How to make green tomato chutney and chamomile mint tea - Gardening with Brendan
I’ve been speaking to a few people over recent weeks about green tomatoes which haven’t ripened, but they don’t have to go to waste. In fact there are all sorts of things you can do to use up the last of the summer harvest, and after a quick forage in the garden I thought I’d have a go at making a green tomato chutney and a herbal ice tea this week.
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00:00Good morning, well today we're going to look at what you can do with leftover green
00:29tomatoes which won't ripen now at the end of the season. It's now October here in Ireland
00:36and I still have quite a few small green tomatoes which will not get the chance now to turn red,
00:43so instead of wasting them I'm going to go and collect them and make a green tomato chutney.
00:50I'm also going to collect the last of the mint and the lemon balm and make a tea and then make
00:56some chamomile tea as well, maybe some iced tea just to use up the leftover. So it's just some
01:01ideas here this weekend to show you what you can do rather than letting things go to waste.
01:08So we're just going to start off here with the tomatoes indoors and as you can see there's a
01:14couple of red tomatoes there. I don't know if you can see that but I'm just going to pick out the
01:19green ones now and these are quite small varieties of tomatoes you can see them up there and
01:32there's no sign of what's left now turning red so and I can already see that the
01:41plants themselves are starting to fall back in on themselves so
01:48even the ones indoors that are getting that bit of heat
01:53are
01:57starting to die back. It's just the time of year. That's how many I've collected so far
02:03That's how many I've collected so far indoors and now we're going to go outdoors and get some more
02:16You can see none of them are really ripening and there's quite a few of them here so
02:20I'll just pull these off now and then next week I'm going to chop and drop
02:25the tomato leaves and stems and just use them as fertilizer
02:35See something's been ... ah there's a tiny snail
02:39having a bite out of one of them. I'll just leave that one for that
02:42How about these other ones?
02:59Place them back and
03:05there's some on the ground there but we'll just leave them for whatever wants to pick at them
03:10So we're just going to rinse off these tomatoes in some water
03:22and then we'll get chopping in a moment. I'll just show you the other ingredients here
03:28so we have some sultanas or raisins whatever you can find, a couple of big onions, two
03:36cooking apples, these are Irish cooking apples, good time of the year now in October they find
03:43them in the shops. This is dark brown sugar, soft sugar, you could probably use white sugar I'm not
03:51sure like but the recipe I looked up and a couple of different ones had different options and then
04:02but they all seem to use darker sugar and then the other essential ingredient is malt vinegar
04:10and then it's really up to you what kind of if you want to add any spices
04:14I'm going to add a bit of a few chili flakes, some cloves and nutmeg
04:21and that would be basically that. So I want to give it like a kind of a warm winter
04:27kind of taste so that's why these are going in. The other thing in terms of utensils you're just
04:32going to need a chopping board, a large pan where all the ingredients will be thrown in once they're
04:37chopped up and there's probably a bit of chopping involved in this. Everything has to be chopped very
04:42finely even the raisins and that's just for ease of spreading and getting it out of jars and then
04:50you're also going to need some glass jars with lids, preferably screw on metal lids that will
04:57seal it and that's so it preserves and can be used then over the winter or even in the next year.
05:06What I'm going to do with these jars is often bake them just to sterilize them near when the
05:12recipe is ready because you want them to be warm when you're putting it in there
05:16and I also boil the lids to sterilize them in just in a pan of water for about 15 minutes
05:24and these will go in at around 120-130 degrees celsius into the oven just standing upright.
05:31They'll be washed out just beforehand as well with soapy water then rinsed and then put in
05:36on a baking tray in the oven again 15-20 minutes and then try and time it so that they're
05:46still kind of warm when the mixture's going in and then at the end we're going to boil these
05:52in a pan as well once the lid's on and once the mixture's inside it just to seal it even further
05:59and that prevents microbes getting in and things like that. Just chopping up the sultanas here as
06:07well just even get them a bit finer they're kind of tricky to chop probably need a bigger knife for
06:16this. So that is the entire mixture all chopped up and added to the pan and we'll just get the
06:22heat on now and there it is you can see there so all I'm going to do with that is give it
06:29a good stir around and the final thing to do is add in the spices and something
06:37I forgot to mention before is salt so about 10 grams or one and a half
06:47heaped teaspoons of salt and instead of cloves because I thought they were going to be a bit
06:53difficult to get out of there I'm going to add in
07:00some ground ginger instead so we have here some nutmeg, ginger, salt and a few chilli flakes and
07:08just a few because I'm not a great cook but I've ruined a lot of things by adding too many chilli flakes
07:23so
07:29it'll be interesting to see how this develops now this could take anywhere from between 40 minutes
07:34to a couple of hours and you want that to reduce right down and get like a almost a much thicker
07:42consistency as you can see it's just like buttery there now it's just all the vinegar at the bottom
07:47but I'm thinking the cooking apples will probably help with that too
07:53give that jelly like and the sugar obviously
07:57give it a jelly like consistency and so now I'm just going to cover that until it's at the boil
08:03and then leave it uncovered boiling for a little while about five minutes or so and then adjust the heat
08:10adjust the heat after that
08:24now we'll just leave all that off surprising that despite the fact that there's half a
08:32litre of vinegar on here it doesn't smell very vinegary it has to be malt vinegar you use as well
08:41to the brown vinegar
08:54so we're now at the final stage of the process here and as you can see I have the jars that are
08:58just out of the oven still pretty warm and the lids were boiled and we have our mixture here
09:06and here I have a pan of water boiling so I'm going to once I spoon the mixture
09:11under these two jars I'm going to put them in here you see the lid properly and here's
09:18the tea that I made I'm just going to leave that to cool completely and then make ice tea
09:23so
09:27all right
09:27I'm just going to spin it I think there's going to be a lot more than three jars worth here
09:49I'm going to try to be careful not to
09:53or even just to clean the room when it's done
09:57you can see it there
10:28so
10:34there's first jar gone second
10:41I don't have any more jars so
10:45if I had I could probably have got a third jar out of this
10:57so
11:15there's probably a bit left there probably enough for another jar
11:18so these what I'm going to do now is just
11:22I'm going to put a kitchen toilet and I have a mic attached to me here so that's why I'm moving around
11:39I'm just gonna
11:44wipe the room like this make sure there's nothing on there
11:52so
11:56and that's just to prevent contaminants
12:01in between the lid
12:07and the same with this one
12:13make sure there's nothing there
12:15so all that remains to be done now is they put the lids on
12:29you want them nice and tight but maybe not too tight
12:40and then we're just going to boil them now for over 10 minutes
12:43in this boiling pan of water the things I'm going to do today is collect some of this
12:51lemon balm
12:55and make a drink this is edible of course and I want to boil it up
13:05and maybe make an iced tea out of it I'm going to do that with a few different things so
13:13I'm not sure if this comes back next year I must look it up actually but
13:18but I'm glad I dug it out I dug it out earlier in the year because it has spread quite a lot
13:22some of the younger shoots here really really fragrant smells like citrus
13:28again almost like a citrus cleaner more than a fresh lemon or anything it's just uh
13:37but it grows in abundance here oh there's some green tomatoes that we
13:41we didn't see earlier hiding in amongst them
13:47I think it will come back but I'm not sure so as you can see here we have
13:52loads of chamomile flower still growing and you just pop the heads off
14:04and even walking past here you can smell this beautiful appley pineappley scent
14:10wafting especially on a warm day
14:14and they're just prolific growers I grew these from seed and they've been flowering all summer
14:19right through to now something lovely about fresh month as well now lemongrass and fresh
14:26month are I think they're related but they are not plants that you should be putting on the ground
14:35definitely not just picking the leaves now hopefully this will come back next year as well
14:40but if you put them in the ground they spread like wildfire and they take over
14:45and there's quite a lot of plants like that quite a lot of herbs like that actually
14:50so they've been through the runcer and the pot
14:54and then I'm just going to add some cold water to it
15:12and literally just boil it up that's all so while the chutney is going on there
15:18while that's going on we'll just strain our tea mix
15:26see the lovely green colour there from the leaves dark green we're just gonna
15:36that's that there nothing fell out so that's fine so in there we have the chamomile month
15:41it's a fun lemon bum
15:49give it a sniff here
15:55can really smell the chamomile more than anything
16:04so
16:25and once that's cold now this is the tea I'm gonna
16:29serve it up with some ice cubes just shake it up in one of these things water bottles
16:41you might add a little sugar to it now at this stage as well to sweeten it
16:47so
17:17so
17:19those will be like a sweet iced tea basically
17:24but with all the goodness of the fresh herbs and mushrooms
17:38and that is two ways where you can use up some of the leftovers in the garden
17:45if you just have a look around and see what you have there
17:48there's also some calendula there I could have added them or even made
17:53some quinoa palm with as well if I had the ingredients for it but maybe next year try that