Yes, another chilli recipe! Yesterday I found that some of the bramley apples I had stored in the garage really needed using up. In addition, there was a full bag of Apache chillies left in the freezer from last year where the whole of this year’s crop had also been squirrelled away. I decided to make another batch of Chilli preserves – this time a super hot one! This would use up all the apples and frozen chillies. Warning this is very hot. The fumes pretty much knocked out most of our house-hold whilst cooking. However, if you like a very hot chutney – similar in style to those red Indian style chutneys you get an Indian restaurants then this could be for you.

When you batch cook and freeze it is very easy to end up with an endless supply of the same meal again and again. I remember the early years of allotmenteering – I nearly convinced myself that the bags of broad beans were breeding in the freezer when I was pulling the 50th bag! From my experiences, I quickly realised that the key to using up your supplies (and keeping buy-in from the rest of the family) is to be creative in making a range of meals. If you can freeze a base recipe that can be made into a novel meal you are onto a winner. No more complaints of ‘Oh no, not pasta sauce again!’.

This is not a full recipe as such, I wanted to share methods I use to make a base recipe for cooking and then turn this into a variety of dishes.