Advent 2022 - Fast Tracking #23

 

Today's Challenge: Fast from... all imported foods.

Breakfast

black Tregothnan tea

grape juice (pressed from our own grapes and frozen) 

morello cherries picked at the local PYO in July and bottled

homemade Greek-style yoghurt

Lunch

British cheese (Lincolnshire Poacher, Isle of Mull cheddar), granary bread

Tea

black Tregothnan tea

toasted English wholemeal muffin made as per Day #7 with homemade damson jelly made from foraged and homegrown fruit

Supper

egg pasta (made with eggs from our bantams who are kindly still laying) with home-grown tomato sauce* from the freezer and grated Cornish cheddar cheese. 

leftover steamed blackberry puddings with blackberry sauce and homemade egg custard

*I made and froze the sauce for this back in November when the last of our homegrown tomatoes needed picking and using up. 

In addition to the slightly motley selection of homegrown tomatoes, I used some British red onions, a handful of carrots, a couple of red peppers, herbs from the garden and four homegrown and home-dried chillies as per the pics below. I don't usually add chillies to my tomato sauces but in the absence of being able to use any black pepper, I thought the home-grown chillies might add a welcome note of warmth.

I usually cook the vegetables for tomato sauce in olive oil first before adding tinned Italian chopped tomatoes and a bit of water before cooking in the pressure cooker for 12 minutes. The sauce sometimes needs reducing, once the pressure has dropped and I then just blitz it with a stick blender for a smoothish pasta or pizza sauce. For this, olive oil was out so I cooked the vegetables first in some British salted butter.

The end-of-season fresh tomatoes made the sauce much more watery so it needed a lot of reduction to  thicken it and  I then had to put the whole thing through the mouli to remove the tomato and pepper skins, chilli stalks and seeds and the woody stems of the herbs which in November were rather tough. The sauce was a lot of effort to make and get to the right consistency but making it ahead of time and freezing it made supper today pretty straightforward. 

E x