Anyone for apple chutney?

It seemed such a good idea. The mother in law had even rewritten the apple chutney recipe for me and brought it with her the last time she came to stay, alongside a carrier bag full of apples.
Every time I've gone in the garage the last few weeks the growing smell of ripe apples has hit me as soon as I've opened the door. On Friday the nagging sense that if I didn't do something with the apples soon it would be too late was confirmed when the smell of over ripe and fermenting apples finally overpowered the normal garage smells.

I decided Saturday would be the day to get round to making the chutney. With happy husband, who loves his mum's home made chutney, and children at an age where they can get a bus to town to amuse themselves, I set about chopping and preparing the ingredients.

I'm not really your mother earth, homely type of person and, in an effort to cut the preparation time, I decided to try my new gizmo, onion chopper! After the first onion there were problems. With tears streaming from my eyes I peered at the 14 other onions waiting to chopped and realised that in my effort to cut corners I had in fact added to the difficulty equation by having to wash out said 'gizmo' following every onion. 2 hours in and virtually blind with the constant flow of tears I was finally onto....... THE APPLES. I have a confession..... it was only at this stage that I began to fully appreciate the seriousness of the fermentation process that had begun. Discarding the black, the fly ridden and the obviously squishy, I was left with a sad and manky collection which barely made up the weight I needed! Hey ho.......... I had started so I was going to finish!

Onions and apples finally prepared I looked, aghast, to realise that the pan I was using was FAR too small for the ammount of ingredients I'd prepared. It was THEN that I noticed the small print on the mother in laws recipe card, IF NO PRESERVING PAN HALVE THE INGREDIENTS!

By 10 oclock at night I had finally completed TWO separate batches of apple chutney. Needless to say we had, at a very critical moment, run out of jam jars and were frantically emptying and combining every half empty jar in the house in an effort not to waste the precious chutney. As we turned into bed late that night my dearly beloved turned to me and said innocently, 'I had no idea it was so much effort to make chutney'.

And if per chance any one of you reading this ends up with a jar of chutney for Christmas, please appreciate the sentiment and the high cost!