home grown

A combination of beautiful sunshine, plentiful rain and the wonderful mushroom compost I have mentioned before has resulted in a massive haul from the gardens over the last couple of months; so bountiful I was finally able to achieve my goal of creating a vegetable pasta sauce from entirely home grown produce.

My initial recipe was simply tomatoes and herbs; a stroll through the gardens and I found I could add pumpkin, leek and spinach, and a rustle through the freezer resulted in eggplant and purple carrot from an earlier harvest added to the mix.

The fresh ingredients were used in the quantities I was able to harvest from the garden, with one cup of carrot and one and a half of eggplant.

I peeled and seeded the tomatoes (the most time consuming part of the entire recipe!) and roasted the pumpkin with a little olive oil and pepper for half an hour at 200°C, then everything went into the pot as follows.

My ingredients; most fresh, some frozen, but all home grown.

Pumpkin, pre-roasting, tossed with olive oil and pepper.

Peeled and chopped tomatoes added to the sautéed leeks and simmered for 10 minutes.

Eggplant added and simmer for another 10 minutes.

Finally, roasted pumpkin and finely chopped spinach, parsley, basil and garlic chives are added and simmer together for another 10 minutes.

I ended up with a good eight cups of sauce, which I divided into four lots to be frozen for winter. A week later we've already eaten one portion with pasta and mama-made garlic and basil meatballs, it was simply divine!