I am a sporadic chutney maker, but a fairly regular chutney eater. Cheese and chutney is one of life’s many pleasures, and never more so than at Christmas when the glut of sugary sweet foods can be a little overwhelming. My palate often craves savoury goodness, and cheese, bread, chutney and olives is one of my favourite ways of satisfying that craving. One of the best things about chutney, is that it is incredibly easy to make but looks as if it isn’t. This is particularly good when given it as a home made gift. Most Christmases will find me throwing together a chutney or two,and this Christmas is no exception. This Christmas, not for the first time I made the seasonly named ‘Christmas Chutney’. As with much of my Christmas cooking it comes from the Nigella Christmas book, a book I’ve referred to numerous times before on these pages and reviewed here a couple of years ago.
Christmas chutney is an amalgamation of apples, onion, cranberries, dates, clementines, sugar, cloves, ginger cinnamon, cayenne and white wine vinegar. Could there be a more Christmassy list of ingredients. The Cranberries are beautiful to look at but when cooked and combined with clementine and all those warming spices are just divine.
It really is no more complicated than chopping, and mixing everything together in a pan. An hour of gentle bubbling combines and melds together all those delicious flavours until you are left with a cheery red mixture with which to fill jars to squirrel away for yourself or to give away as home made gifts which will last well into the new year.
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