1 Variety

I remember hearing on the radio not so long ago, perhaps on the excellent BBC Radio 4 Food Programme, that Heinz tomato soup, was in fact probably as nutricious as one of the apparently fresher and more natural looking chilled soups that have stormed the supermarkets in recent years, like the Covent Garden Soup Company ones. Perhaps it had something to do with lipids? In any case, I've always enjoyed a can, as it's perfect comfort food on a miserable winter's day.

So maybe, and I've made no attempt to check this out, Heinz tomato ketchup is, in the pantheon of processed foods, no great demon either, at least nutricionally. But whether it is or not, unfortunately I still have a problem with it, which is the way that some people use it to totally obliterate the taste of whatever (and in some cases I really mean whatever) else it is they are eating.

Actually, although I am somewhat concerned about hoards of teenagers failing to develop an appreciation of good food, for me the problem is more personal. One of the perpetrators of the crime of food smothering is my wife, and I find it especially galling when she is doing it to something that I have lavished time and effort on in preparing. When I put a plate of home made salmon fishcakes, shepards pie or beautiful fresh spring greens in front of her it is a racing certainty that she will, admittedly slightly appologetically, reach for the bottle.

Obviously I can see that this is more my problem than hers. But today I sought a solution. As I am currently in the throes of a tomato glut - coming from the six greenhouse and three outdoor tomato plants on my allotment - I decided to make my own tomato ketchup.

Having never made ketchup before I went straight to Hugh Fearnley-Whitingstall's River Cottage Cookbook, which I thought might have a recipe, and it did.

Essentially I chopped up 2 kg of tomatoes along with a couple of onions and a red pepper and simmered them until very soft. My two year old daughter and I then went to work with the Mouli for a while before adding 60 gm of sugar, 120 mls of white wine vinegar, a pinch of mustard powder and a bag containing mace, cinnamon, cloves, garlic, bay and allspice. the recipe worked out well in every respect except for the time it took to reduce the thin sauce that came out of the Mouli to a thick gloop. Hugh suggested it might take 20-40 minutes, when in fact it took six hours!

Luckily I wasn't planning on serving it with dinner this evening. Also, and it's hard to tell as I haven't bottled it yet, but it looks like my 2 kg of tomatoes is going to produce less than one litre of sauce. Oh well, at least now when my wife smothers my food in sauce I won't think of it as another battle lost to processed food and a personal insult, and she needn't stint to avoid hurting my feelings.