Marrow Chutney
I actually started out following a random Marrow Chutney recipe but it looked uninteresting and rather bland as it was cooking; there was other garden produce sitting around waiting to be used so I just started chucking it in. The final recipe is something like the following:
Start with a large marrow and peel, de-seed and cube it, I left it overnight with salt scattered over it to remove water. After a good rinse it went into a jam-making pan (which I am fairly sure has a proper name that currently escapes me) and I started cooking it with white wine vinegar and sugar. In went some chopped fresh ginger, chopped apples, shallots and onions and a handful of dried mixed fruit. At this stage it looked very unchutney-like and pale so I halved some red and green cherry tomatoes and some physalis from the greenhouse and added them for the colour (and flavour??).
Once it had simmered for a while and was starting to look gloopy, I added some pickling spices in muslin to add to the flavour and simmered a while longer before bottling. Chutney tends to need a few months for the flavours to develop and intensify so this will be one for Christmas - and no doubt a useful Christmas present for people too!
As this only used one marrow and five more were waiting to be used in the kitchen I decided to try making Marrow Jam. The lack of wild plums this year because of the rubbishy weather means we need something for the toast - I wasn't convinced about this - marrow jam - really??! But its worth trying at least once.
Marrow Jam
This is one recipe I have followed properly - thanks Hugh for a nice River Cottage recipe. I used ground ginger rather than fresh and added enough so that there was a distinctly gingery smell. I admit this is mainly because the thought of marrow jam is pretty unappealing - it sounds tasteless so the ginger was to address this. I did try some when bottling it, and there is no taste of marrow in the final jam. I'm not sure what it tastes of but I really like it. The real test will be if the kids ask for it on their toast instead of crabapple...
