Dried Tomatoes

I've been stockpiling cherry tomatoes all this week, they're ripening like crazy and there are only so many times you can eat tomatoes in a week before they get a bit boring, so on Saturday I decided it was time to do something with them.  Some sort of pasta sauce seemed like the most obvious use for them but the receipes I found all wanted them skinned.... I think not!

After a bit of searching I came across the idea of oven-drying them (an english solution to sun-dried tomatoes!) so I enlisted Rob's help to squish all the innards out of the little tomatoes and then left them in the oven for several hours with some olive oil and herbs until they came out all chewy and dry.  They taste just like the sun-dried tomatoes I've bought before with very strong tomato flavour (which to be honest I'm not all that keen on!) so I'm thinking I will try chopping them up and baking some tomato bread later on or just let Rob eat his way through them in salads etc.  Much better off this way than gradually going off in the fridge though - for now they are tucked up in the freezer until I get inspired to use them!

Cake!

From This...

Whilst not strictly made with produce from my own garden I think this still qualifies for a mention here - this is the chocolate and courgette cake that I made to celebrate passing my latest round of ACCA exams.  I used this recipe from the BBC Good Food website which calls for two courgettes both of which were donated from other peoples' gardens - a lovely yellow one from Angela and a more traditional green one from Domo at work.

To This!

It was a blissfully easy cake to cook and was delicious - much less rich than your average chocolate cake and with a lovely spongey texture to it, almost like a brownie but much lighter!

Om nom nom

There are only so many pictures I can show of plants-with-fruit-on before it starts to get a bit repetitive so I'm making a bit of a detour onto the subject of just what exactly I'm going to do with all these things once they've grown.  Entertainingly I hadn't really given this much thought when I was planting and I think next year I may try and grow things that will be useful for eating.  Nonetheless it makes a nice change to have some garden-fresh veg in our meals and it has prompted me to cook some new things because there's no way I'm letting it go to waste after all the effort I put into growing it!

And so I present - Salmon with Broad Bean cous cous and cherry tomatoes

This was from a recipe on goodtoknow.co.uk and was both tasty and stupidly easy to cook... my favourite combination :D  In short, stick the salmon in the oven, boil the beans in water just before it's ready and cover the cous cous with water per packet instructions, combine cous cous & beans, add a little lemon juice and serve!

I'd never eaten a broad bean before and was pleasantly surprised by them... probably not enough to go out and buy some but I shall certainly be eating the rest of the ones I've grown.