Tomato Relish, thanks to Ronan

Well Hi again, as I mentioned in the previous Blog we had picked a bucket of tomatoes from the garden, and Ronan made (with a little help from Mum) a tomato relish.
The recipe we used was a "whatever we have in the house" recipe. Using ingredients that could be used to make a tomato relish, without going out shopping.
We used:

Small bucket of baby roma tomatoes (picked from the garden)

Some brown sugar, what was left of a Spanish onion, about 3/4, some Italian white wine vinegar (I'm not big on measuring), sprig of Rosemary (picked from the garden), garlic, mustard, all spice and seasoning

Roughly chop the tomatoes (we want a chunky relish)

Chop, chop, chop

and more chopping !

Mummy did the onions

Peeling the Rosemary off the sprig

Scrape ingredients into the Le Creuset - of course !

Stir onion gently until almost clear, then add brown sugar, let cook for a while until dissolved. Then add all the rest of the ingredients - I used about two tablespoons of vinegar and the same of brown sugar and then heaps of garlic.

Bring to boil, then turn down to simmer, for around an hour or so, you can tell buy how it looks and tastes when its finished.

Reducing nicely, just a bit longer

Ready to jar up into some washed out, left over pesto jars we had

Finished product!

You could wash the labels off these and decorate with fabric and ties. They would make great gifts.

Ronan - "Junior Master Chef "- very proud of his work.

Verdict:

Tasted this so far with eggs on toast for breakfast, mmmmm. Then I had it with spinach and ricotta triangles, yummmy. Next time we will add chilli to it, for Mum and Dad.

Vege Garden and bling shoes.

Just over a year ago my amazing husband told me he was going to build a little vegetable garden in the back yard, I thought this was a great idea. I expected to come down from working in the house to find a nice little turned and planted patch. With some key items we use regularly, something small and easy to tend to (because I knew that would be my job). To my pleasant surprise I found a masterpiece that measured about 14 foot by 20 foot !! Well it flourished, as you can see in these old pictures, this was our first crop !!!

We used most of what grew, but it was all new to both of us and at the end of these crops we changed our strategy. Well, we actually let it rest for a while and then started over again. We now grow the following items and they also flourish: snow peas, coriander, spinach, bok choy, silver beet, rocket, corn and lettuce. I love just being able to pop down the back yard to cut off some fresh greens etc to add to our meals. He has also recently been testing some brewing herbs like mints and lemon grasses to have as tea, they taste amazing! Our most recent addition was some comfrey, research needs to be done on how to use this one.

A recent post in the "Diary of a Shoe lover" Blog, I wrote about the use of my old shoes as House Shoes. I really do wear these as my garden shoes, and now my chick feeding shoes.

After planting all the seedlings mentioned above, we had a tomato plant grow up by itself (above left), it just kept growing and growing and growing. It also produced lots of what we eventually worked out must be a miniature roma tomato plant. They are delicious, and we have harvested about 10 kilos from this one plant! Its at the end of its life, hopefully we can grow some vines off the seeds. Well, I am about to go and make a tomato relish with the last bucket load of them, fun fun. Actually I thin I will get Ronan to make it.

Talk soon x

Waiter, I think there's a chicken in my salad !!!!

Welcome

Welcome to this little Blog, it will have lots of stories about shoes, food, and other related subjects. I do hope you enjoy this, I absolutely loove food, wine and shoes. Whilst I always appreciated great shoes, my obsession with them has grown over recent years.  I have had access to some awesome shoes (wine and food as well) so I felt I should share some of this with the world. I hope you enjoy x First official Blog coming soon !