30 fresh tomato recipes

Tomatoes are humble enough to blend into the background of sauces and salads, but robust enough to star as the main ingredient in a dish.

30. Tomato chutney

The Rowdy Chowgirl
A tomato chutney that's sweet, spicy, sour, and salty all at once with a fiery cayenne kick.

By Christina Masters, The Rowdy Chowgirl

Adapted from My Bombay Kitchen,via The Traveler’s Lunchbox
Makes about 1 1/2 quarts; recipe can easily be doubled.

3 pounds ripe tomatoes, coarsely chopped   
1/2 cup thinly sliced garlic (about one large head)
1/2 cup finely julienned peeled ginger
1-1/2 cups malt or cider vinegar
1/2 to 1 cup raisins
2 cups turbinado/raw sugar, or half light brown and half white
1 to 3 teaspoons cayenne pepper (or to taste)
1 small cinnamon stick
4 whole cloves
1-1/2 to 2 teaspoons salt

1. First, open a few windows. Place all the ingredients (start with the smaller amounts given) in a heavy nonreactive pot and bring to a boil, stirring so everything gets well combined. Lower the heat and simmer gently, stirring occasionally, until the chutney reaches the consistency of a soft jam. This will probably take at least 2 hours; you can speed things up by increasing the heat, but then you’ll need to remember to stir much more frequently. Particularly once it starts getting thick it can burn in a flash.

2. Adjust the balance of sugar, salt and vinegar while the chutney is still warm. Add more cayenne if you’d like it hotter.

3. To can for shelf-storage, sterilize four or five 8-ounce jars. Bring the chutney back to a rolling boil for 2 minutes, then proceed with your favorite canning method. Otherwise, it will keep for a few weeks in the refrigerator.

Read the full post on Stir It Up!

30 of 31

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.