Chilli Sauce

My chilli plant has gone nuts with really hot chillies. So I made chilli sauce. 

Ingredients 

125g “firey red” chillies, roughly chopped 

2 garlic cloves, crushed 

1/4 red capsicum, roughly chopped 

2 black russian tomatoes, roughly chopped  

1/8 cup white vinegar 

1 tbs sugar

Salt

Pepper

Method  

Heat all ingredients in a saucepan on high until vinegar is boiling. Reduce to simmer and heat for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Transfer ingredients to a blender and blend until smooth. Place in sterilised jar. Consume within 3 months.

Note: I didn’t deseed the chillies so this sauce pretty much blows your head off which is just how the hubby likes it. For a “cooler” version, ditch some seeds. (and save some to plant later for more chillies). 

Mango Mini Popsicle

The strawberry popsicles I made earlier were delicious, but they took forever to eat. So I thought I’d make a baby, snack version. I just put the yoghurt mixture into an ice tray instead, and added a toothpick to each one. The mixture was thick enough to hold the toothpick in place. Easy 🙂

Ingredients
One small mango, cut up
Four tablespoons of natural yoghurt
Two tablespoons of apple juice

Method
Mix all ingredients in a blender. Transfer to ice tray. Freeze for 4 hours.

I didn’t add chia seeds to these so they haven’t got that low GI goodness that chia seeds give but this way they’re nice and smooth 🙂

Strawberry Frozen Yoghurt Popsicle

Since we’re renovating our backyard it’s been a while since I’ve grown any food (other than herbs), thus it’s been a while since I posted any food related posts. I didn’t grow anything here but I did have a recent dream that I was growing strawberries so that sort of counts! Either way, this is a healthy and tasty little treat I thought I’d share.

Ingredients
1/3 punnet strawberries, chopped
3 tbs natural yoghurt
1/4 cup apple juice
2 tsp white chia seeds

Method
Put all ingredients into a blender. Blend until smooth. Pour into popsicle moulds. Freeze for 4 hours.

The strawberry and chia seeds give it a bit of texture which I quite like. Plus the chia will give you some of that long lasting energy 🙂

New Favourite Snack

New favourite snack: cheese and biscuits with homemade green tomato chutney on top 🙂

Green Tomato Soup

My green tomato experiments continue..

Ingredients
1 onion, sliced
2 garlic cloves, sliced
1 tbs olive oil
10 green and slightly red tomatoes, sliced
750ml vegetable stock
Thyme
Salt
Pepper

Method
Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Drizzle olive oil over oven tray. Arrange sliced tomatoes and garlic on tray and drizzle more olive oil over the top. Roast for 30mins. Fry onions in large pan until soft. Add roasted tomatoes and garlic. Add stock, salt, pepper and thyme. Simmer for 20mins, stirring occasionally. Put mixture in food processor and process until smooth. Serve with crusty bread and a dollop of natural yogurt.

Green Tomato Chutney

So I cracked it with my two Roma tomato plants that I randomly chucked in the garden cos they didn’t fit in the vegie boxes. I didn’t stake them with as much love as my other tomatoes and they were falling over the lawn and the tomatoes themselves were becoming home to slugs and millipedes before I got to them. So I pulled off all the tomatoes that hadn’t yet been made into a home (all the green ones) and pulled the plants out.

Next step was to decide what to do with 1.5kg of green tomatoes

I’ve never made chutney or jam or any of those lovely things before so I took to the internet to find some recipes that a. Looked yum, b. Looked easy, and c. Got good reviews. I found this recipe called Gran’s Green Tomato Chutney.

This recipe is super easy, and I love the step by step instructions with pictures. When I first added my onion and tomatoes I thought I’d calculated the amount of vinegar wrong because there seemed to be way too many tomatoes. I quickly checked the picture associated with that step and saw that that was how it was meant to look.

You’ll be horrified to know that I bought jars. From a shop. With money. Now that I’m officially someone who makes chutney I’ll have to start saving jars!

Had my first sample of chutney tonight on a homemade quiche. A good sign is that Adam kept telling me he didn’t want to waste it on quiche because the quiche already had so much flavour that he couldn’t taste the chutney well enough. He wants us to eat it with cheese and biscuits so we can fully appreciate it’s sweet goodness. It is pretty nice I must say. I’m definitely a homemade chutney lady now! 🙂

Chilli Prawn Pasta

(With tomatoes of course!)

Ingredients
500g Fettuccine pasta
Olive oil
400g roma tomatoes, sliced into 1cm slices
2 cloves garlic, crushed
2 small, red chillies (or one if you like it milder), sliced thinly
300g raw prawns
Fresh basil
Freshly grated pecorino cheese

Method
Preheat oven to 200 degrees celcius. Arrange sliced roma tomatoes (homegrown of course) over greased oven tray. Roast for 15 minutes. Cook pasta according to instructions. Splash a generous amount of olive oil onto a hot fry pan. Fry garlic and chillies for a couple of minutes. Add prawns and fry for a further minute. Squash roasted tomatoes with a fork and add to fry pan. Add a generous handful of fresh basil to sauce. Drain fettuccine and stir pasta through sauce. Serve with freshly grated pecorino. Quick, easy, summery, mouth-watering dinner.

Basic Napolitana Sauce

Time to get my Italian on. My sister used to work in a fruit shop run by an Italian family. She was a fussy eater when she started there and didn’t like tomatoes. Oh, how quickly that changed! You weren’t allowed to be fussy there. They made it impossible to refuse offers of food. The owner, Peter, would follow my Dad around in the shop with various bunches of fruit and say things like “Warren, try these bananas, they’re beautiful” and put them in Dad’s shopping trolley. It wasn’t long before Dad realised that nothing was ever free, and while this seemed like a nice gesture at the time, he always had to pay for it at the register. Mum would often say things like “why did you buy paw paw?” and Dad would innocently say “Peter made me, I had no choice”, and he was right. There was no choice. So not only did my sister start liking tomatoes because not liking them was not an option, she also learnt about the wonderful things you could do with tomatoes. She worked there for many years and quickly became part of the family. She has dark hair and fair skin so many people actually thought she was their daughter. She worked there around the age when one starts to become interested in cooking and her fruit shop mum, Joanne started sharing recipes. Long story short, I tried cooking my first proper napolitana sauce using Joanne’s recipe and homegrown tomatoes.

The recipe says to use 1.5kg of Roma tomatoes, but I happened to have about 2kg of Romas and Big Reds so I used a combination.

It took me forever to take the tops off each tomato, score them, dip them in almost boiling water for 10 seconds, transfer them to an ice bath, then peel them. So labour intensive! The Roma tomatoes peeled a lot easier than the Big Reds.

I then chopped each tomato in half and squeezed out the juice and seeds. This was also easier with the Roma tomatoes than the Big Reds because the Big Reds have so many intricate chambers of seeds.

After about an hour of tomato prep I could finally chop them up and chuck them in my saucepan. I cooked the sauce for about 3 hours and it made the house smell amazing! In 3 hours of cooking I probably only needed about one cup of boiling water to add to the sauce.

Homemade napolitana served on egg fettuccine, topped with basil and freshly grated pecorino. It would have been better with parmesan because the strong flavour of the sauce overpowered the pecorino, but I didn’t have any fresh parmesan. I licked my plate afterwards. And Adam kept opening the fridge and sniffing the leftover sauce. Must be a good sign!

Juicy, Seedy Tomatoes

Clever blog friends: I’m attempting my first proper napolitana sauce which meant squeezing the juice and seeds out of 2kg of homegrown tomatoes. I’ve kept most of it cos it feels like such a waste to throw it away. Any suggestions about what to do with about 200ml of tomato seeds in their juice?

The sauce is currently simmering away making my house smell sweet and garlicky. I shall post the recipe later (if it tastes good!)

🙂

A Bounty Of Tomatoes

Up until now the tomatoes have been coming in a nice steady stream of 4 or 5 a day. And between my boyfriend and I we’d easily get through that many a day. But yesterday’s harvest gave me about 30 tomatoes. True, I’d just done a couple of 12 hour shifts so I hadn’t picked any for a couple of days but still, that’s a lot of tomatoes! Time to get out the napolitana sauce recipe I think!

I did cook up about half of these last night into a very basic pasta dish courtesy of Jamie Oliver.

I love Jamie Oliver recipes because they are so simple and flavoursome. I was drawn to the roasting of the tomatoes for this sauce. So sweet and yummy! The recipe I used for this dish is here:

http://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/pasta-recipes/penne-with-tomato-basil-olives-and-pecorino/#UhvKy286f5jIYGp5.97