Tuesday, February 22, 2011

African Food and Making Chutney

We were having African food for supper and decided to get a little crazy and make African flat bread, chapati. It’s super easy, and because there’s no yeast, you just make the dough and fry it up in a bit of oil. Easy.

We do a whole wheat version, and the kids love it, especially with chutney. We had a jar of Harmony Farm’s rhubarb chutney, and let me tell you, the stuff is to die for. Simply amazing. The only problem is, we can only get it in the Summer, so by the time the jar was empty, we were out of luck.

Being the go-getters that we are, we decided to take matters in our own hands and make the stuff. Piece of cake, right? Well, sort of. The recipes that we had all involved canning protocol, and I was most definitely not up for that.

However, as anyone any experience in the kitchen knows, all recipes were meant to tweaked and modified, and this was no different. Sure, it might not come out exactly as the author intended, but that’s what makes it personal and unique. When you add your own destructive tendencies to the mix.

The recipe we had was for apply chutney, and the only problem was we didn’t have any apples, which is unusual for our household. I did, however, have some frozen peaches that I’d saved in the freezer, so we used those, instead. I probably should have cut back on the sugar a bit since the peaches are frozen with sugar, but no biggie. We cooked up the mix, put it in clean jars and just kept them in the fridge. I figure as long as we eat them within a month, they should be fine, employing the sniff test before eating, of course.

The chutney came out great, everyone loved it with the whole wheat chapati, and we also had curried cauliflower stew with couscous. I love it when we can pull of the genuine vegetarian meal (high on the K&A scale) it’s a challenge making something the kids will devour.

Until the next time, thanks for reading, and thanks to Stephan Fuchs for the pic.

No comments: