Bell Pepper and Dried Apricot Chutney (Page 905)

• Date: Thursday, May 29, 2008 -- 10pm
• Location: Somerville, MA
• Kitchen: Matty's Apartment
• Dining Companion: Matty
• Recipe Rating: B+
  

I am trying to make some progress on the Relishes, Chutneys, Pickles, and Preserves section of The Book, so I made this recipe last week. I have trouble getting too terribly excited about chutneys. Typically what happens is that I make some chutney, we have it with whatever we are eating for dinner, and then it sits untouched in the fridge. Under normal circumstances I would wait until I really needed a chutney before making one, and then perhaps it would get eaten. But book-cooking doesn't always go like that... So is this chutney currently rotting in the fridge? Well, yes. Was it tasty? Well, yes. If you are in the market for a chutney, this one is pretty good. Red peppers and dried apricots initially seemed like an odd combination to me, but it worked quite well. I found the balance of ingredients also to be nice. Often chutneys go a little overboard with the vinegar (yes, they should be vinegary, but there is a limit...). This one had a nice, pronounced, vinegar flavor, without it being too much. Further, this was quite simple to make. I don't feel too motivated to eat this straight out of the bowl, but if I needed a chutney, this is probably the one I would make.

The recipe is here.

Tonight I went to a conference banquet dinner. In and of itself this is pretty unremarkable. Most conferences in math include some sort of big dinner thing, and I have been to lots and lots of them. This one was different though. I wasn't there as a mathematician. I was there as a date! My special gentleman spoke at a conference at Brandeis this week, and tonight I joined him at the conference dinner. While he is also a mathematician, we are in different fields, so our mathematical crowds are somewhat disjoint. Often friends of mine will bring their significant others to these things and I always wonder what that must be like -- to be the one person who hardly knows anyone in a room full of mathematicians who have worked together for years. Mathematicians have this reputation for being strange and socially awkward. I won't claim that there is no truth to this, but whatever social awkwardness there is tends to be very good-natured. In particular, mathematicians are generally very accepting people. However, that is often paired with a shyness towards strangers that might come across as dismissal. So it has often occurred to me that it must be hard to be a stranger in a big crowd of mathematicians. I didn't really get the full experience tonight though -- I knew a reasonable percentage of the people there (and, of course, I am a mathematician myself...). My special gentleman would also argue that the low dimensional topology crowd is unusually friendly, and perhaps that is true. So although I had a nice time at the dinner, maybe my experience wasn't representative of the usual math banquet date!