Courgette Chutney

If you have a vegetable patch, you're probably wondering what you're going to do with the eight thousand courgettes/zucchini that are growing right now. Rather than have chopped courgettes stirred into pasta again, I decided to do something a little different.

Ingredients

• 1kg courgette
• 500g onion
• 500g apple
• 1 tin of chopped tomatoes
• half a teaspoon of cloves
• ditto peppercorns
• ditto juniper berries
• a teaspoon of powdered ginger
• 750ml vinegar
• 250g sultanas
• 500g soft brown sugar
• 1 teaspoon arrowroot

1. First, wash and finely dice the courgette. Dice the onion. Peel and dice the apple. This will take a while, so put the radio on or get help. It's fairly dull. Chop into half-centimetre blocks, or whatever your willpower permits.
2. Put all the diced bits into a large saucepan, then add the sultanas and stir it through to mix it up a bit.
3. Mix the sugar, arrowroot, ginger and salt (on the scales is fine), and add this to the pan, stirring it in again.
4. Pour over the vinegar, and stir it around again.
5. In a cloth bag, put the juniper, pepper and cloves. Crack them under the flat of a knife/wooden spoon.
6. Throw the spice bag in with everything else and put it on to simmer, stirring occasionally.
7. Keep the lid off.
8. Wait two or three hours. Taste occasionally. When it tastes like chutney and not vegetables in vinegar, it's done.
9. Put into sterile jars (stick a few old jam jars in the oven with a bit of water in each one for 20 minutes on a reasonably high temperature).
10. Allow to cool, and put it somewhere out of the way for a few months…

Or, more succinctly: chop everything up that needs chopping. Mix it all together. Cook the funk out of it.

No picture yet. It won't be ready until October.