If you’ve been a regular visitor around here, first of all, thank you and have a seat, you’ve earned it. Secondly, you may remember I had a pumpkin growing competition with dearest son, which he won with “The Beast”. (If you missed it, more details about size and weight can be found in the post ‘PUMPKINS!’).

The other day I decided the time had come to tackle Mr Beast (no not the Youtube guy), and turn him into something useful. The first thing I decided to go for was pumpkin chutney as I’ve made it before and love it – will also be putting a jar into Christmas hamper I’ve mentioned previously! You’d think that would be easy enough but I soon discovered, step 1 was getting into the beast. It went something like this:

Then I got the other ingredients organised like onion, sultanas and tomatoes but I’d forgotten I needed to skin the tomatoes, which I did like this:

So far so good, the progress was looking promising:

I followed the instructions – lid off, lid on, add this spice, add this vinegar and so on it went. Then I waited…..

After something like eternity, I had a gorgeous smelling pot of lava – word to the wise, this stuff burns if it hits your skin….yes I did.

Then my favourite part - putting into sterilised jars:

Just to show how dangerous this stuff can be, here is what the wall looked like when I was finished:

Its messy and takes ages but so worth it!