Something Smells Good

Any idea what this is?
You’ll get the answer further down in the post.

Woke up to a rainy day today. The bowl of green tomatoes sat on the breakfast table.

 

I decided to weigh them.

Turned out I had enough for half a batch of green tomato marmalade…  (0,5 kilo)

I also had a lemon (which the recipe requires.)
So I squeezed the juice out of that, and grated the peel.

My old recipe uses lots of sugar… 1,5 liter for 1 kilo of tomatoes?! That seemed a bit much…  I checked some other recipes on the internet and decided 4 deciliters was probably enough for my half kilo of tomatoes.

What I did not have was whole chunks of ginger root (which are supposed to cook with the tomatoes and then picked out before you put the marmalade into jars). I did have ginger powder, though. So I added some of that. I also had cinnamon bark sticks (there’s your answer to the first picture). Cinnamon was not in the recipe, but since I was in experimental mood, why not? If nothing else, it looked nice for the picture!

Into the pot with the tomatoes, the lemon juice, the grated lemon peel, the ginger, the cinnamon. I also added just a little bit of water because my recipe said so. I should probably have left that out. Especially since I did not have any of that Certo pectin stuff at home either (which helps the marmalade set).

Boil for 20 minutes, then add the sugar.
Let the sugar melt and let it boil again.

Skim the foam of the surface. (Not that there was much of it. Pour the marmalade into jars. I used four “baby food” size jars.

And then just hope that it sets! I think this batch got a bit runny, but I’ll no doubt be able to use it anyway.

The balance between sweet and sour (and ginger and cinnamon!) came out quite nice (to my taste).

And the four little jars of marmalade do make it feel more worth while having watered those tomatoes on the balcony all summer… It’s been “ages” since I last made my own marmalade  – well, at least three years, because that’s how long it’s been since I last grew my own tomatoes!

 

 

 

Harvest Time

 

Taking into account how many litres of water I had to carry through the flat from the kitchen to the balcony during the hot weeks of the  summer, I’m not sure the harvest from my tomato plants this year can be considered “worth” the trouble. Only three or four fruits (did you know they are fruits, not vegetables?) reached even a shade of red while still on the plant. Today I had to harvest the rest, green as they were, or the next wind would just have scattered them over the balcony floor.

22 July. The tomato plants are the big one in the right hand corner and the smaller one in the black pot to the left of it.

17 August (“big” tomatoes)

 
8 September (the same pair as above)

13 September - Cherry tomatoes from the small plant (the size of cherries)

 
Yesterday I ate the red ones. To be quite honest, the ones I buy at the supermarket taste better…

This was my first attempt where I live now to grow tomatoes. At my previous flat, the balcony was a little bigger and more sheltered, but had less sun. I never managed to get the tomatoes red on the plant there either. But some years I got enough of green ones to make a few jars of green tomato marmalade from them. The recipe includes lemons and ginger (and sugar, of course).

Well, this year at least I got a blog post out of them!