Nispero, Mango or other Sweet Chutney

Ingredients
1/2kg fruit
Up to 1 cup vinegar
1/2 cup water
1 tsp chilli powder
400-425g sugar
4 tsp salt
2 tsp chopped ginger
2 cloves garlic
3/4 tsp cardamom seeds/powder

Peel and remove stones from fruit and cut up into small chunks.
Cook fruit, garlic and ginger in water on low heat. When tender, add sugar, vinegar, chilli, cardamoms and salt and stir until thick and golden. Remove from heat and leave to cool. Put in airtight jars or jars previously heated in oven.

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Chuck the Green Tomato Chutney?

Because we live in a continental zone where the summers are scorching and all but the hardiest plants withdraw into themselves, our best time for tomatoes is actually autumn when the days are still balmy and the night-time temperatures don't fall too low. As a result we are able to still pick fresh tomatoes for salad right into November. Unfortunately this year at the end of November it was very cold and bucketing down with rain and salads had really lost their appeal to be replaced in our affections by steaming bowls of hot broth or curry. As a result the tomato plants were left languishing. It was too wet for any but really hardy types - of which I am definitely not one - to go out in the garden anyway, so although I had that nagging feeling of something left undone, I consciously pushed any thoughts of dealing with the tomato plants to the back of my mind for 'When it stops raining.'

Now, almost a month later, the rain has finally stopped and we are able to return to the garden to assess the benefits and damage this unprecedented rainfall and unseasonable cold snap has had on the plants.

At first sight the tomatoes looked a sorry sight with their leaves wilted and many tomatoes on the ground but closer inspection revealed a great number of healthy tomatoes - albeit green ones - still on the plants. I decided to dismantle the tomato patch ready to plant something else when we return from holiday after New Year and at the same time salvage as many tomatoes as possible. It was easy to spot any that had frozen as they had a sort of transparent appearance but in fact there were extremely few of those and apart from that there were a number which had been burrowed by insects but not that many given we don't use any pesticides. The final count of the haul was a hefty two and a half kilos - not bad for an abandoned tomato patch in at the end of December!

Had we been staying at home I would have taken some of the green tomatoes into the house to redden - done in the dark on newspaper contrary to what common sense might dictate - but since we are going to be away I decided that haul was best turned into chutney. Since I am a hopeless addict of Indian food, I scoured the internet for an Indian green tomato chutney and after rejecting a few for containing ingredients that are expensive or difficult to obtain here in the Spanish hinterland or that ones I'm allergic to - I finally settled on one which I found at The Cooks Cottage which is a site worth visiting just for the visuals!

Unfortunately the recipe proved to have way too much vinegar (or, perhaps it was simply that malt vinegar is much less sharp than the wine vinegar I used? We don't have malt here.) and the result was less than happy. I scoured the internet for solutions to getting rid of the vinegary taste and was slightly comforted to find that this had happened to many more people than me and with a variety of chutney recipes from across the web. Solutions included everything from adding the same amount of ingredients again - minus the vinegar, of course - to adding fresh coriander, more sugar, apple juice or more apples. I tried just about all of them and also added some more chilli and bay leaves...

The result? Well, its touch and go. I've bottled it and decided to leave it for a few months to see how it tastes then. Will I chuck the chutney? Watch this space!

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Spanish 'Migas' recipe: Uses for leftover bread 1

'Migas' are tiny cubes of fried bread and are traditionally served as a tapas in Spain with freshly fried sardines and sometimes with spicey sausage (chorizo), bacon etc. As with all breadcrumb recipes, it is a way of using up stale bread leftovers that dates back to times of scarcity. Here is a recipe for the sardine version.




Ingredients
stale bread,
green peppers (usually the small pointed variety grown and sold everywhere in Spain)
fresh sardines
olive oil
garlic cloves - unpeeled and cut in half lenghtwise
salt
water

Quantities of ingredients are up to the discretion of the cook!

Instructions
Cut the bread into small cubes, the smaller the better.
In a frying pan, fry the green peppers and sardines in olive oil.
In another frying pan with clean oil, fry the garlic cloves.
Add water to the breadcrumbs so that they go spongey and throw in a pinch of salt. Then transfer the bread to the frying pan with the garlic, stirring them continually until they are golden brown but still soft.

Serve the fried peppers and sardines on a bed of 'migas'.

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