Our Wee Farm

First Passata of the year.

Last year we made enough passata to last us all through winter ... or so I thought. It lasted about 3 weeks! (absolutely delicious on pasta with mozzarella and basil)

This year I have 8 times as many tomato plants and even though we're eating them all the time, we still managed to make our first batch of passata. The J Walsh yellow tomatoes, while lovely, don't have as much of a tomatoy flavour as the Tommy Toe red, so we put all of them in the sauce ( hence the paler colour) along with a lot of red ones.  It's delicious. 

We've put it in bags to freeze, half lt for 4 people and 1/4 lt for just the 2 of us.

We also invested in a mouli. Last year Lloyd squished it all through a sieve by hand ~ it was very time consuming. So the mouli is great!

There's about 4 litres here.

Edited to add the recipe for My slightly mad friend
In a large pan lightly fry garlic and onion ( to taste and depending on how much tomato you have) then half all your tomatoes, add them to the pan and cook right down for about an hour. Let cool.
Take another pan and either use the back of a spoon and shove the tomato mixture through a sieve or go to your local kitchen shop and purchase a mouli, if you don't have one already) and mouli the mixture into the other pan.
That's it! You could add some other things, like herbs or sherry or you could add that when you actually use the passata. Personally it tastes so good I like it just like it is.
Next time we make it I'll take pics of the process - I find I need pics of something so I understand what to do. Does that make me certain brain sided??

Anyway...

The day before yesterday I staked up one of the chilli plants, it was so laden it had fallen over. I was worried it would break, but took the chance anyway. It did break - three branches full of chillis snapped off. The rest of the plant is still fine though, so I took all the chillis off the broken branches. If it's anything like last year I think it'll grow more from where they broke off, anyway.

It's actually raining today, real heavy rain. The first proper ran we've had since mid-October, we're well happy. So are the trees, the grass and the ducks.