Nigella's Christmas Chutney

I have rules about when you can start getting excited about Christmas, listening to festive music and putting up your decorations. Trust me, it is not in September. However, it is a tradition of mine to make Nigella's Christmas Chutney which needs at least 3 months to mature and as the apples are ready for harvest I decided to make it this weekend.

We are very lucky where we live to have an apple orchard so despite only needing around 3 apples for the chutney I decided to pick more as I have also made a crumble.

To me, this chutney is all of my worst ingredients in a bowl, I really don't care for dried fruits/dates/figs/ prunes and raisins are my absolute worst! 

Not that this chutney includes those ingredients, I just don't care for them. Mr Poachie always asks me why I make things that I don't like but if I only ever cooked things that I like, I would get sick of eating cheese pizza.

I must confess it does smell amazingly festive when you make it, all of the ingredients are just put into one large saucepan, you bring it to the boil and leave it for an hour.

Once it is a pulpy mass put it in to sterilised jars and then store in a cool dark place for at least 3 months (can be up to one year) and then if like me, you can gift it for Christmas.

I know no-one ever really wants a chutney for Christmas but I love gifting people things that I have made.

One year I made Mr Poachie a gift basket of homemade treats including chocolates, a Star Wars jam jar xmas tree decoration and a few other things. He said he loved it because of the amount of thought I had put into it and it felt personal.

So that's it! I now shan't mention the C word until 1st December!