Preserving your veggies, and pretty labels

One of my pleasures in preserving veggies straight from the garden is the finished result. Complete with label made on my computer.

Love to see the jars lined up. Very satisfying.

Happy gardening (and pickling).

Spicy eggplant & capsicum chutney

Growing your own food is sometimes the easy part, what to do with the glut is quite another matter. In this case it’s eggplants.

This is not going to turn into a cooking blog as other folk do a much better job of it.  It’s more about my attempt to find ways of utilising the vegetables that land in my lap as manna from heaven (or in this case, from the community garden where I have my allotment).

Today’s recipe is Spicy eggplant & capsicum chutney. Here is the link.

It’s a new recipe so I’ll try it out by just doing half quantity, see if I like it. Everything lined up on the kitchen table and we’re ready to go. Incidentally, it’s not that the eggplant is small – it’s more a case of the capsicum being huge. I only need half that amount – I’ll be eating it for the rest of the week!

Whichever way you point the camera at it – diced eggplant doesn’t have a ‘good side’, so I’ll chain myself to the stove now and the next pic will be the finished result. Hopefully.

I’m back again.

WOW. Just had a taste of the finished result. What can I say except that it will clear out your sinuses! The heat will depend of course on the heat of the chilli you are using and how ‘hot’ you like your food. In this case I used one level teaspoon of chilli powder as I didn’t have a fresh one.

It will be interesting to see how the taste matures as the recipe suggests you leave the chutney for a month before using it. Should be perfect for Christmas to go with cold meats and cheese or as the recipe suggests, with Indian curries.

This is the amount I made using half of the recipe – four x 250 ml jars. I’m very happy with that result, especially considering that the only thing I had to buy was the red capsicum and a few fresh dates. The rest of the ingredients were out of my pantry staples.

And that’s more of my eggplant stash used up.

Happy gardening.