Sweet and Sour Shrimp, Peach Chutney and Meditations on Newlywed Cooking

Hello and welcome back to the Stone Soup Cook!

This week, I’m focusing on the beginning of my annual food preservation rituals. On Tuesday, I featured recipes for basic, fresh tomato sauce using lots of fresh tomatoes and today, I’m sharing my recipe for PEACH CHUTNEY.

Every year, I make a couple of batches of peach chutney and we use it through the year for a topping for ice cream, on a cheese board, with peanut butter for a sandwich, or, as I’ll share today, with shrimp for a no-fuss, no-muss weeknight dinner of sweet and sour shrimp, and with grilled pork for an elegant dinner entree.

But first, a quick story:

Shortly after we got married, I got a job up in San Francisco, which resulted in a commute that was a couple of hours each way. This meant not getting home until about 8:00 in the evening. Most nights, we ate food I had made over the weekend and portioned out for easy consumption during the week, or we ordered delivery. But one Friday night, Mr. Stone Soup got home early from work and decided to tackle a recipe he’d seen either in the newspaper or in one of my cooking magazines. By the time I got home, he had used every pot in the kitchen and covered every flat surface with dirty utensils, paper towels or smears of condiments.

He greeted me at the door with two perfect plates of shrimp in a sauce over rice. We sat down with a glass of wine and enjoyed a delightful meal.

And then I saw the kitchen.

Mr. Stone Soup gave me a wry smile and said “I was 39 steps into this recipe before I realized I was making sweet and sour shrimp.” We both had a good laugh and then rolled up our sleeves and got to work on the dishes.

Today, in addition to the recipe for peach chutney, I have a sneaky, quick version of sweet and sour shrimp that comes together in minutes and makes far less mess than the first time we tried it!

PEACH CHUTNEY SWEET AND SOUR SHRIMP STIR-FRY: