Just a few quick pics today of our quiet just-us-two Christmas in France.
Back soon!
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©Deborah Harmes and ©A Wanderful Life
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Just a few quick pics today of our quiet just-us-two Christmas in France.
Back soon!
COPYRIGHT
©Deborah Harmes and ©A Wanderful Life
Please respect the words and images on this page.
All rights reserved.
There are other things that I do besides writing and photography and one of them (occasionally!) is cooking something special. What’s wonderful about making chutney is that you can enjoy those brightly coloured jars of goodness all year long.
We have loquat trees in our back garden here in Australia that are simply groaning with fruit right now. I had never even heard of a loquat tree until we moved to this part of Victoria, so I had to do some research into them. They’re a stone fruit, originally from China. And since ours are 65 years old, they are HUGE and full of fruit!
The birds have been circling the trees, so I decided that I’d better get cracking and use some of that gorgeous orange-yellow fruit before they ate all of it. So I spent hours today chopping and prepping what turned out to be a very spicy chutney. It smells and tastes like it will be worth it!
Here’s THE RECIPE!
Now — back to work on some photos. More soon.
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Seriously, when I realised that it had been a month (and a very odd month indeed!) since my last post, I felt like I had stepped inside an episode of The Twilight Zone and time and space had eaten me. There have been rather a lot of ups and downs with medical issues, but I am hopeful that things are on the upswing now. (fingers crossed!)
We did our very-few-blocks walk across the river to the Saturday market here in St. Girons yesterday and came back with a new digital kitchen scale and all of the ingredients for something wonderful — tomato chutney!
This simmered for over 2 hours before it became the colour and texture that made me happy, but here is the recipe for anyone who’d like to try it. And it made 9 jars of recycled-marmelade-jar size final product. I tweaked the basic recipe with lots of spices after reading several versions of tomato chutney recipes online and deciding that just tomatoes, sugar, and onions was going to be a bit too bland for our taste.
TOMATO CHUTNEY
2 kilos of ripe tomatoes
500 grams of sliced and slightly chopped onions
8 fat cloves of garlic
8 cm piece of ginger peeled and chopped
375 grams of brown sugar
325 ml of cider vinegar
Juice of one lime
1 large or 2 medium apples — peeled and chopped
1-1/2 to 2 cups of raisins
10 cardamom seeds
1/2 tsp sweet paprika
1/2 tsp smoky paprika
1/2 tsp chili powder
4 tsp cumin
4 rounded tsp allspice
3/4 tsp cinammon
Bring all ingredients to a full boil in a large kettle-style pan with a heavy bottom. Once boiling, reduce the heat and allow the mixture to simmer for at least 2 hours, perhaps longer, until you see the liquid significantly reduced, the mixture thickened, and the colour of the chutney change from bright red to a brown-red.
Enjoy!
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I only asked for a hamburger — a cheeseburger to be more specific. But then Mark swished me out of the kitchen and told me not to peek as I walked by about 15 minutes later.
The man loves to cook and thank heavens for that since I’m a bit ‘over it’ most of the time. And he really prides himself on presentation — making the food look as good as it tastes. And yes, it was SO yummy!
Alongside you see a tomato and cucumber salad and a dollop of the chutney that we made a few weeks ago.
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Normandy beaches in winter may not always be as gray and rainy as our last week here has been in Brehal on the Atlantic coast of France, but it’s definitely the kind of weather that makes you want to stay dry, cook, and work on some sort of project.
This small video expresses those sentiments on this early December weekend. Just a tiny bit of warning, these videos sometimes take awhile to load if you have a slow connection, so be patient!
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Several of you have written and asked for the recipe for the apple chutney after seeing the photos of the organic apples yesterday and watching the video that I took of Mark operating the mechanical apple peeler.
This recipe produces 2 500 ml (18 fluid ounce) jars of chutney and it goes really well with cheese and meat and sandwiches. We ate some the other night with a chicken quiche. Yum!
Here’s the recipe.
APPLE CHUTNEY
250 g (9 oz) onions, chopped
1 kg (2 lb & 4 oz) cooking apples, cored and chopped
125 g (4-1/2 oz) sultanas, raisins, or chopped dates
1 tablespoon ground coriander
1 tablespoon paprika
1 tablespoon mixed spice
1 tablespoon salt
350 g (12 oz) granulated sugar
700 ml (1-1/4 pints) malt vinegar
1. Put all ingredients into a large pan. Slowly bring to the boil, stirring often, until the sugar has completely dissolved.
2. Simmer for 1-1/2 to 2 hours, stirring from time to time to stop the chutney sticking to the pan.
3. After the shortest cooking time, start checking if the chutney is ready by dragging a channel through the mixture with a wooden spoon so that the bottom of the pan is visible. If the channel immediately fills with liquid, the chutney is not ready. Cook for a further 15 minutes and then check again. The chutney is ready when the channel does not fill and the mixture is very thick.
4. Remove the pan from the heat and leave to stand briefly. Carefully pour the chutney into hot sterilised jars and seal. Allow the chutney to cool completely before labelling and storing in a cool, dark cupboard. Store for at least 2 months before eating.
Enjoy!!!
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Apples — we have an abundance of organic apples here at the house in Normandy where we are house sitting and child sitting for friends while they are in England at a conference.
It’s been remarkable to see how the apple processing in our mini production line has sped up each day as we got into the groove of peeling (with Mark’s expert assistance!), coring, chopping, and stirring-stirring-stirring.
But I’d honestly forgotten how much fruit it takes to simmer down into a comparably tiny amount of final product. So I moaned a bit when I saw how few jars were created after the first on-my-feet-all-day of kitchen work. An entire afternoon and evening and only SEVEN jars???
Off to a new part of Normandy in a few days. Keep coming back to read about new adventures in living on the road!
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Please respect the words and images on this page.
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