Chutney in the City

Many people believe that chutney is an English invention, but it most likely has its origins in Northern India: "the word 'chutney' itself is a corruption of the Indian 'chatni'. It's derived from the word chatna which literally means 'to lick' and represents the lip-smacking sound made on eating something tasty (such as chutney is meant to be)."

Anyway, following on from our Beans, Peas and Plums project, our pilot tenant gardening project, some of our tenants had a multitude of tomatoes that had been harvested and needed using up. To save them from going to waste, someone came up with the idea of making something a little different to the ordinary and something which stores well. Two of our support workers went round to one of the ACH houses to join tenants in making chutney.

Having never made chutney myself (even though it's supposedly "typically English"), I was curious to find out how it's done.

Many chutneys use balsamic vinegar, but our tenants substituted this for malt vinegar to make it alcohol-free. For the recipe which was used, see below:

Ingredients

1kg tomatoes

500g red onion

4 cloves garlic

150ml malt vinegar

Chunk of ginger

1/2 tsp Paprika

1/2 red chilli

6 seeds Cardamom 

250g sugar

Method

• Peel and chop all the vegetables, making sure to remove seeds from the chilli.
• Add all ingredients to a large saucepan and simmer on a low heat for 1 hour.
• Pour into jars whilst hot and seal.

       

It's as simple as that!

We hope you enjoy! We will be sharing more recipes in the coming months: from tenants' home-cooked delights to tips on how to cook on a budget. We like to exchange ideas and elements of different cultures, especially as we have tenants of 20 different nationalities! Let us know if you have any comments,recipes or ideas you would like to share.

We are excited to say that we are in the process of developing a new social enterprise, alongside tenants, which will sell East African Injera & Spice, so keep your ear to the ground for updates on this exciting venture.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank Beneden Grants for the grant we were given for our new tenant gardening project in Birmingham. We're really looking forward to developing the project alongside tenants, which we hope will enable people to learn new skills, improve wellbeing and ease the integration of members of newly arrived communities into UK life.

Check out some of our existing partners and organisations we like related to food, wellbeing and sustainability:

Easton Energy Group
Incredible Edible
The Asylum Seekers Allotment Project
91 Ways To Build a Global City

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