a hawt and spicy evening.....a reflection on men and women...

The wife and I picked apples from the neighbor's tree, and prepared to make apple pear chutney. I wish I could say we picked the pears, raisens, spice and onion too, but we picked them up at the store. You say "what is chutney?" and I answer "sort of a salsa-jam thing from India." You lay out all these tasty Indian foods on your plate with rice and bread, then add dollops of hot chutney here and there, like you would would with salsa or ketchup, but chutney is made with fruit and hot peppers :)

How do you make it, you ask? Similar to jam or apple sauce. Dice pears and apples, cup of raisens, sugar, vinegar, boatload of spice and hot peppers, boil for an hour, then put into sterilized jars, HUZZAH! Eat up the next day and for many days to come...

But here is the difference between men and women, or maybe, just this man and this woman. The wife is a detail obsessed type, good with accounting and the like, and I am a slob. SO, recipe in hand, the wife is captain of this chutney ship, reading directions, wearing her tidy apron, while her husband disregards the directions behind her back, randomly chopping and throwing things into the pot. At one point she was like
"stop that! measure those apples!" and I am like
"I don't need to, it looks about right" and she grabs things and measures, and, um, I had prepared enough for a double batch, not one, so I was like
"OH! I s'pose that is good to know, that we are, um, making a double batch now" and she is like, glaring at me...then we get to the spice, the cloves, cinnamon and whatnot, and I grab jars and start to shake
again "what are you doing! we need a 1/4 teaspoon!" (does such a measure exist??????) and I am like
"the more the better! its chutney!!!!" and she is like
"forget giving this to anybody!!!!" angrily trying to open and measure the cinnamon and I am like
"gimme!!!!" and grab and dump, seeing that there is, I dunno, not too many spoonfuls left in the jar, figuring, its time to start a new one, but at that point she is MAD and the apron comes off and she starts to huff away
"noooo! come back! I'll behave! you were right about the double batch part!" and she returns saying
"I am in charge, alright?" and the dutiful husband is like
"OH! Of course!" and I take a huge hunk of ginger and begin chopping and she is like
"what are you doing! I thought I was in charge?" and I smile guiltily and pass it over...about ten times the amount of ginger required...but she dices it and tosses it in saying
"we canNOT give this away, how do you explain that it is a ginger bomb?"

Stuff boiled a little more than an hour and we got a few STRONG cups of chutney, and a hawt and spicy smelling house. I give the wife credit for putting up with me, but I figured chutney is like salsa: take it easy and throw in a ton of stuff!

And the next day, eating it with rice? UNBELIEVEABLY yummy :)