Saucy Tomato Ketchup and My New Mouli

Once again I can't get more pics up on blogger so I'm using picasa which lets me do one pic per blog when I really wanted to do three. Anyway this pic is pivotal to the story so it wins. The other pics would have been my lovely new stainless steel mouli and my finished bottles of tomato sauce.
We call tomato ketchup, tomato sauce. This should not be confused with passata or pasta-type sauce. So this is about the stuff that people put on their barbecued snags (sausages) and steaks and chips etc.
The recipe like many others I use for garden vegie gluts is from the book shown here. It was written by three NZ sisters, Mary Browne, Helen Leach and Nancy Tichbourne. It was first published in 1982 and my paperback (limp edition) is from 1986. It is subtitled "For cooks who garden and gardeners who cook". Obviously this was well before the ubiquitous take over of THAT for other pronouns such as WHO and WHICH.

It not only tells you how to grow the stuff but how to cook it and how to deal with seasonal gluts. It's fantastic and I have used it as my vegie growing and cooking bible for 25 years.

The reason for this telling is that on the way home from Echuca we stopped at Elmore and then Bendigo( more about Bendigo later ). Once upon a time, a few years ago I stopped and bought a 10 kilo box of tomatoes in Elmore for $10. They were amazingly red, had very few seeds and hardly any watery stuff ran out when they were cut open. Absolutely wonderful. So we stopped again and bought a box. YES they were just as good and I have just finished making 15 bottles of ketchup and have enough cut up and salting for ten jars of spicy relish.

But I don't know if I will be able to make the ketchup so easily again. Even though I bought a wonderful new stainless steel mouli I have run out of a vital ingredient...glacial acetic acid.

This was available at chemists in the old days but now pharmacies deal in ready made tablets and just put labels and instructions on the boxes and I shall have to go to a "Compounding Pharmacy" to get this ingredient. The great blessing about it is that you add 2 tablespoons of it instead of about cups of vinegar so you don't have to boil it all down for so long. In fact with good tomatoes the boiling down takes only about 10 minutes and the acetic acid is always the last ingredient to be added.

This wonderful book also gives the best recipe for green tomato and apple chutney and lots of others which I adhere to. My best selling savoury product on my market stall is the chutney.
Fortunately my SIL has a BIL who grows hydroponic tomatoes so that I can get them any time of the year to stock up.

If anyone can't get this book and would like recipes please ask in the comments section and I will email them to you. It doesn't just have to be about tomatoes. This book deals with everything you can grow in NZ and OZ. I love it!
Cheers for now Gillian