a saucy experiment with green tomatoes

Last week I wrote about leaving the green tomatoes on the window sill to slowly ripen but then on the weekend I had a change of heart and instead thought I’d make a tomato ketchup with them, only green!

I had in my mind a lovely bright green sauce which tasted just like red ketchup.

I read a couple of recipes, one for green tomato chutney and one for red tomato ketchup and sort of morphed the two recipes, taking bits from both.

The mixture smelled delicious as it cooked – sweet and vinegary – but as they cooked, the green tomatoes lost their bright green and the whole mixture turned a kind of swampy greeny-brown, which was not quite what I’d imagined and did not look very appetizing.

Luckily, I had some dark-fleshed plums going a bit soft in the fruit bowl, so I chopped them up and threw them into the mixture (channeling MacGyver – with his mad problem solving skillz) and -whew- that took the mixture from unappetizing pond-scum to dark ruby red. (Not tomato sauce red, mind you, but still, at least it looked edible.)

When the mixture was cooked, I pureed it and bottled it in Agee jars.

It tastes somewhere between homemade ketchup and a BBQ sauce. I don’t know what to call it – but name or no name – it tastes good!

(Don’t ask for the recipe – my experiment was highly unscientific and I wouldn’t want to be responsible for ensuing disasters. My kitchen methods are pretty renegade.)