Today at 10am I picked up another 100lbs of Tomatoes! I am in the process of making Roasted Tomato Passata, it is a recipe from the River Cottage Preserves Handbook. It is delicious and so easy, and can be put in the freezer for later use! While the Passata is cooking in the oven I have been dipping the remaining tomatoes in hot water to get the skins off. I then have to core them and cut them into quarters and

Pumpkin Hand pies in the foreground and Roasted Tomato Passata

freeze them . Later I can use them for  stewed tomatoes or Sweet Tomato Chutney (a very special ketchup like chutney!). I can also make more Passata later in the winter! I used up the last of my white pumpkin that I cut up for the White Pumpkin & Ginger Marmalade.  I steamed  the pumpkin and made it into a filling for Pumpkin hand pies. Unfortunately at the moment  there is too much in activity in the kitchen to assemble the pies and once formed  they need to be frozen before they can be baked.

It is now past 9pm and by the way the the hand pies were delicious! The next time I make the hand pies I will  use less sugar in the filling and probably no vanilla . The pies were my reward for running 4 1/2 quarts of roasted tomato passata through the Foley Food Mill . Using the mill means that you don’t need to skin the tomatoes, just core them. If your sauce is well roasted, everything including  the garlic and onions will get pureed,great for apple sauce too! My husband gave me my stainless steel food mill as my old one would rust .  He ordered it  and presented it too me at the beginning of the tomato season about 5 years ago! What a great guy…how many husbands buy their wives canning equipment?

I do love the finish from the SpringForm pan!

I put 6 pints and 3 quarts of pumpkin puree in my freezer last fall and I needed to

Delicious!

start using it up. I found this recipe in a small but terrific cookbook called “A Harvest of Pumpkins and Squash-Seasonal recipes” by Lou Seibert Pappas. The coffee cakes baking smell wonderful and the recipe makes either 20 standard muffins or 1- 9″ springform pan coffee cake. You don’t use regular white sugar,but confectionery sugar plus regular white flour(I used King Arthur), Polenta, 4 eggs(from our farm ),allspice , cinnamon,baking powder,fresh rosemary minced and lemon zest.I just took out the larger of the two springform pans and only a couple more minutes on the smaller one. The recipe says  to eat it warm or at room temperature, that sounds like an invitation to try a piece tonight! I am planning to cut each of the coffee cakes in half and freeze the other halves to see how well they keep. The recipe makes so many muffins it would be nice to know I can freeze some of them and not waste them.