Stonkingly good

Yesterday four friends came round for dinner and at the end of the evening one of them thanked me for a "stonkingly good dinner".  What a lovely word.  And yes, it was a pretty good dinner.

The friends were two couples who hadn't met before, but they are the only friends currently on my eating together list who will eat - and enjoy - any kind of food at all.  My other friends range between only needing to avoid one or two things they don't like to one who is a gluten-free vegetarian, with various levels of 'can't eat, won't eat' in between.  In the event, the dinner I cooked would probably have been eaten happily by at least one other friend, but when I was planning the meal I enjoyed having total freedom in what to cook.

We began with a bottle of cheapo French supermarket sparkling white.  I still have half a dozen bottles, although I will no longer be able to obtain them once they run out.  It currently costs about £1 a bottle, but is so drinkable.  I will miss it when I no longer have access to it.  My guests had finished theirs by the time I served the starter.

The starter was individual salmon and asparagus tarts served with a garnish of asparagus spears and buttery fried breadcrumbs.  I finished my white fizz while others had a little white wine (brought by one of the guests) and one started on the red.  I avoided soggy bottoms in my tarts by brushing the blind baked tart bases with a little beaten egg before pouring in the filling to bake.

The main course was duck breasts with a red wine jus, served with small roast potatoes, braised red cabbage and French beans.  I'd never cooked duck breasts correctly before, since when I have cooked them, there have usually been people there who would not like them left correctly pink.  Would I be able to pull it off this time, with no experience?  I think they're one of those things where you have to just trust the instructions and cook for the length of time stated, so I put the duck breasts skin side down in the pan and went back to the dining table, ignoring the increasingly loud sounds of spitting fat coming from the kitchen for 7 minutes.  Success.  Perfectly crispy skins.  Into the oven for 8 minutes, rest for 5 and slice ....  to reveal slightly pink.  The cabbage was delicious, in spite of my trepidation at using a whole tablespoon of fennel seeds and the jus was a triumph.  I adapted the recipe, having found some actual home-made duck stock in the freezer and using lots of juniper berries and redcurrant jelly as well.  Most of us drank red (again, brought by guests) while one prefers white with everything.

I love a good dessert wine.  A search in the less-used wine rack in the larder, right under the stairs, revealed a bottle of 2002 Sauternes.  I know very little about wine, not least how long a dessert wine is likely to remain good in the bottle.  It went in the fridge for a few days.  When I brought it out, my guests, at least two of whom know a bit about wine, were suitably impressed.  I noticed (from a secret code written on the label) that it was the most expensive wine I have ever bought, costing about ten euros about 7 years ago.  In the UK, of course, it would be a lot more expensive.  To go with the wine we had individual brown sugar pavlovas and little chocolate pots.

For once, my cheesboard did not hold any cheddar.  Instead I chose goats' cheese, blue Stilton and a cheese I had not heard of before.  To my surprise none of my guests had heard of it either; one friend I think of as knowing most of what there is to know about food and two of the others have a house in France.  Still, none of us had heard of Vallage, from the Champagne region of France.  It's a soft cheese which tastes like butter.  Doesn't sound appealling?  The taste is so much better than the description and I noticed that it was the one people kept picking at after they were full.

Three coffees, two teas, and the evening was over.  As I expected, everyone got on well and there was plenty of interesting conversation.  And a stonkingly good dinner.

Ruby Thomas' Lemonade

It's been a while since I wrote a foodie post for this blog, so it's overdue.

I like to make jams, pickles etc as Christmas presents but for one reason or another it wasn't a jam-making sort of year so I was looking for some substitutes.  I made a rather tasty grapefruit marmelade (not nearly enough left for us so I may have to make some more.  I also decided to make a batch of Ruby Thomas' Lemonade.  I used to make this often but had completely lost my copy of the recipe.  I had to seek help from The Oracle (also known as my mother) and fortunately she still had the original.

Ruby Thomas was a friend of my maternal grandmother's when she was out in India.  My grandfather (well, both of them, actually) was in the army and they came back to the UK on leave for a few months only to be prevented from returning by the outbreak of war, so this recipe dates back to the 1930s.  Now, we think of lemonade as a fizzy drink but this is in the old tradition of home-made lemonade that you see people in old movies drinking in hot weather (or indeed permanently hot places like the southern states of America), so it's more of a cordial.  I've found it very good made with hot water if you want a winter pick-me-up.  I daresay you could put honey in it or something stronger if you wanted it for a cold remedy.

As I said, I haven't made this for many years; I think I stopped because it's made from sugar.  I haven't ever changed my eating habits much but I do drink sugar-free when I can.  I wasn't sure I could even get the ingredients any more but the Epsom Salts were available from Boots and the acids from our local wine-making shop.  A word of warning - when I read the Epsom Salts tub I found that they should not be consumed by pregnant women.  It says breastfeeding women too but we checked with the maternity hospital who said there was no problem after the birth.

Ruby Thomas' Lemonade
 

INGREDIENTS: 

6 lemons
3 lbs granulated sugar
2 oz Epsom Salts
2 oz citric acid
1 oz tartaric acid

A large mixing bowl.  If you are fortunate like I am, your mother will have offered you one of her two Mason Cash bowls when she downsized.  If not, improvise.  Use more than one bowl if necessary. 


 

METHOD:

In a large mixing bowl, mix sugar, grated lemon rinds, acids and salts. 

Add the juice of the lemons and stir.  

Pour in 4-5 pints boiling water, depending on how much you can fit in your mixing bowl!

Stir and leave to cool.  Strain if necessary then pour into bottles, preferably sterilised as you would sterilise jars for jam.

Should make about 5 large bottles.  The lemonade will keep a month or two in the bottles but once opened, keep in the fridge where it should keep for a couple of weeks.

To use, dilute with water to taste, probably 1 part lemonade to 4 or 5 parts water.

Making yoghurt

About twenty-five years ago V bought me a yoghurt maker. I took to it straight away and used to make my own yoghurt all the time. I think I stopped when I got married and had to share my under-the-counter fridge with one and a half others (husband and ten-year-old stepson) and there just wasn't room in the fridge for the yoghurt tub. That was over twenty years ago.

I noticed the kit in its box in a cupboard recently and decided that either I had to start making yoghurt again or it had to go. I now have a larger fridge, so why not? I've googled and found that you can't get these Deva Bridge yoghurt makers any more, which is a great pity. Apparently you now have to have electric kits with individual pots. This way is so much better.

The kit consists of an insulated pot, a milk saver and a thermometer. You start with a little live yoghurt as a starter. The instructions say as little as 1 teaspoon will do. The fresher this starter the better. You then put your milk in a pan with the milk saver, bring to the boil, turn heat down and simmer for three minutes. Remove the pan from the heat and leave the milk to cool until the temperature drops below the top line on the thermometer. (If it drops below the bottom line, reheat the milk.)

Gradually blend the milk into the yoghurt starter, stirring all the time. Put the two lids on the pot. Apparently the curve of the inner lid, together with the channel in the rim, collects some of the condensation, but I'm not sure this would be completely necessary.) Leave for five hours.

Yoghurt.

It's a little difficult to photograph yoghurt but I think you can see the two curves on the spoon I stuck into the pot, which you wouldn't get with milk.

Fresh yoghurt is deliciously sweet. The instructions say that the acid taste will start after about three days. I remember only the first day as being actually sweet, though. You can flavour and sweeten your home-made yoghurt, of course, though I plan to have it just as it is, on muesli as I usually do.

POSTSCRIPT

There's good news and bad news. The bad news is that after 25 years of being careful, this morning I managed to catch the edge of the yoghurt thermometer with the dishcloth, sweep it to the ground where, of course, it broke. The situation is rescued, however.

Looking at the instructions that came with the yoghurt maker, I found the temperatures that were indicated by the thermometer. The top line, below which the milk must cool, is 49 deg C and the bottom line, below which it must not cool, is 43 deg C. Good news follows, though. By very happy chance, I was given a digital food thermometer from Lakeland Limited for Christmas, so it will do the job perfectly. (I do have, as I have mentioned here before, a jam thermometer but one of the ways in which I find them useless is that the line above which the liquid must come for accurate measurement of temperature is higher than I will ever have a pan of milk for yoghurt.)

More good news is that the yoghurt is still just as sweet this morning. And finally, although the directions say to leave the yoghurt making for five hours, by this morning it was considerably thicker than yesterday.

I'm still very sad at breaking the original thermometer, though.

Recipes

This bookcase contains my recipe books.  I have a sort of embargo on buying any more unless I get rid of something to make room.  I broke this rule a couple of years ago by buying a book at a car boot fair that just would not fit in.  The trouble is that I'd be able to get rid of some of the smaller books relatively easily but new ones tend to be bigger. I have now put this book in the bookcase. How have I made space? Ah. Well. I suppose I have broken the rules still further.

 

For years I've had an A4 ring binder containing plastic wallets full of collected recipes. Naturally, the collection is a growing one. Recently it's been getting difficult to wedge the folder back into the bookcase and some of the compartments have been so full that it's taken ages to find a particular recipe. Some serious sorting was called for!

 

I now have two A4 ring binders of recipes. Eek! How did this happen? Surely the trail of cuttings covering the study floor must mean I have more space in the folder? On closer examination the trail of cuttings proved to be only one sheet thick and when collected together there really were very few pages that I had steeled myself to get rid of. On the other hand, in the interests of clarity I have subdivided the recipes into much smaller sections so there are more layers of plastic wallets and the finished whole just wasn't going to go back into one folder.

 

Well, there certainly wasn't room for two A4 ring binders in the bookcase so I made a decision to put the folders somewhere else and just reinforce the rule that I must not own more recipe books than will fit in the bookcase.

 

Where are the folders going to live? Haven't a clue, I'm afraid. 
 
In case it's of interest, the sections I have divided my recipe collection into are as follows:

• soups
• starters 
• fish
• chicken
• duck & game birds
• beef, lamb, pork, venison & rabbit
• Indian
• vegetarian main dishes
• vegetarian pastry dishes
• vegetable side dishes & salads
• dressings, sauces, marinades & stuffings
• cold puddings
• hot puddings
• cakes & biscuits
• preserves & snacks
• sweets
• drinks

I think I will bite the bullet and see whether I can't get rid of some recipe books, even if it means typing out the one or two recipes I use from the book. I think if you've had a recipe book more than ten years, you know how useful it is - or not.

Fudge

We interrupt the general preparations, festivities and frivolities with a practical post. Shandora asks for an easy recipe for beginners (with measurements in grammes.) This is a tall order as making fudge is something that can easily be not quite right, so I will divide the post into two parts, recipe and helpful hints.

Chocolate fudge (why start anywhere else except chocolate? )

450g granulated sugar
150ml full cream milk
150g butter
150g plain chocolate
50g runny honey

Grease a tin approx 18cms square or equivalent.
Heat all the ingredients gently in a large heavy-based sacepan, stirring until the sugar has dissolved. Bring to the boil and boil to 116 deg C (soft ball stage).
Remove from the heat, stand the pan on a cool surface for 5 minutes, then beat the mixture until thick, creamy and beginning to 'grain'.
Pour into the tin.
After a few minutes, mark the fudge out in squares.
When completely cold, turn out and cut through into squares.

Tips for fudge-making.
grease  - use butter as there is always butter in fudge.  Use plenty, especially in the middle of the tin, as this will help when it is time to turn out the fudge at the end.

boil - don't be tempted to have the heat up too high.  All fudge recipes are prone to sticking, some more than others.  The reason for specifying a heavy-based pan is to minimise the mixture sticking, so a lot will depend on the type of pan you have. 
You need to achieve what is often described as a 'rolling boil' where there are continuous bubbles but not too much more than that.  It's better to take time and need patience waiting for your fudge to cook than to have burnt fudge.  Stir from time to time, using a wooden spoon. 
If you have the heat too high, you will notice that when you stir across the base of the pan, you will feel the mixture lifted off the bottom of the pan and the bubbling will become much fiercer.  If this happens, turn the heat down a little.  Towards the end of cooking time this may happen more often and the fudge will tend to 'catch' and little brown overcooked bits will start appearing in the mixture.  This isn't a disaster, usually, but if it starts to happen you should turn the heat down and stir more often.  If this is all that happens then the worst result would be a slightly more caramelised flavour to your fudge.  If you don't take care with this, though, you will get really burnt bits, which will spoil the flavour and make your pan difficult to clean!


116 deg C (soft ball) - you are often advised to use a sugar thermometer for making things like fudge, as you are supposed to be able to judge the temperature more accurately.  Over the last thirty years or so I have had several sugar thermometers and without exception have found them more trouble than they are worth.  For jam, I use the saucer test and for sweets I used this method:
Half-fill a cup with cold water.  To test the temperature of your fudge, drop a little off the wooden spoon into the water.  Using your thumb and forefinger, collect the fudge together to form a little ball. 
The temperature needed for fudge is described as 'soft ball'.  The next stage (for some toffee) would be hard ball.  What you are aiming for for the best fudge is as firm a soft ball as you could still describe as soft ball without it turning to hard ball!  Imagine hard ball as feeling a little like the sort of toffee you have to break up with a hammer.  Soft ball is like what I would call caramel. 
If you cook your fudge too much, it will not have the right texture when set and will be more like toffee except that the beating you've done will break it up into fragments.  If you don't cook it enough, though, you will never get the fudge to really set properly.  I don't think I have ever overcooked fudge, but I have undercooked it through impatience.
If you are thinking you have done something completely wrong because all you have in your cup of water is a sugary, buttery mess, then it is just much too early!

cool surface - you can use a stainless steel draining board for this, moving the pan from time to time onto a cool patch once the heat has transferred to the draining board.  Best of all, though, is a marble slab.  This really speeds up the cooling process and saves beating time.  If you can, keep your marble slab in a very cool place, or if you are making the fudge in the winter, take it outside to get really chilly while you are waiting for the fudge to cook.  

beat - there are no shortcuts to beating fudge that I have discovered.  You just have to beat with a wooden spoon till your arms are thinking of dropping off!  Do not be tempted to use an electric beater; the beaters really don't aerate the mixture in the right way and when it starts to thicken, even a really sturdy electric beater isn't really up to the job.  The five minutes standing on a cool surface will save you beating time.


beginning to grain - when you're making fudge, beating really does mean beating.  What you are supposed to be doing is introducing plenty of air into the mixture as it cools and begins to set.  The first sign that this stage is near is when the fudge starts getting rather crystallised around the sides of the pan.  The mixture itself should be developing very fine lines through it as you beat.  These are in fact small areas of cooler, slightly crystallised mixture.  As soon as you see this happening and feel the mixture becoming noticeably thicker, pour your mixture immediately into the greased baking tin. 
If you do this too early, your fudge will be more creamy but also possibly not quite as firmly set as it should be.
If you do this too late, your fudge will be too crumbly and it will be impossible to cut it into squares.

mark - I have found that the best way to get the maximum number of whole squares of fudge (rather than triangular pieces and crumbs!) is to mark the squares out when the fudge has been in the tin for about five or ten minutes.  You should be able to get the knife to draw through the top of the surface and leave a clean line behind.  If you try this too early, the fudge will just settle back into the line.  Too late, and you will not be able to mark the squares easily.  Having done this marking out, the final stage will ensure beautiful squares.

turn out and cut - once the fudge is completely cold, I turn the tin upside-down onto a wooden board.  If you have greased the tin properly, the fudge should just turn straight out onto the board.
Using a very sharp, large knife, cut through from the 'back' of the fudge to meet the lines you have marked out on the top earlier.  This is fairly easy to do if you have a good eye and have divided the widths up evenly. 
You will always get some crumbly bits, especially round the edges, and some cuts will not go straight so that you end up with more triangular shapes, but with practice you should get more and more skilled at this.

As to what fudge should be like, for those who've never tasted it, I shall invite other readers to supply descriptions in comment form!

Quince Pickle

H told me that quince pickle is delicious, especially with cheese. K said that it seemed a bit of a waste of quinces as they are so expensive and you can pickle any old stuff. But I had made plenty of quince in vanilla quince syrup, a batch of quince jelly and still had lots of quinces left.

I searched around for some days for a quince pickle recipe, never finding quite what I was looking for. Eventually I realised that what I was looking for was a recipe devised by me, using components from recipes that had caught my eye.

I managed to leave enough on the sides of the preserving pan and the wooden spoon for us to have a little taste and it was delicious! It may change with maturing, of course, but the initial impression is of a fairly tart pickle, followed by rounded, mellow flavours, one of which is most definitely quince. The quantities below made the jars above. I can't say how it will keep but there's no reason to suppose it won't keep about as long as any other chutney or pickle containing both vinegar and sugar.

Ingredients:

1.5kg quinces, washed, cored and chopped
500g onions, chopped
500ml cider vinegar
200ml white wine
500g light brown sugar
6cms length of ginger, grated
12 garlic cloves, crushed or grated
2 tsp juniper berries, crushed
½ tsp ground cloves
1 tbs sea salt

Method:

1. Put all the ingredients apart from the quinces into a preserving pan. Heat gently, stirring, to dissolve the sugar then bring to a simmer.

2. Add the chopped quinces to the pan. Bring back to the boil and then lower the heat to a gentle simmer.



3. Simmer for about two hours until most of the liquid has gone and the quinces are soft and dark pink in colour.



4. Ladle into sterilised jars and seal.

Thanks, Mum and Dad

Excuse me, will you, while I just play with my New Toy for a while? There's a recipe for plum ice-cream thrown in for free if that helps.

Back in April, M and I got married and Mum and Dad generously gave me - oops! sorry, gave us - a Kenwood Chef. They actually handed it over a few weeks before the event so I could use it when making the celebratory lunch, which I did, but then it was covered over and we left for France and the KC sat here patiently waiting for my return.

I've been thinking about the ways in which it will save me time and was able to use three different functions one after the other when doing things with some plums. There were two jars of plums which didn't seal properly and needed using straight away.

First, I made a big batch of crumble mix.


The flour and fat went into the food processor and within about a minute the thing was done! Used what was needed for today's crumble and froze the rest, ready to take out in whatever quantities are needed. Fruit stewed, crumble crumbled, instant puddings!

Secondly I made a batch of Plum ice-cream. An unspecified quantity of cooked plums (enough to make a good quantity of puree, probably at least 500g when uncooked) liquidised themselves while I got the cream out of the fridge,



300ml each of double and single creams whisked themselves till firm while I found a half-litre ice-cream tub,



and then puree and cream were blended together very gently in a few seconds.



The mixture goes straight into a half-litre tub and into the freezer. The beauty of this recipe (which is loosely based on one for strawberry ice-cream from the Readers Digest "The Cookery Year") is that it is so rich in cream that it doesn't need beating at intervals once it's in the freezer.

I think the washing up took longer than the making! I shall have to read the instruction manual and see which bits can go into the dishwasher for next time.

Stockpiling

Over at Making Good Milla has been asking whether she is organised or over-stockpiling. The things she lists as having handy don't seem over-stockpiling to me but as it happens I had been asking myself a similar question.

Part of the success of being a bon viveur on a budget lies in having plenty of storage space and freezers so I can take advantage of BOGOFs, bargain multi-packs and reduced-price-because-near-sell-by-date items. I have two freezers in the UK, one large, one medium. In France, though, I have only one very small freezer, which is turned off during the winter months. Still, after five months there this year it was pretty full. Three or four weeks before we left I set about eating everything up but couldn't quite do it. I thawed any fresh meat products and cooked them up, then brought back the cooked meat and froze it. The already cooked food was brought back as it was and we've been eating it up since. Yesterday we had chicken with preserved lemons for the third time in ten days. That was certainly not well organised.

As to over-stockpiling, I've decided that I don't.

In France it was a glut year for all fruit, as I've mentioned before, and I was determined to preserve as much of it as possible. I used to have one jam shelf, in the cupboard under the stairs. A couple of years ago M built me the broad shelf under the sloping lobby roof and that took the excess that I was building up. This year both are full and I now have bottled fruit and jam in boxes in a shed as well. The bottled fruit will become all sorts of puddings and we'll have lighter savoury courses on pudding days.

It was an interesting experience, though, eating meals based completely on what I already had. I like to batch-cook anyway so there are always meals which only need the minimum of work and it has been useful not having to cook much from scratch during the period of packing up and now unpacking. One of the strange things on our return here was looking in the freezers to see what I had. There's not much room in either, so I've decided to do a bit of eating up for the next few weeks. This will also save some immediate expenditure during the next couple of months, which are always lean ones for sales.

Working my way through the fresh produce we brought back with us, today I started thinking about the quinces. They're not over-ripe and it isn't urgent but I wanted to start planning the different things I'm going to make with them and I completely lost my recipe for quinces in vanilla quince syrup. Searched my recipe folder twice to no avail. I gave up looking and decided to do a google search for quinces in vanilla syrup. The fourth hit was my own recipe in the Umra Recipe Book, which I host on my own website! You really can find anything on the internet. (Do you think I can use the internet to find M's measuring tape?)

Mind you, I haven't found a recipe for quince pickle, which H told me on the phone yesterday is utterly delicious. If anyone out there has such a recipe, I'd be pleased to have it.

Tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes

Over at the Down To Earth Forum people are discussing, amongst other things, what to do with all the tomatoes. Usually I make tomato puree, roast tomato and garlic soup and tomato and vegetable sauce and freeze them but here we have only a very small freezer which is turned off for the winter anyway, so I do jams, pickles and bottling, or canning as it seems to be known in the US, Australia and NZ.

Red tomato chutney and green tomato chutney are well known, but I made this recipe a couple of days ago and it’s tasty as well as different.

Tomato and Red Pepper Chutney
2lbs ripe tomatoes, roughly chopped (skin first if you prefer)
1 red pepper (about 6 oz), deseeded and roughly chopped
8oz onions, finely chopped
10 fl oz red wine vinegar
4oz sugar (brown if you like for extra flavour, though I used white)
1tsp paprika

1. Put the tomatoes in a large pan. Add the other ingredients and bring slowly to the boil. Bubble gently, uncovered, for an hour or two until the vegetables are tender and the chutney is thick and pulpy.

2. Spoon into sterilised jars and seal.

3. Store in a cool, dark place for at least four weeks. Once opened, keep in the fridge for up to one month.

Plum preserves

I love to cook and make things like preserves. One of my friends likes to mis-quote "Life's too short to stuff a mushroom" as variations such as "Life's too short to make your own ice-cream" but I notice she's always very happy to eat mine! The trouble is that life certainly is too short to do everything and it's one of my constant conflicts to decide how to spend my time. But that is for another blog.

For about ten years or so I got out of the habit of making jam but since I've been coming to M's house in France, where there is fruit growing on our land and other fruit available locally at lovely cheap prices, I've found the urge to preserve irresistable again. This year has been a glut year for all fruit, including the Victoria plum tree, which in the last five years I've only ever seen produce a couple of dozen fruit before. They are truly delicious. I've bottled, jammed and chutneyed and have now run out of jars again.

One thing I want to use this blog for is occasional foodie features and recipes and the plums get the honour of going first. I would have liked my first foodie photo to show the glow of colour you get from sun on a jar of jam but we are in the middle of a cold, wet spell so you'll have to make do with the kitchen tablecloth.

The recipes assume some experience, e.g. in knowing when jam has reached the right temperature, how to sterilise jars, etc. They're also in imperial weights, for the time being at least. Until recently I didn't have kitchen scales that could competently weigh in metric and many of the recipes I use or create are based on traditional ones where the measurements were all in imperial anyway. There is a useful conversion site here if you need it.

Plum, rum and raisin conserve
I've combined several other recipes to come up with this. The first tasting (on buttered scones) was delicious!

6lbs plums
juice and rind of 2 lemons
juice and rind of 2 oranges
1lb raisins
6lbs sugar
6 tbs dark rum

1. Quarter and stone the plums. Place in a preserving pan with all the other fruit. Cook on a low heat for at least an hour until the plums are all soft and the raisins have begun to plump up. Stir occasionally.

2. Add the sugar and stir while it dissolves. Turn the heat up a little and bring to the boil. Cook till setting temperature is reached, stirring frequently as the jam has a tendency to stick.

3. Remove from the heat, wait for the jam to stop bubbling, then stir in the rum. Pour into sterilised jars and seal.


Plum chutney

5lbs plums, halved, stoned and roughly chopped
3 red onions, finely chopped
3 coooking apples, peeled, cored and roughly chopped
22fl oz red wine vinegar
1lb 8oz light soft brown sugar
1 tsp each cloves and salt
1 tbs mustard seeds

1. Put all the ingredients in a large pan and cook over a low heat, stirring until the sugar dissolves.

2. Bring to the boil and simmer, uncovered, over a low heat for about three and a half hours until the mixture is thick and pulpy. There should be hardly any liquid left.

3. Ladle into sterilised jars and seal.

4. Store for at least a month to mature.

The original recipe suggested that the chutney should be eaten within six months but I plan to ask it to last a lot longer than that. It has sugar and vinegar and isn't all that different from tomato chutney recipes which I've known to last well for several years.