So hanging outside is an awful lot of tomatoes. Coupled with the fruit bowl full of half ripe tomatoes, I have a LOT of tomatoes. And what better way to use them up than to make a red and green tomato pasta sauce?
No better way is the answer to that.
I slit the bottoms of the ripe tomatoes and blanched them for peeling.
For the record, green tomatoes (they were in the second, unphotographed batch), they don’t peel easily. Because I don’t have a decent sieve and I am a martyr (no seriously, can you hear the little violins?) I elected to peel them with a potato peeler. Don’t mock me, it worked.
I then smooshed (technical term) the ripe tomatoes in my hands and chopped the green and yellow tomatoes up with a knife. First time in a while, but I didn’t cut myself once. I did manage to accidentally throw a tomato at the smallest child though, so that probably filled my accident quota for the morning. (I later managed to cut my finger on the soaker hose and trip over my own feet, so it obviously wasn’t my accident quota for the day.)
I threw everything into the pot, along with some sugar to counteract the green tomatoes, some salt, because everything is better with salt and some white wine vinegar. Because I like white wine vinegar and tomatoes.
I left it to simmer and pulled tomato skins out of Amy’s hair. I also washed some dishes, before the pile fell over and attacked me.
It simmered for about oh, an hour, before I checked the seasoning, added more salt and sugar to taste and left it alone again to reduce and thicken a bit.
Once the green tomatoes were soft, I blitzed the whole batch with my stick blender (I inherited an actual Swiss Bamix, it’s fantastic. Shitty way to get kitchen gadgets though).
At this point I added 8-10 cloves of garlic, and 2 finely diced onions and wandered away to let it cook some more, before coming back and attacking it with the Bamix again.
I picked out the one last green tomato that wouldn’t puree, checked the seasoning again, added some brown sugar and then bottled it.
We had some for dinner tonight, on gluten free pasta. My advice for the day, don’t put GF pasta in cold water to start cooking. It won’t be pretty. And no, that muck up wasn’t me. For once.
Ingredients:
A couple of kilos of red and green tomatoes
salt and sugar to taste (you will need to add sugar to fix the acidity levels)
white wine vinegar
2 finely diced onions
10 cloves of garlic
Blanche and peel the tomatoes, cutting out any black spots that the slugs/bugs/flies might have left.
Squash them in the pot, making sure you don’t lose any juices. Squirting yourself in the eyes is also bad. Don’t do that.
Chop the green tomatoes and add the the rest, along with a little bit of vinegar, salt and sugar to taste.
Leave to simmer for an hour or so before blending. Check seasoning and cook some more. Blend again.
Add onion and garlic and leave to simmer for about 20 minutes, before (you guessed it!) blending again.
Bottle while warm into warm sterilised jars with the pop top lids. Screw the lids on tight and leave to cool, thus letting them create their own vacuum seal.
