Waste Not Want Not Green Tomato Chutney

It always surprises me how many green tomatoes people end up with at the end of the season, especially in England. But it doesn’t always have to be a waste. Now the first thing that springs to mind when people mention green tomatoes is the infamous green tomato chutney. It just so happens that this week, Andy’s Dad has brought up the subject of a rather large crop of unripe tomatoes sitting in his greenhouse that he doesn’t know what to do with.

Having built up a bit of a reputation across our families for our chutney and jamming skills, we’ve offered to transform his sorry looking stash into a green marvel. Here is our recipe for Waste Not Want Not Green Tomato Chutney for your pleasure and ours:

1000g green tomatoes, chopped into bite sized chunks
250g peeled Russet apples, chopped into bite sized chunks
2 large onions, finely chopped
1 tsp of salt
1 big hot red chilli, finely chopped
50g chopped apricots
50g sultanas
1/2 inch piece of ginger, grated finely
1 garlic clove
300g light muscovado sugar
400ml white wine vinegar
2 tsp mustard seeds, fried gently in a bare pan, then smashed in a pestle and mortar
1 piece of cinnamon bark

Add all the ingredients to the pot (all the best recipes have those words in them) and heat until soft and gooey. Make sure you don’t keep the chutney on too high a setting as it will catch to the bottom of the pan, even if you have a non stick one and this will cause tainting. You’ll know it is ready when you can draw the spoon or spatula across the bottom of the pan and it leaves a line behind for a few seconds before the chutney fills it. Make sure you remove the cinnamon bark before filling the jars.

There are a number of methods of jar sterilisation floating about, but our favourite is to wash the jars and lids in really hot, soapy water and drying them in the oven at 110oC / 225oF / ¼ Gas Mark (Andy questioned my logic here, but yes, ¼ gas marks do exist) for about 10 minutes.

We hope this will help you to sort out at least some of your green tomato worries!

Lethargic Tomato Soup Recipe

This week has been extremely eventful for me. Not only did I have a car crash last Friday which seriously stunted my attempts at blogging before it has even got off the ground, but as a result, I’ve been dopped up on happy pills to get rid of the back pain, so my cooking has definitely taken a back seat.

But despite all of this, of late, Thursdays has been the day when Andy has his friends round and they all bond over a good game of cards. I, being the dutiful wife, try to entertain myself by doing all the things that I don’t have time to do in the week whilst he is lazing about the place like the ironing, cleaning and cooking.

Well, being the lovely person that I am, I made the guys some mango chutney early on in the evening whilst they got set up and Andy fried off some popadoms to go with them. Before you all start wondering, why this thread is called tomato soup, my mango chutney recipe is a closely guarded secret that I haven‘t even told my little brother, so unfortunately, you’re never going to ascertain the recipe for that little gem. However, the soup I made for my dinner that arose as a combination of my lethargy and need to use up some old tomatoes definitely is one worth trying.

One of my favourite parts of cooking is opening the fridge and finding ingredients that I know need to be eaten up soon and rustling up something with them. Being creative stops the boredom from setting in and definitely helps to fend off the food ruts that turn up when you have a limited repertoire of recipes to work with.

Anyway, as promised, my soup recipe. Unfortunately, I didn’t think far enough ahead to actually take photos, so you’ll just have to trust me on this one; it looks and tastes great!

Makes two good sized portions or four starter portions.

½ jar of pasata sauce
6 medium tomatoes
3 large stems of fresh basil
8 springs of thyme
Half a large onion
1 large clove of garlic
½ tsp of cracked black pepper
½ tsp of salt
1 tsp of vegetable bouillon
1 tbsp of caster sugar
3 tbsp of greek yogurt
2tbsp of sunflower oil
1 tbsp of tomato puree
1 large nob of butter
2 handfuls of conchiglioni pasta shells


1) Put the onion into the food process and blitz until finely chopped. Grate the garlic through a fine grate or crush in a pestle and mortar.
2) Heat the oil and butter in a large saucepan, then add the onion and garlic and fry off until soft. Make sure you continuously stir so as not to let the onions brown.
3) Take the tomatoes and cut the skin in a cross shape all the way round. Put them in a bowl and pour hot water over the top. Leave them submerged for a few minutes until the skins loosed, then peel and put in the food processor. Add the fresh herbs (destalking the thyme) and blitz.
4) Boil the pasta shells in a separate pan until soft (just follow the instructions on the back of the pack).
4) Add the blended tomatoes and the pasata to the onions and heat until simmering gently.
5) Add the yoghurt, salt, sugar, pepper, bouillon and puree to the soup and heat until it starts to thicken.
6) Once thick enough, use a hand blender and blend until smooth. Add the pasta shells and enjoy!

Welcome to our new blog!

As it says in the title, Welcome. This is our new blog about our greatest love: Food.

Now I suppose you are wondering how we came across the name, Chilli & Lace. Well, it's quite simple really: we love chillies and we live in Nottingham, the home of lace. The name sort of came to us during a conversation with my auntie earlier today when we were throwing potential names about.

In this blog we hope to inundate you with our recipes as and when we try them out. We're not saying we are professional chefs, but we like to think that we are quite adept at cooking, but we definitely didn't get to this stage without a few trials and tribulations along the way, not to mention tears and tantrums.

We are hoping to pass on some of our favourite recipes, ones that we have created, and ones where we went wrong, but managed to pull it back in the end, oh, and a few photos of our progress too.

Feel free to email us and tell us how you've got on with our recipes and definitely let us know if there are any alterations you made to make the recipe better or unique to you. We're always open to learning new things about cooking.

Oh, and Andy has just pickled some chillies, so we'll add that entry first thing in the morning.

Night for now,

Michelle & Andy