Dear Laura
There’s something to be said for moving into a house with an established vegetable patch, even if it has been rather neglected. Tomato plants do need a bit of pampering in the early stages and tend to produce small, misshapen fruit with brown blobs on, if they don’t get it. But all is not lost.
If some of them are still flowering, you could improve their chances considerably by pruning off the branches that are producing tomatoes which go rotten before they ripen, tying the main plants to upright poles (fencing standards are ideal for this, because the string doesn’t slip down them) and giving them food and water. I prefer to use natural remedies – for humans and veggies alike – so I would suggest digging in some mushroom compost near the roots and giving them a bit of potash. You don’t have to buy the potash. Just sprinkle a bit of the ash from your braai round the plants and water it in. By the way, don’t use a sprinkler. Tomatoes don’t like their leaves and fruit being doused in municipal water.
Of course, it may be too late for natural remedies, and your tomatoes may need the veggy equivalent of antibiotics – fertiliser!
You may still find yourself having to buy tomatoes for salads, but the hotch-potch collection you are getting now should improve later, and there are all sorts of ways to use third-grade fruit.
If you are going to cook tomatoes, other than grilling or frying for breakfast, it’s a good idea to skin them before chopping them up. The easiest way to do this is to put them, whole, into a dish and cover them with boiling water for two minutes. Then the skins just peel off. If you are dealing with half-tomatoes (i.e. the good halves of half-rotten ones), then put them, skin-side-up, in a roasting tray in the oven for 20 minutes. Then you can pick the skins off the top.
Once the tomatoes are cooked, you can freeze them for use in pasta sauces and so on. What I often do is to fry some chopped onion and garlic, add the skinned tomatoes and cook it up into a braai sauce to freeze for later. Rather like the boarding school dish you so disgustingly referred to as “train smash”. Bangers and mash and train smash became one of my favourite suppers, too!
Making tomato soup can be a bit of a problem. If you chuck the tomatoes into a blender, you get all the seeds in it. The recipes all tell you to press the pulp through a sieve, but this is very time-consuming and really not an option for a working wife. When you were a baby, I had a wonderful hand-operated gadget that turned anything into baby food. It was made by Moulinex, and I had it sent from France. It was totally unavailable in South Africa at the time, so, when you grew some teeth, I gave it to a pregnant friend.
I spent the next twenty years regretting my generosity and pressing tomatoes through sieves! Then I found a shop in Northgate which sells them, and my life as a soup dragon is back on course!
The ‘tomatapi soup’ I made in the Okavango Delta depended not only on surplus tomatoes, but also on getting bream out of the river at the bottom of the garden. I don’t think you can manage that in Gauteng! But you could use other sorts of fish skins, bones and heads to make the stock, which you strain, add to the tomato juice, season with salt and black pepper and thicken with a little cornflour. Add a dash of Old Brown Sherry at the last minute and serve with a blob of sour cream in the middle and a sprinkling of chopped parsley.
If you don’t have the time or inclination to mess about with fish heads, you can use chicken stock – either real or cubed – and call it ‘tomachicki soup’ instead.
I’ve never found it an embarrassment to have too many tomatoes, except when my father visited me at the height of harvest-time. I gave him tomatoes, in some form or another, for breakfast, lunch and dinner, three days running. Finally, he complained, and demanded toast and marmalade. I hadn’t any marmalade, so I offered him tomato jam! He nearly killed me.
Love Mom
