Saving the last of the fruit bowl stragglers with my Fruit Bowl Chutney!
There are times when I look mournfully at the fruit bowl. Dribs and drabs of delicious and beautifully grown harvest can begin to look very unloved and shrivel into lonely despair.
With just a handful of each lounging around in the fruit bowl they can ripen quickly without a clear future.
This weekend was such a case: one humongous pear that seemed to take forever to ripen; a couple of nashi that had ripened and slyly managed to survive the fruit flies; a handful of undersized kiwifruit that had begun to dehydrate; stray grapes that didn’t make the lunchbox; freshly picked feijoa and a few sad apples hidden under the lot. With the exception of the feijoa, none of the lost fruit particularly appealed. Their moment had come and gone – well, almost. I thought I’d experiment with a ‘fruit bowl chutney’ to give them one last burst of life! I thought it was a wicked idea and couldn’t see how it could go wrong, and it didn’t!
You wouldn’t think twice about combining them in a fresh fruit salad or bake them together in a fruit crumble, so the concept of preserving them together wasn’t so far fetched at all. To add to it, were a couple of frozen whole bananas that I had saved a few weeks back. Bingo.
So with no further ado, fruit bowl chutney was conceived and bottled. This chutney is delicately delicious. It’s not overpowering – not overdosed with chilli, nor curry powder, nor cloves. It simply enjoys the late autumn harvest with a hint of allspice (which isn’t a flavour bomb in small measures).
If you don’t have any allspice, don’t despair. Make your teaspoon a combination of predominantly ground cinnamon, with a dash of nutmeg and a pinch of ground cloves.
The secret is combining 1kg of assorted fruit with no one variety overpowering the other. Literally use your fruit bowl fruit for inspiration! If you need more ‘fruit’ try rhubarb from the garden. Apple, pear, feijoa, banana, grape, kiwifruit….virtually any fruit (except citrus). Below is one of my many variations, just as an example.
Fruit Bowl Chutney
Makes: approx 1 litre
Ingredients
- 2 pear, skin on
- 2 apple, skin on
- 4 kiwifruit, small
- 3 feijoa
- handful of grapes
- 2 banana
- juice of a lemon
- 5 onions
- 1 tsp salt
- 1 tsp allspice
- 1 cup brown sugar
- 2.5 cups of white wine vinegar*
Method
- Firstly prepare your fruit: dice into small pieces, drizzle with lemon juice to discourage browning, weighing your booty on your kitchen scales. When you have 1kg, transfer the cut fruit into a large saucepan.
- Finely chop onions and add to saucepan, along with salt, allspice, sugar and vinegar. I used 1.5 cups of regular white wine vinegar plus 1 cup of my blueberry vinegar (just use regular if you haven’t got the infused vinegar handy).
- Over a low-medium heat, stir well to ensure the sugar dissolves then allow to simmer for 1 hour.
- Sterilise your jars then bottle.
Perfect simply with cheese, or for kids and grown ups who stray away from overpowering flavours, this chutney is for you.
