Tomato sauce

Tomatoes. Is there anything better? There's a nice man at the market from whom I can buy a case of tomatoes at a time. This month he had romas by the case, around 10kg, for $12. Can't sneeze at that, when they were going for around $3 or $4 a kilo everywhere else. The catch is that they are uber ripe, and some are already over the line - I got 9.5kg of useable tomatoes out of this weeks's box. That's still an excellent price. But it means you pretty much have to use them straight away. Since we're still swimming in tomato relish from the last time I couldn't walk past the nice tomato man without buying a case, I thought I'd have a go at a tomato ketchup.

As luck would have it, I'd been watching one of Jamie Oliver's shows during the week, in which he made a fabulous looking ketchup. I'd recorded it because I had a feeling I might want another look at it at some point. Copied out the recipe best I could, and had a go...

The first step was to make some passata - essentially, tomato puree with some onion and spices in. I cheated a little and bought two bottles of passata at the supermarket to get things started. I put the bottled sauce, and around 4kg of tomatoes into a saucepan, over a medium heat, and cooked for around an hour, until the tomatoes had broken down. I then added onion and spices, and since I would have to blend the ketchup later, elected not to blend the passata now, purely for labour saving reasons.

While the passata was cooking, I chopped the other 5kg of tomatoes. Not a pleasant exercise when the hands are showing the signs of the kitten teething - tomatoes being acidic and all, the juice doesn't half sting in little scratches.

I then chopped around 4kg of onions. Actually, that's a total lie. I put 4kg of onion into the food processor, and whizzed them. I hate chopping onions more than almost everything else, ever.

I sweated the onions in a little bit of olive oil, for about 10 minutes rather than the 15 suggested. If I had've left them any longer they would've burnt.

Meanwhile in the mortar and pestle I whacked some fennel seeds, coriander seeds and powder and cloves and gave them a bit of a stir. These were added to the onion for the last couple of minutes of cooking.

The onion and spice mixture was then added to the passata which by now was finished. This was followed by the chopped tomatoes, a bit of salt and pepper, ginger, chilli, basil (just the stalks, the leaves came later), some red wine vinegar and brown sugar.

It was round about this time that it became obvious I'd made an ocean of ketchup - that's my 15 litre stockpot in that photo, full almost to the top. Oh well.

I then brought it to the boil, no mean feat taking into account the volume, then reduced the heat to medium and cooked the ketchup for about half an hour, adding the basil leaves right at the end so that they don't just wither and disappear.

And then, the real fun began. Jamie makes it sound really easy on the show - whack in blender, push through sieve, bottle. The reality is an awful lot of buggering around, and ketchup absolutely EVERYWHERE. That was even without having a blender lid accident. Also, blending 15 litres of ketchup 500ml at a time to prevent afore mentioned lid accidents is nothing short of tedious.

Luckily Michael was on hand to take photos. Or something. Once the ketchup had been blended, I used a collander to sieve out the skins and the bulk of the seeds, since my sieves are too fine, and were just letting tomato flavoured water through.

Fortunately, not only have I been hoarding empty jars, but so has my mum, so I did manage to have enough jars on hand, although that did include two huge V8 juice bottles! You can see some of the tomato-flavoured devastation here, all over my stove.

A very, very messy production, but so worth it. Despite having produces gallons of the stuff, I can't see it lasting long. You can use it in place of tomato ketchup, but also as a base for pasta sauce, or probably on its own in pasta. Next time, however, may make smaller quantities at a time!!

Blood Orange and Orange Juice

There's really very little to say about this, but I just wanted to share the fabulous colour of this juice. Again, another market find, around 1kg of blood oranges to 2kg non-blood oranges (I'm pretty sure they were navels but I'm writing this after the fact so I'm not 100% sure). Enough chat, look at the pretty...

Fruit cut up and ready to be juiced. I'm so glad we found the juicer attachment for the food processor.

The slushy pulpy bits. Even they were pretty.

Around a litre of juice...

... fit nicely into my old V8 bottle.

Also, this was damn tasty juice.

Corn Relish

Corn. The Wonder Fruit. What can't it do, really. We're big fans of corn in our house, and although that radioactive yellow goo they sell in jars in the supermarket under the name of corn relish does have a special place in our hearts, I thought I'd have a go at a slightly more wholesome variety.

Once again, unfortunately, I did not grow any of the veg I used in this relish. We make a monthly trip into the Queen Victoria Market in Melbourne, and this month one of the stall holders had corn for $1.20 an ear - what was I supposed to do!?

The photo above is of Michael using my mum's very nifty corn removal tool, me having silly girly hands and all. It's basically a set of metal jaws with handles, that strip the kernels off the cob. However, as you can see to the left, we had a bit of trouble getting it to take the whole kernel off, and wound up having to remove the remainder of each kernel with a knife. Oh well, now we know for next time!

Once again, the fiddliest part of this relish was all the chopping veg - aside from the corn, there was celery and two colours of capsicum to dice, plus onion. Once that was done, yet another easy peasy relish. (I should apologise but I can't locate the source of this recipe - I scrawled it on the back of an envelope off the internet, but now I can't find it. I will continue to search and update when I find it though).

1. I first boiled vinegar, salt and sugar in a large saucepan, until the sugar dissolved and the mixture was boiling.

2. In went the vegetables, and spices, and I reduced the heat and simmered the relish for around 10 minutes or so, until the veg got soft and the liquid absorbed. Again, due to my paranoia about sticking things to saucepans, I stirred it more or less constantly during this time.

3. Into my brand new spiffy jars, and voila!! The colour of this relish is incredible, and as it sits in the fridge the flavour is intensifying.

Tomato Relish

Again, a disclaimer. I did not grow these tomatoes, but they had ripe tomatoes for $1.50 a kilo at the Vic on the weekend, and being as my whole family is massive fans of the old tomato relish, I thought bugger it, why not.

So, courtesy of my good friends ABC Tasmania, here we go...

1. Chop tomatoes, apples and onion into small bits. I got quite carried away and diced them right up fine. Two kilos of tomatoes will take longer than you imagine to chop.

2. Into a big saucepan goes the tomatoes, apples, onion and garlic along with the vinegar, sugar and spices.

3. Bring it to the boil, and stir it enough to keep it from sticking to the bottom of the pan. In my case, since I'm quite well known for the variety of things I can stick to the bottom of a saucepan, I stirred it until it boiled.

4. The mixture then needs to boil for around one and a half hours, during which time I perched on my barstool in front of the stove and multitasked - periodically stirring the relish, as well as watching the league on the tellly, and peeling the onions for the pickled onions.

5. I then mixed the cornflour into a bit more vinegar and added that to the pan, leaving nothing left to do but to stir until thickened, then bottle.

This relish is ready to eat straight away, and has been a hit with the entire relish-loving family. I'm just looking forward now to when I can use my own tomatoes to make it :)

Pickled Onions

I love pickled onions. Which is weird, because I hate onions. With a passion. But just try keeping me away from pickled onions. I have, however, been disappointed with the quality of the jarred pickled onions in the supermarket of late, and when I saw pickling onions at the market the other day, I thought I'd better have a go.

So, in the interests of full disclosure, I did not actually grow these onions, but they are from the fruit and veg market at the Vic.

This jar I bought in Kmart for around $8, the obviously saw me coming since I later bought a similar sized jar I intend to make another batch in for around $2 at the local $2 shop.

Anyway, first things first, since I only had the one large jar, I figured a good place to start was with finding out how many onions would fit in the jar. I bought around 3kg of pickling onions, because they were cheap cheap cheap and, as I already might have mentioned, I love pickled onions! As it turns out, approximately 1kg or so fit in the jar.

Once the onions had been peeled and top and tailed, which was a laborious job I managed to acheive whilst supervising the tomato relish, they were left to soak in a bowl of brine overnight. I made the brine by heating water and a handful of salt until the salt had dissolved, then allowing to cool before adding the onions.

In the meantime, I prepared the pickling vinegar. Into plain white vinegar I put a tablespoon each of coriander seeds, cloves and cardamom seeds, a couple of cinnamon sticks and a few bay leaves, and brought it to the boil. The vinegar was then left to steep for about five hours, before being sieved off and stored overnight until the onions were ready to bottle.

The next day, I drained the brine off the onions, and rinsed them well, then laid them out on a paper towel to dry off. When they were dry, I put them into the sterilised jar, and discovered that I could have fit a few more in, once I had removed the peel and ends. Not to worry.

I then sieved the vinegar again to remove all the gunk that had settled to the bottom overnight, mostly clove dust as far as I could make out, then poured into the jar over the onions. I folded up a bit of greaseproof paper and stuffed it in the top of the jar to stop the onions floating, at least for the next couple of days until they have absorbed enough vinegar to stay submerged.

These will be ready to eat in around three weeks, but I'm intending to leave them a little longer than that.