harvest

I picked more 'Ailsa Craig' and a few 'Roma' today, and finally two giant brown beefsteak 'Black Russian' tomatoes that had not split on the vine.  There were already a couple of bowls of tomatoes hanging around in the fridge, so I thought I'd better do something with them, having bothered to grow them.  Leaving them in the fridge until they went mouldy does not count as doing something.

The consensus of opinion on the internet seemed to be that you could freeze raw tomatoes, and that it was worth skinning and de-pipping them first.  I duly poured boiling water over them, in two batches, slipped the skins off, chopped them into quarters, scraped the pips out into a sieve, stirred the contents of the sieve around vigorously with a wooden spoon to get the juice since reading somewhere that the liquid around the pips is one of the best bits, put them in five separate containers in batches that looked about the right size for cooking one meal for two people, and put them in the freezer, hoping to be able to combine the lumps of frozen tomato into fewer containers later on to save space.

It was not an unpleasant task, and once it began to thunder and pour with rain I couldn't have been doing anything outside anyway.  It did take ages, though.  It's true that I'd have had to do the same thing if I were prepping fresh tomatoes while cooking, the only difference being that I was doing five meals' worth at once and not just one, but it still felt like a lot of effort compared to picking up a four-pack of Waitrose Essential tinned tomatoes.

There was the scrunch of heavy boots on gravel soon after the downpour began, as the Systems Administrator dashed in from the wood (followed five minutes later by a wet and disgruntled Mr Cool).  The SA came into the kitchen and remarked that I was doing something with the tomatoes. I agreed that I was.  The Systems Administrator has been doing the cooking recently, and has been trying to use them up, but the problem is that not everything in the SA's repertoire is based on tomatoes, and there have been evenings when the SA has wanted to put something together quickly after a hard day pulling up brambles, and has not felt like spending an extra twenty minutes skinning and de-seeding tomatoes.

This is one problem with grow-your-own, when the grower and the cook are not one and the same person.  It must have been the same in the old days of grand houses with cook and head gardener, when presumably the cook knew what was in season and what crops were coming along and would ready herself to get creative with a non-stop supply of broad beans, and perhaps the head gardener was amenable to feedback from the kitchen that there was a limit to how many peas or marrows one household could eat.  But now people are used to being able to go to the shops and buy practically any vegetable they fancy at most times of the year, they are used to cooking what they feel like doing and not being dictated to by the supply of ingredients.

We do possess a passata making machine, bought years ago during the Systems Administrator's vegetable growing phase.  I think it came from the Seeds of Italy catalogue.  You tip whole tomatoes into the top, turn a handle, and it mysteriously separates out the skins and pips from the flesh.  I did not use it today because I am not honestly sure how it works, and wasn't sure the faff of disassembling it and washing it at the end would be worth it for the volume of tomatoes that I had.  I shall have to see whether recipes cooked with the frozen home grown tomatoes are noticeably nicer than if I'd just chucked a tin of Waitrose plum tomatoes in juice in.  Otherwise the temptation not to bother is quite strong.