Grow Your Own Veggies - Make Your Own Food

Come with me to show you the garden and what I've been working on today 😉

It's mid August, the time when you harvest most of the vegetable. This year we're late with everything as we were stuck in the city during the lockdown, thus many of the veggies are only ripe now. No worries, better late than never and we're still grateful for what we get, even if it's just 30% of what we used to in other years.

We're lucky to have some wonderful neighbors who helped us a lot during the lockdown and and still helping every way they can as they have plenty and they are generous. People like them don't grow on every tree.

Today was the day to harvest tomatoes and make tomato sauce for the winter. It's the best period of the year as we get to enjoy the fruit of out work and the fruits mother nature gave us this year.

Gardening Report

This is a tomato sauce with onion, that you can have with spaghetti or any kind of pasta, or just with mashed tomato and stake or any kind of meat. I'm going to share the recipe with you, but first come with me to show you where the whole thing starts.

First of all, for this recipe you need tomatoes. What better place to look for tomatoes than your own garden, right?

One of the advantages of growing your own tomatoes is that you can grow whatever type you like and believe me, it's very important to choose the right one. We always have at least four or five, let's see how many I can show you today.

This is flat and big. The three tomatoes you see here probably weigh 2kg. It's sweet and can be eaten raw and it's perfect for juice and sauce as well as the juice you get is very thick.

These are mostly for juice and sauce. You can eat them raw but they have a thick skin, which I don't really like. The good thing about these is that have very little juice, these have more flesh than juice.

These are my favorites, sweet and just the perfect amount of juice and flesh. Just perfect to eat them raw. Obviously you can make juice and sauce as well and we do both when we have plenty. Us first, juice and sauce after. However, we have plenty of the others, so this can be for raw consumption. The one on the photo still needs a few days to ripe though.

This is another type, not so brilliant this year. These tomatoes don't grow so big and this year, due to too much sun, most of them are burnt. See those white spots? Those spots will never be red as those a burn marks. So these will go into the sauce.

Tomato Sauce With Onion

This is a recipe my dad has found on the internet and have thought it worth a try. By the time I got here, he already made a small quantity and today we made double quantity as it's good. There are plenty of tomatoes in the garden, so why not diversify what we do and try out new sauces, right?

Ingredients

3 kg tomato,
2 red peppers,
1 kg onion,
4 clove garlic,
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil,
0.5 dl vinegar,
a few basil leaves,
1 tsp salt,
1 tsp pepper,
1 tsp oregano,
6 decagram sugar.

The beauty of this recipe is that has no conservant/preservative at all, which makes it more healthy.

Method

First you need to get the tomato juice ready. We have this amazing tool we're using for juice.

omato Sauce With Onion.jpg

Mince the re pepper, garlic and onion as well, or chop them, as you like. My dad has chopped the first one and it was kind of lumpy at the end, so this time we decided to mince the paprika, onion and garlic.

Add the vegetables to a pot and cook on medium heat till it gets the consistency you need. It took me 45 minutes or so. It is important to choose your tomatoes wisely, pick the one with more flesh, otherwise you'll get a very thin juice that needs indefinite cooking.

Add the spices, salt, pepper, vinegar and sugar and cook for about 20 minutes.

Bottling

This is a very important step as the sauce has no conservants. Here's what we do. Microwave the clean jars for about 1m, fill them up to the neck with sauce, put the cap on and turn them upside down for about 5 minutes. Microwaving is needed to sterilize the jars and turning them upside down has the same purpose. After 5 minutes you can turn them back on, cover with a blanket and let cool for a day.

It's the best way to have some sauce for the winter, without any chemicals added. It's healthy, easy to do and can come in handy when you don't have time to cook.

This is my entry to Hive account@ecotrain's challenge called "Simple Vegan Cooking On A Budget Month!"

Check out my latest recipes:

Grow Your Own Veggies - Make Your Own Food - Tomato Sauce With Onion for ecoTrain Simple Vegan Cooking On A Budget Month

Gardening Report

Tomato Sauce With Onion

Ingredients

Method

Bottling