Green tomatoes from the vegetable garden – chutney time?

As we move into the third week in October,  the weather is gradually changing and cooler nights are arriving.

In fact this week the first smell of wood smoke was noticeable in Barga Vecchia as people started to feel the encroaching winter and light their fires and stoves.

The giornaledibarganews weather forecaster, David Sesto  tells us today in his article that warmer weather is on the way at least for the next two or three days  (article here)  but down in the vegetable garden everything has more or less come to an abrupt as it cold down there at night.

There are a couple of sad looking cabbages which have managed to evade the hungry mouths of the marauding deer and a handful (and I do mean a handful  of green beans but apart from that, the season is over.

It looks as though there will not be enough sun to ripen the remaining tomatoes and so a decision has to be made.

Do we pick them and move them up to the house and maybe see if we can ripen them in boxes put out by the windows or maybe we could try something which we thought about doing last year but somehow never got round to doing  -  making some green tomato chutney.

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Chutney refers to a wide-ranging family of condiments from South Asian cuisine and Indian cuisine that usually contain some mixture of spice and vegetable and/or fruit.

A virtually limitless number of chutneys can be made from almost any combination of vegetables, fruits, herbs and spices. Chutneys are usually grouped into either sweet or hot forms; both forms usually contain various spices, including chili, but differ by their main flavours. Chutney types and their preparations vary widely across Pakistan and India.

Trying to buy some of the ingredients to make the chutney on Wednesday in Barga was somewhat difficult -  chopped candied ginger and cider vinegar for instance were a little difficult to find but overall everything else was available.

The recipe (below) did say 15 minutes preparation time and 45 minutes cooking,  which by my reckoning comes to exactly an hour,  so why did it take me more than 4 and 1/2 hours to prepare and cook my green tomato chutney?