I use green tomatoes to make my kasoundi a little bit different.

For this recipe, I grow my own green tomatoes and use the green tomato you end up with at the end of the season.

You will need to grow green tomatoes yourself, or if you know a commercial tomato grower (one who sells from the farm gate), you might be able to buy some green tomatoes to use in this recipe.

You can make Kasoundi with red tomatoes if you like, but I offer no guarantees that the recipe will work as I have only ever used green.

Recipe  

Ingredients

• 125 grams fresh ginger peeled and chopped
• 65 grams garlic, peeled and chopped
• 30 grams green chillies, deseeded and chopped
• 25 ml vinegar
• 125 ml vegetable oil (I use grapeseed)
• 45 grams Black Mustard Seeds
• 15 grams Turmeric
• 45 grams Cumin
• 1 kg Green Tomatoes, peeled and chopped
• 250 ml vinegar, extra
• 125 grams brown sugar
• 25 grams salt

Method

Clean and roughly chop the tomatoes. Place in a saucepan and cook down until soft enough to run through the mouli. Puree and set aside.

Mince ginger, garlic and chillies with 25 ml of vinegar in the food processor to make a paste

Heat oil until very hot in a heavy-based pan, then cook off mustard seeds, turmeric and cumin, until aromas lift off the pan. Add ginger paste and cook for a further 5 minutes.

Add tomatoes, 250ml extra vinegar, sugar and salt, then simmer until the oil floats to the top. This took about ½ an hour for this quantity.

Bottle and seal in hot sterilized jars

Curried Zucchini Relish

This has always been one of my best sellers when guests come to visit.

It could have something to do with that it is fantastic whipped into a 250-gram packet of cream cheese to make a corn relish style dip!

If zucchinis are in season, we may make Curried Zucchini relish in a Jacican preserving cooking class. 

Recipe

Ingredients

• • 1 kg zucchini - 1 cm dice
  • 500 grams onion, peeled and chopped
  • 70 grams salt
  • 570 ml vinegar
  • 320 grams brown sugar
  • 70 grams arrowroot
  • 10 grams turmeric
  • 10 grams mustard powder
  • 10 grams curry powder
  • 5 grams ground ginger
  • 5 grams paprika - mild
  • 150 ml vinegar, extra

Method

Dice zucchini, chop the onion and combine in a non-corrosive bowl. I use a large plastic bucket that fits in the fridge. 

Sprinkle with salt, cover with tap water and leave in the fridge overnight.

The next day drain very well.

Place vinegar in a large pan with sugar, heat, stirring until sugar has dissolved.  Bring to boil.  Add zucchini and onion.

Mix arrowroot with spices and extra vinegar to form a paste. 

Add the paste to zucchini.  Return to the boil.  Boil 10 minutes.

Bottle and seal in hot sterilized jars.

You should have six and a half 250 mls jars of Curried Zucchini Relish from this recipe. 

See you in the kitchen soon!

PS: If you would like me to teach you how to make Curried Zucchini Relish, come along to a Jacican preserving cooking class.

Each summer in Gippsland, we all have too many zucchinis growing in our veggie patches. 

If you visit Jacican for a preserving cooking class over the summer Zucchini Bread and Butter pickles may be one of the recipes we cook for you to take home!

I have in the past cut all the vegetables for this pickle by hand, but time is short, so now I use the food processor to save time.  You could use a mandolin if you want to risk your fingertips.  Hand cutting the zucchini is fine, but you may not get a uniform thickness.

Recipe

Ingredients

• 1 kg Zucchini sliced
• 500 grams of brown onion - peeled and sliced
• 60 grams of salt
• 1 litre vinegar
• 250 grams of sugar
• 25 grams of yellow mustard seeds
• 5 grams of turmeric

Method

Place zucchini and onion in a large non-corrosive bowl.  I use a large plastic bucket that will fit in the fridge. 

Sprinkle with salt and cover with tap water.  Leave in the fridge overnight.

The next day drain very well. 

Place in a large saucepan, add the sugar, mustard seed, turmeric and celery seed. 

Barley cover with vinegar.  Don't worry if you don't use all the vinegar.  Stand for 2 hours.

Bring to the boil and cook for 5 minutes.

Bottle and seal in hot sterilized jars. I like to drain the cooked zucchini first, then wearing gloves to fill the jars. Once all your jars are full, top with the vinegar mixer. 

This recipe makes six * 250ml jars. 

Enjoy!

Looking at the BOM, this area of Gippsland usually gets about 50 mm of rain in January. 

It looks and feels like we have had a month of January rain in the last two days.

Checking the 7-day forecast, the air temperatures are not warming up that much for a summer in Gippsland, but seasonal gardeners know this, and new gardeners need to learn it; plants need more than air temperature to grow. 

They also need the soil temperature to rise and longer days with more sunlight. 

Even though humans can’t see it, the days create enough sunlight for the tomato plants to photosynthesis, creating their own food.

So we don’t need to worry that much about all this rain.  

It just means that we don’t need to hand water; the tanks stay full, and it is unlikely that they will run dry by February, like most years (last year, it was mid-January). 

Daily inspections will keep an eye out for fungus, mildew and blossom rot on the plants, but there is enough airflow around the tomato plants and they are pretty healthy to begin with, so it is not foreseen as a problem. 

The most significant problem pests here are cabbage moths, and these cooler temperatures and wet weather help keep them under control, as they don’t like the rain. 

This year, there are 78 tomato plants in the Jacican vegetable patch spread over two- and a bit garden beds; there are plenty of flowers but sadly no tomatoes yet.  

This is not a worry, as there is still time. 

It paces the growth over the summer, giving a bounty of different things at different times and hopefully, then there will be tomatoes until Mother’s Day. 

Of the 78, 16 are standard varieties, Grosse Lisse and Romas, and the rest are heirloom varieties grown from seed from August in the glasshouse and planted in raised garden beds in the backyard.

For some reason, just to start even earlier, a giant heirloom tomato that came from a friend of a friend (saved by being left on the bench until it turned into a hard, tiny ball) was planted out in July and placed in the lounge room next to the wood heater to sprout.  

These were the first tomatoes planted in the vegetable garden at the start of November, with the rest going into the patch at the beginning of December. 

Growing from seed takes longer, so sometimes it is later before they can go into the ground. 

Knowing what I know now about microclimates and how to grow things, maybe the vegetable garden wouldn’t be where it is, and perhaps someone would have moved the house to put the garden in a better spot. 

The vegetable patch here is on the south end of the block, on a south-facing slope, which makes it a coldish micro-climate for tomatoes and their friends in the Solanaceae family. 

But this doesn’t stop tomatoes growing each summer; it is just not too suitable for others in the family like capsicums and eggplants. 

Soil preparation is the most crucial step for everything in the vegetable patch. 

We sprinkle over handfuls of blood and bone, top dress with mushroom compost, and finish with sugar cane and straw mulch.

All those years ago, when planting my first crop of tomatoes, the advice was given to make up a slurry of water-retaining crystals with a bit of liquid fertilizer and put a handful under each tomato plant to help it establish, give it a feed and not let the roots dry out. 

This has been done yearly since with every tomato crop, which means that once the tomatoes start to flower and are given a top feed with potash, there is no need to feed them throughout the season. 

As needed, the tomatoes are given a light prune and tied up. 

Using a tripod system, plastic-coated metal poles with an extra centre wooden stake for added support, which is not the cheapest system, but after ten years of use, they are still up to the job. 

Touch wood, here’s hoping that all the tomatoes survive the rain, keep flowering, then fruit, and 2024 sees the biggest bumper crop of delicious juicy tomatoes ever. 

But these could be famous last words that could bite. 

Now, in this rain, if you want to talk zucchinis  … they are exploding!