybe this is because we got our tomato plant from Paul's Grandad George or maybe this is because we weren't too invested in whether they produced tomatoes or not.  We're not sure but the fact of the matter is they grew.

They grew large enough to produce tomatoes, lots of them...

The biggest problem was the fact that we had lots of tomatoes which were mainly green and not ripening very fast.  We didn't know what to do with them, then we had a brain wave we'd ask Paul's Grandad George and Nannan Mary if they had a recipe and thankfully they did. So they passed on his recipe for Green Tomato Chutney to us which we decided to try.

To make Green Tomato Chutney you need the following ingredients:

5lb Green Tomatoes
1lb Onions
1/2oz Peppercorns
1oz Salt
1lb Sugar
2 pints Vinegar
1/2lb Raisins
1/2lb Sultanas

The instructions advise to slice the tomatoes and chop the onions and mix together in a basin with the peppercorns and salt. Allow this to stand overnight

Next day boil up the sugar in the vinegar, then add the raisins (which may be chopped) and the sultanas.

Simmer for 5 minutes, then add the tomatoes and onions, and simmer until thick.

So when we followed this recipe with some slight variations such as we used a could of red tomatoes as well as many green tomatoes to make 5lb weight. We also left the tomatoes and onions to stand for a few days instead of overnight, the only other thing that we did differently was to use mixed fruit as this was the only thing available in the local shop.  (Unfortunately this meant that  we had to pick out the candied peel which I don't recommend as this is really time consuming.)

The rest of the recipe we followed as instructed and the resulting chutney is very nice; however, the vinegar boiling stage smells like sick and I kind of burnt the pot I made this in... Still it made 3 generous jars full of chutney which helped stop us from wasting the tomatoes and I may one day scrape the burntness from the bottom of that pot. (In a million years probably.)