Suburban Tomato

I’m getting very excited about my summer crops at the moment.  I planted out the tomatoes today.  The eggplants, capsicums and chillies are hardening off and I harvested some winter grown potatoes yesterday.  All in all I have become absolutely obsessed with Solanaceae crops (sorry Daphne).  It is a little easy though to come up with a Top 5 – Tomatoes, Eggplant, Peppers, Potato and in my case Tamarillo (although only if I group chillies and capsicums together as peppers).  Instead in this post I take it one step further and give you my top variety for each of the above top 5.

Tomatoes – Rouge de Marmande

You can find Rouge de Marmande tomatoes in every nursery/plant retailer in Melbourne, even my local supermarket stocks them, for good reason though, they are a great variety.  They taste great, are well suited to Melbourne’s climate, are generally very productive and are reasonably compact plants (all things being relevant they are tomatoes after all….).  Rouge de Marmande plants grow to about 1-1.5 metres which means that if you have 2 metre stakes you’ll be fine.  They produce a lovely slicing tomato that also makes great sauce – what more could you possibly want?

Eggplant – Bonica

I have to admit this was something of a close call between Bonica and Lebanese eggplants – the latter being a long skinny variety and Bonica being the more traditional oval type shape.  Bonica though won the day because I usually find it to be more productive and I find I use the larger fruits in more recipes.  Bonica grows well in Melbourne and the plants can get pretty big which means lots of yummy eggplants to eat.

Potatoes – Kipfler

Again this was something of a close call – I also rate Dutch Cream really highly amongst others but Kipfler won on a couple of counts.  Firstly it crops comparatively quickly – about 3 months from sending up shoots to dying back.  The second reason is that it just tastes so damn good!  The Kipfler potatoes at the supermarket are flaccid and barely OK.  Home grown ones are firm, fresh and delicious.  Finally as they are a small salad potato they don’t require heaps of room for the tubers so you can grow them in anything from a medium sized pot to a garden bed and everything in between.

Chillies – Scotch Bonnet Chillies

I haven’t included a capsicum in my list because I simply haven’t found one in particular that stands out from the rest.  I have been growing the same unknown variety for the last few years but unfortunately I’m not sure what variety it is and also it does have off years.  So my pepper selection falls to chillies and this is the category I struggled with the most.  In the end I went for Scotch Bonnet for a couple of reasons.  The plants are relatively long-lived and get through Melbourne winters fairly happily (they do sometimes lose quite a lot of leaves (if not all) towards the end of winter/start of Spring but the foliage should start to reappear in mid Spring).  They crop heavily and the fruits look pretty.  Finally as they are medium/mild heat they are pretty versatile in terms of what you can do with them.  They make good sambal oelek.  They are delicious stuffed and they can be happily used in any recipe where you’d use chilli.

Tamarillo

Actually I have absolutely no idea what variety my Tamarillo is.  I saved the seed from a fruit given to me by a friend and she’d got it from one of her friends who had a tree but didn’t like the fruit.  I do know the tree is in Geelong so perhaps I should call it Geelong Tamarillo.  Regardless though it is a great fruit (presuming you like Tamarillos that is….).

For another (as yet unknown but bound to be fabulous) Top 5 head over to The New Good Life. 

A couple weeks ago I wrote a post on the best sauces to make with herbs.  This week I thought I’d return to the saucy theme, only this time it’s sauces made from either fruits or vegetables.   It is the AFL grand final this week after all and what else would you eat while watching the footy but a pie and sauce?  Which brings me to my very obvious and predictable number one:

Tomato Sauce (Ketchup).  On more than one occasion I’ve caught my two year old son drinking tomato sauce direct from the bottle.  He’s not particularly discerning, he drinks commercial sauce and home made sauce in equal quantities.  In his eyes, and those of much of the western (if not whole) world there’s something about the combination of tomatoes, spices, vinegar and sugar that is hugely irresistible.

 Chilli Sauce.  For me tomato vs chilli is a pretty close run thing.  I love chilli sauce.  I love sweet chilli sauce, I love the harsher and hotter varieties and I love Tabasco.  When I travelled in my early 20s I used to do it with a bottle of Tabasco sauce in my backpack and frankly there were more than a few places that I visited that I was hugely grateful to have it.  Ugali/fufu is really not that flavourful, or at least its not when its prepared in your average East African backpacker cafe….

Aioli Some of the best sauces in the world aren’t preserves.  Some are delicious unctuous concoctions that draw together the pungency of garlic with the delicious richness of mayonnaise.  Aioli might not be that good for you (unless of course you’re being chased by a swarm or two of vampires) but it sure tastes delicious.

Cucumber dipping sauce – I have tried the fishcakes in virtually every Thai restaurant I’ve ever eaten in, and I’ve tipped a good many of them in some cucumber dipping sauce.  Made with diced cucumber, sugar, vinegar, fish sauce, chilli, and peanuts as its base ingredients, cucumber dipping sauce is at once refreshing, moreish, warming, cooling and just plain delicious.

Jam Sauce – Not all sauces are savoury, some are sweet.  You’ve got chocolate sauce, custard and the very little known and under appreciated jam sauce.  Jam sauce is what I tend to make when I make jam, or rather when I try to make jam in about half the time it usually takes to make it.  Fortunately I actually really like runny jam and find it great to swirl through yoghurt, drizzle over pancakes, use to glaze tarts and drip onto toast.  All in all it does everything jam can do and a little bit more.

And that was my Top 5 sauces made from fruit or vegetables (but not herbs – for them go to my previous post).  What would make your list?

Speaking of lists Barbara Good should have another Top 5 for you over at The New Good Life.