Chutney

I found this post half written in the draft box.  I know why I didn't post it.  Chutney doesn't need a recipe.  You can make it with whatever fruit or vegetables are on hand, add a few onions, sugar to taste, vinegar to cover, a few spices and let it simmer away till soft and thick.

I am making apricot chutney now and am researching an a spicy asian apricot sauce.  Thanks for the idea Tigger https://tiggerswee-blog.blogspot.com/  .  Below is the chutney recipe I had originally written.  I think it was superior as I note, though cannot remember.   The recipe uses wine, red or white, which I often use now.  I halve the vinegar and top up with wine.  It's makes a lighter sauce.

Chutney is something I make at anytime of the year but we are out of chutney and I thought I would follow an actual recipe and make something superior.  This a recipe from a greek magazine. An exotic  recipe for them.  It uses leeks and onions and also wine as well as vinegar. 

 Chutney is not a greek thing.  I describe mine as a sweet and sour sauce.  They rarely have a taste to see what its all about.  City dwellers are of course more adventurous.  Rustics prefer classic, traditional, downhome, what they know and love.  They prefer lashings of strong garlicky tzatziki  with their roast goat.

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Onion Chutney

1 kilo onions – chopped small

½ kilo leeks – chopped small

Put these in a big saucepan

Add

1 cup small black raisins

½ kilo brown sugar

½ litre white wine

½ litre vinegar

Freshly grated nutmeg

2 tsps fresh grated ginger

½ tsp chilli powder

Juice and zest of one orange

Simmer for one hour.  Stir till the sugar has dissolved.

When it has thickened a little put into sterilized jars.

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Word of the Day -

Flaneur -    idler, dawdler

borrowed directly from the french.  Meaning to stroll, to saunter

lâneur “idler; dawdler; loafer” is borrowed directly from French flâneur, an agent noun of the verb flâner “to stroll, saunter aimlessly; lounge.” The ultimate origin of French flâner is obscure. In 19th-century France, the flâneur was a figure for a type of wealthy, foppish man-about-town who leisurely wandered the boulevards of Paris and lounged at its cafés. In the early 1900s, German literary critic Walter Benjamin, inspired in great part by the writing of Charles Baudelaire, helped develop the flâneur into a symbol of the modern artist and writer, at once immersed in and alienated by the hustle and bustle of urban life. English borrowed another noun from French to describe the disposition of the flâneur: flânerie “idleness, dawdling.” Flâneur entered English in the mid-1800s.