An End to the Season

Tomato, tomato, tomatoes!

Last weekend brought the end to the tomato growing season for the garden. It was a bittersweet end to be honest. Tomato soup, tomato salad, frozen tomato, tomato sauce, tomato relish, tomato in the casserole, tomato in the curry, tomato on toast, tomato in the kids lunches, tomato, tomato, tomatoes! Even my family were declining offers for bags of freshly picked tomatoes. There is a limit right? Room had to be made for my winter crops to go in anyway. What to do with the 3-5kgs of fruit still hanging on the vines Ahhhhhhhhhh. I really don’t like being wasteful and I know that in a couple of months tomatoes are going to be the price of gold in the supermarkets. I have been freezing tomatoes in small zip lock freezer bags as the season has progressed, which are going to be very useful as we head into winter. My wife made a comment as to how many tins of tomatoes we go through in our cooking during winter. Easily two or three a week.

As we don’t have our own canning set up, freezing was going to be the less time consuming method (yes, I have had enough of bottling for the time being). I decided to make single serve bags of ‘ready to use’ flavoured tomato mixes. Main ingredients were tomato, garlic, onion and a fresh herb (coriander or basil). Here is the method:

Dozen small tomatoes, half an onion, two garlic cloves, herbs

Add to a food processor and pulse

Pour into zip lock freezer bags and label

Looking forward to more fresh tomatoes next year.

Chilli Sauce

On my walk home from work one summer’s evening I passed a store with a stall of organic seedling plants outside. I find it difficult to pass by such plant stalls without taking a look and this time I was tempted by a punnet of yellow chilli seedlings. Now my only other experience growing chillies was something of a disaster. It was difficult to tell if they were ripe, they were extremely bitter and had no heat whatsoever! Consequently they all ended up in the garden bin.

Being yellow I decided that at least this time I would have some idea of when they would be ripe. I planted three of the seedlings (gave three away) in the corner of my glass house, with nothing more than a dressing of fresh compost. I then watered them every five or six days. Three months later I harvested near on a kg of brilliant yellow, sweet smelling chillies. Biting the end off one confirmed they were indeed hot chillies.
So what to do with them? A tip from my friend Jenny had me freezing some of the chillies, so I could use one or two when required. The rest I turned into sweet chilli sauce.

This is my recipe.
-  300g chillies, 200g red capsicum (if you want it really hot substitute capsicum for chillies), 3 garlic cloves, 3 cups white vinegar, 3 cups sugar.
-  Halve half of the chillies and put in food processor (with seeds), remove seeds of remaining chillies and add to processor.
-  Add chopped capsicum, garlic and half the vinegar to the chillies. -  Process until finely chopped.
-  Put the chilli mix, sugar and rest of the vinegar in a pot and on a low heat. Stir until sugar is dissolved.
-  Turn up the heat until the mixture boils.
-  Turn down heat to simmer and stir every now and then for around 40mins (until sauce thickens). Don’t worry if it’s not totally thick as it will thicken more as it cools.
-  I poured the mixture into jars that had been heated in the oven to sterilise.
Enjoy!

As an aside, I remember as a kid my dad coming out of a public restroom laughing. He then told us about the graffiti he’d read. ‘If you feel like the bottom is falling out of your world, have a chilli curry and have the world fall out of your bottom’.

Fruits of my labour: Silverbeet into Sag aloo

This time of year you should find that Silverbeet is prolific in your garden. It can be one of those veges that you grow, but leave uneaten in your plot because you don’t know how to make the most of this highly nutritious vegetable. Well I’m a fan of it just steamed or maybe with some butter and seasoning. It’s also great chopped finely in an omlet, quiche or frittata. Tonight though I took some inspiration from Mr Rick Stein and adapted his ‘Potatoes and Spinach with Cumin and Mustard Seeds’ recipe (Rick Stein’s Far Eastern Odyssey p. 278) for my own Silver Beet usage needs.

 For this recipe you will need 4Tbsp mustard oil (I just used rice bran), 1 tsp black mustard seeds, 1 tsp cumin seeds, 25g crushed garlic, 30g peeled and grated ginger, 2 thinly sliced green cayenne chillies (because I’m serving to small children I left these out), ½ tsp turmeric powder, ½ tsp kashmiri chilli powder, 700g peeled potatos cut into 2.5 cm pieces (didn’t measure every piece), 250g spinach (Silverbeet), ½ tsp Garam masala.

Heat the oil in pan, add the mustard seeds and cover with lid until the seeds stop popping, turn down the heat and add the cumin seeds, sizzle for a few seconds, add the garlic, ginger and chillies and fry for two minutes.  Stir in the turmeric and chilli powder, then the potatoes, 5 tablespoons of water and a teaspoon of salt.  Cover and cook.  Stir occasionally (add a little more water during cooking if needed, I didn’t).  Once the potatoes are tender, stir in the silverbeet and cook for a couple more minutes.  Sprinkle over the garam masala and eat!! 

As you can see I served with some steamed peas and a tasty piece of pan-fried salmon.

I would love to see the fruits of your labour and what you do with them, too.  Send me your photos.