Saturday sarcasm

Oh! Dearest Readers! You will not be able to contain yourselves with this tastiest of posts.

The long-awaited totally unoriginal recipe for fruit chutney with some brilliant unique photos is about to be revealed.

[For anyone who has no idea what this is about you may wish to check out my Clouds post about how to become Freshly Pressed and The Daily Post]

Firstly, take some fruit. But not just any fruit. I recommend, pineapple, peaches, mango. But not all of them.

Pineapple lends a slightly tarter flavour and a different texture, peaches and mango are sweeter and softer. In fact, I haven’t tried mango but that really doesn’t matter does it?

Anyway, I had two peaches in the fridge. Here is an outstanding photo of two peaches in case you don’t know what they look like.

Two peaches

Method.

Chop peaches.

Here is another super photo, this time of chopped peaches.

Two chopped peaches

Put chopped peaches in pan. Add salt, pepper, lemon juice, cayenne, cumin and fennel.

Two chopped peaches and spices in pan

This recipe calls for cinnamon but I don’t have any because I am not keen on that – note the interesting personal touch I have added to this recipe?

I also don’t have any ground fennel in the roughseas spice cupboard but I do have seeds, so I riskily used some of those. Would that work? Was I taking my life in my hands by departing so much from the recipe?

While busy reading fascinating recipe blogs on the internet, don’t forget to occasionally get up and check chutney to make sure it is not sticking or burning. Oh, I forgot to tell you to turn on the heat, make sure it is low. I have electric which is pretty smooth, but if you have a fierce gas flame, eg bottled gas, then add a drop of water.

Another option is to put a lid on the pan to keep steam/fruit juice contained. It wasn’t an option for me as I have no lid for this pan. Another rather interesting personal touch I feel.

When you are happy with the consistency, turn off the heat.

Wow!! Wasn’t that the most unique and interesting recipe you have ever read?

To be serious, it’s actually adapted from a pineapple chutney recipe. I have used pineapple on its own, with peaches, and today was obviously peaches on their own.

Spices:

One and a half teaspoons of –

Salt
Fennel (ground – but seeds work well, fenugreek or celery seeds would be good too)
Cumin

Less than a teaspoon of –
Cayenne
Black pepper

Juice of one lemon

Courtesy of Julie Sahni and her brilliant Classic Indian Vegetarian Cookery book.

Served with curried potatoes – another amazing imaginative unique recipe which involves parboiling potatoes, draining them, chucking on some garam masala, and then crisping them up in the oven for 20 or 30 minutes, at 220/230 fan assisted. I take them out when they look ready.

Left over chard tarted up with cauliflower.

Salad of some greens from a bag at Morrisons, tomatoes, cucumber, bean sprouts, green chilli, lemon juice, salt and pepper, fresh coriander. I didn’t make enough of that.

Peach chutney with other curried goodies

And, here is the delicious peas pilao from the other day, but as this is not a cookery blog I’m not adding a recipe for that.

Peas pilao

Let’s cleverly segue onto something serious. Speaking of food I think I can neatly talk about the Spanish fishing dispute. According to the Gib Chron and El Pais, it seems Madrid is most annoyed with Gib. I couldn’t find anything on the Gib Gov website which presumably, like me is on summer hours.

Anyway, in a nutshell, Gib has announced no fishing with nets in our waters, ie the three mile limit, following the results of the environmental report commissioned earlier.

If you haven’t read my previous post on the fishing dispute, Spanish fishers want to fish in Gib waters, because apart from anything else Spain doesn’t recognise Gib/UK territorial waters.

The current – socialist – Gib government revoked the fishing agreement made by the previous – right of centre – Gib government, saying it was illegal. A nice process was agreed, lots of talks, and the commissioning of the environmental report.

Clearly Spain expected that report to say it would be OK to fish the hell out of Gib waters.

Let’s add another personal touch, aka an anecdote. My partner works with mostly Spaniards. One of these used to sell fish.

‘Spaniards have depleted Spanish waters, Moroccan waters, and now they want to decimate the Gibraltar waters too.

‘We live for today, we don’t look at the future. We want a big sack today, a bigger one tomorrow, and then, there is nothing left.’ [Sack can refer to anything, fish, money, crops, whatever].

And in terms of nothing left, unions and workers in Spain continue to demonstrate every Friday about the job cuts, public sector cuts, increase in indirect taxes, and reduction in labour rights. [Source: Revolting Europe]

But in sunny Gib, we are all still on summer hours, although the unemployment situation is increasingly kicking in here too, with more and more people struggling to find work, invariably on the black.

There are fewer available jobs in the job centre. People’s wages have been cut here in Gib, and desperate cross-border workers continue to push down the rate for the job in order to find food, pay rent and mortgage in Spain. Meanwhile other workers are content to merrily take the Spanish dole at 80% of their Gib wages for the first six months of their two year benefit. Sadly it decreases slightly after that. Is anyone still in any doubt why Spain has a problema economica?

A few more pix of sunny Gib on the slideshow from last weeks spooch mooch around the back of town.

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Revolting Europe

El Pais

Gib Chron