Discover how to make your own sweet green tomato and balsamic vinegar relish, ready for all those delicious sandwiches you are going to be taking to work! It’s also lovely on crackers or you can eat it by the spoonful :-).
Wow! What a week it’s been here in little old New Zealand. Last weekend started off fabulously for me as my sister and bro-in-law made a quick visit to Auckland and we were hanging out generally having a blast eating in nice cafes and chewing the proverbial fat. So far so good!
Then fast forward past the weekend and New Zealand suffers a devastating earthquake which shook, the top of our South Island and bottom of North Island, literally to the core.
Registering at 7.5 the quake can only be described as a whopper and sadly it has caused a lot of devastation to our beautiful country and especially to one of our biggest tourist towns Kaikoura.
Kaikoura is famous for being the natural habitat of many incredible animals, and people travel from all parts of the planet to see them. Seals, whales, dolphins and all manner of sea birds make Kaikoura their home at some point or other during the year. For many of these animals life in New Zealand won’t be the same for quite some time.
It’s also terrible to know that many of my fellow kiwis are currently going through an enormous amount of suffering, especially in places where the quake hit hardest. All in all it’s a pretty sad time for our little country.
So, it seems a little redundant and trivial to be writing this update on how you can make a delicious relish! But in my defence I did make this relish a week ago, so feel I really might as well post it. Also, maybe it will be a bit of light relief from the news, which is currently pretty depressing here.
So here goes:
Onto the relish! Well, as the name suggests its main ingredients are green tomatoes and balsamic vinegar! I hadn’t made a green tomato relish before but I literally could not walk past these pretty tomatoes in the green-grocer the other day, can you blame me? Look how gorgeous they are:
They literally whispered to me to buy them and make something with them!
This recipe follows a very simple method:
1) You chop up your tomatoes and onions into chunks, put into a bowl and mix in the salt.
2) Leave the bowl in the fridge over night and then pour off the liquid the next day.
3) The next part is the easy peasy cooking part. It’s all very simple and easy to do. A bit of simmering and a bit of boiling.
Then your relish is ready. You can tell it’s ready because it has turned into a beautifully brown, thick and sticky jam.
4) The final step is to bottle it and store it for when you want to eat it. I bottle mine in jars recycled from store bought jams.
By the way, I’m not going to go into the Ins and outs of bottling. It’s easy enough to find that information on the internet, so you can check it out for yourself.
After all your efforts, you will be left with a beautiful, deep brown, sweet, spicy, gorgeous relish!
Just as a little aside, it’s not often I post a recipe with sugar in it, but I couldn’t really think of a way around it for this recipe. Let me know if you have had any success with any other sugar substitutes though and I might try it again with something other than sugar.
Anyway after the week we have had here, we all need a little sugar I’m sure!
I hope you like it!
x
Lisa
- 1 kg green tomatoes, roughly chopped. (Any type of tomato is fine. I used a mixture of green heirloom and standard green tomatoes)
- 300 g brown sugar (you can substitute with white sugar)
- ¾ Tbsp salt
- 2 large onions, peeled and chopped (approx. 300 g, I use red onions)
- ⅔ cup balsamic vinegar (approx. 170 ml, you can substitute with malt vinegar)
- 4 small green chillies, chopped
- 1 Tbsp cornflour
- 1 tsp mustard seeds
- 1 Tbsp curry powder
- ⅓ Cup warm water (about 80 ml)
- Put the tomatoes and the onions into a bowl, add the salt and stir through. Leave in the fridge overnight.
- Drain the liquid off the tomatoes/onion mixture and put the tomatoes and onions into a heavy based pan.
- Add the chilli, balsamic vinegar and the sugar to the pan and simmer for 30 minutes.
- Mix the cornflour, curry powder and mustard seeds together and then add to ⅓ cup of warm water. Stir until the cornflour and the curry powder are dissolved.
- Gently stir the cornflour/water mixture into the pan of tomatoes/balsamic vinegar and then boil until the mixture thickens.
- Make sure you stir the mixture so that it doesn't burn or stick to the bottom of the pan.
- When it is a jam consistency then it is ready.
- Store in sterilised jars until required.
Leave a Reply