A bit of a marathon cook off...

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Now, I'm not an enthusiastic cook by any means, and actually only cook when I really have to - mostly because there's always something else I'd rather be doing instead, but this Saturday the urge suddenly came upon me to get in the kitchen and make stuff !

Lilou was very happy to curl up next to the warm cooker as there was far too much noisy DIY going on in the rest of the house ( and therefore quite a bit of swearing as well ! )
First dish of the day was a great big pot of vegetable soup, so easy to do and plenty to keep us going for the weekend.
Next project was a little more ambitious and a first for me, Apple Chutney.
I used the recipe from Chalky's World, as it was looking through Linda's lovely blog the other day that got me on to this.

So in true Delia style I got all my ingredients weighed out and ready to go.

Surprisingly few ingredients really, mostly just apples -
 all good as we have more than enough of those right now.

Very excited about using my new preserving pan ( quite sad

 really that that's the sort of thing I get excited about these days ..)

Lots of gorgeous smelling spicy things, and a muslin bag full of even more.

Apples ( 6lb's of peeling later ), raisins and soft brown sugar.

Garlic, salt and vinegar.

Basically just all thrown in the pan, and cooked and cooked.

Obviously there was no way I could be peeling apples and not make a quick apple crumble.

And here's the final result. You may have noticed that in this picture the lights are on and the curtains are shut and there is a tale to tell there ... In Linda's recipe it says 2oz mustard seeds but I couldn't get any of these so thought probably pickling spices would be just as good. I carefully weighed them out but was a bit short as the whole pot wasn't quite enough. Never mind I thought, we'll just go with what we've got. After a couple of hours of simmering I had a little taste and WOW - that was some hot and spicy chutney !! Nice, but with a really hearty kick, to say the least. The only solution was to cook another lot of apples ( 6lbs more ! ) with raisins and sugar and vinegar and NO spices, so that I could add the two together as drastic damage limitation measures. So, a whole evening of Saturday telly later the end result was achieved. Still a bit of a bite to it, but actually really pretty good on the whole.

I did ring my mum to see what I'd done wrong and yes, it was the pickling spices - should have used quite considerably less than I did, and actually, looking back at the photo I can see at least 6 little chili's hiding in there ... ooops.

The most fun bit of all was adding all the tops and labels...

...... with a necessary Advisory Notice, that eating said chutney may involve socks being blown off...

and now they all need to be put away for three months, which very conveniently takes us to Christmas..

... so family and friends you haven't seen this, right ?

♥