The six children and step children of my late father are this week swapping emails about the annual pre Christmas meal and present swap we have with many of our kids in Shipston where Dad and his second wife Helen live and are buried. All will smile as I mention tomatoes and Dr Tom Winnifrith.
Dad grew them every year and every year they would be largely small and almost all green. With hope triumphing over experience he’d put them on the windowsill in the kitchen hoping they might redden up. They did not. But he persisted hoping that one year he’d triumph. He did not.
I have historically had no great success and have thus developed several ways to use green tomatoes as a food ingredient. But this year my orange and red tomatoes have been a bit of a triumph. Dad would have been both jealous and proud. We eat them as thy ripen but there is enough of a surplus that I am now storing them for the autumn as we go along.
I have always been nervous of what our American cousins term canning. We might say bottling or putting in jars. But it was surprisingly simple and the two jars below now sit in “Joshua’s attic”, that is to say the larder. To jar up tomatoes you need to peel them. Though that is a simple process I could not be bothered to do that with the smaller fruit. So they have been flash frozen, bagged up and now sit the freezer in my newly renovated outside office which is just packed out with frozen fruit and vegetables and tubs of home made ice cream.
Maybe any neighbours reading this want to pop around for some ice cream to clear space? As a diabetic I cannot help out and with autumnal crumbles now on the menu there is only so much ice cream that the family can get through as a pudding course. Or maybe I should get an additional freezer? I am not sure that it would be deemed very green to be running three freezers but needs must.
