Making Chutney

Ellen and Katherine have really put me to shame in the way that they have been working at keeping the blog up to date.
We spent Saturday, September 1, with Ross and Susanna. Bonny and her boyfriend Stefan came over - she lives about 10 minutes away. The girls were very excited to be finally meeting one of their grown-up cousins. This, however, didn't encourage them to talk and they continued their silent communication - lots of big grins and facial expressions to show how excited they were.
The project of the day was chutney making - a tradition for Ross, Susanna and Bonny. It was also important for Susanna, who had a small car accident the night before in a car she had only just bought three days before. Luckily she hadn’t been hurt but it had shaken her a bit.
Ellen worked diligently at chopping the capsicums (called peppers here) while everyone else chopped the other veggies. I find it amazing that although we are apparently an English culture (and some who argue against further immigration claim that we are completely English) that there are so many differences in the names of food. Courgettes for zucchinis, peppers for capsicums, aubergine for eggplant, butternut squash for butternut pumpkin. You can’t buy the other kind of pumpkin here because the English don’t eat it. These differences may only be small but to me they reveal that although our origins may have been English, we are a very different culture. It’s like making chutney – when you cut up all the different veggies and put them together in the pot, the result is something quite different from the original bits. Ellen made lovely brightly coloured labels for all the jars – Susanna said she didn’t need to date them as she would remember when they’d been made just by looking at the labels.
Carlene