(Written on Thursday 26th, but apparently didn’t upload properly..)

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This summer, we grew the best part of a million tomatoes. I gave lots of baby plants away, but most of them stayed with me, and I’m too soft to throw healthy plants away…

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I had a vision of making jars and jars of barbecue relish or tomato sauce – for spaghetti or pizza – but real life rarely aligns itself with my visions….

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In the end, most of them were eaten directly off the plant. Or washed and served at barbecues. When we went on holiday, DB’s folks took ALL the ripe ones they could find (and all the marginally-redder-than-green ones too, but I had said help yourselves, so hey, whatever) and took them into work, and to their own barbecues.

All was well, more or less.

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When Autumn arrived and it got colder, we decided that the rest needed harvesting and turning into something sensible – like soup – so that we could get rid of the plants, and tidy up the garden. DB tolerates the pots and raised beds and wheelbarrow and tools littering the garden, as long as they’re tidy and not in the way of more important things like cars or boats or barbecues.

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I made a couple of batches of sauce to freeze, and used another batch for spaghetti (whoo! Vision fulfilled!). I thought it was good, but DB complained about the skins..*

We were left with a whole lot of green ones.

I spread them out on a couple of wire racks on a tray and left them to do their thing. Which they did… Incredibly.

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I didn’t exactly forget about them, I just wasn’t around enough to do anything with them. Between working, commuting, the normal houseworky stuff, renovating the kitchen and gallivanting round Germany, I was usually too knackered to think, or not there to act upon them, or there but with the knowledge that 20 minutes here and there would leave the kitchen fully booked for more than an evening….

So anyway.

After ripe comes overripe. Overripe involves fruit flies, fruit flies make DB mad, and mad DBs aren’t good company. The tomatoes landed in the carport (which hasn’t seen a car in at least 10 years…) and started to rot gently by themselves.

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On Tuesday, I came home a little earlier than planned because I cut my thumb at work. DB was in Switzerland for the day, so I had the house to myself. Theoretically, I could do anything I wanted. Like curl up on the sofa with my new blanket and cushion (and a couple of chunks of Toblerone), and “just forget the world”**.

Instead, I made dinner, emptied and reloaded the dishwasher, fed the fish, put on some music*** to keep me awake and got to work on salvaging the few tomatoes which hadn’t actually started rotting yet….

The ‘few’ turned out to be 54.. There were almost double that (90ish?) in the ‘still-green-or-already-rotten’ pile (my compost heap loves me, even if tomatoes aren’t all that exotic)

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The resulting sauce is still in the fridge, waiting for inspiration to strike. It still has the skins and pips in, so I suppose it needs sieving or a stint in the mixer.

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Update, Wednesday 2nd December:

And out it goes. A week in the fridge was too much of a good thing…

It all comes of eating out 3 times in 7 days…

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* which I’d left in, because I’d made the sauce at 10pm, and had maybe 25minutes the next day between getting home from work and needing to feed the bear…☆

☆ DB, for anyone actually wondering.

** would you lie with me? 😉

*** nothing like a good YEEHAW! occasionally 🙂