Wednesday, January 04, 2012

A plethora of inexpensive tomatoes in Cyprus

Yesterday morning, I went to Achna Fruitaria. I wanted to buy some oranges, and a couple of sweet potatoes. I also thought I would get some bananas, since Tim has now gone back to the UK. Oh, and I wanted a few cherry tomatoes for lunch.

As always, I looked at the special offers. I noticed that amongst the pre-bagged produce for a euro, there were some cherry tomatoes. I shook my head inwardly.. we would never get through that many, even if they were a remarkably good deal. I did pick up a bag of regular tomatoes, also at a euro, however. I find them hard to resist.

However, when I looked at the ordinary cherry tomatoes, they were something like 3.79 per kilogram. I only wanted about 250g, if that... but it suddenly occurred to me that it would be far better value to buy the huge euro bag, even if we ended up throwing half of them away. And they looked to be fairly good quality.

So I staggered home with, in all, about 14kg produce (which cost me a grand total of just over 7 euros). I put all the tomatoes straight in the fridge.

Today, I thought I should sort through the cherry tomatoes, throwing out any that had gone bad, and selecting the best ones for eating. I was surprised at how many good ones there were, and chose quite a few - nearly a kilogram of them - which we can eat over the next few days:


Even more surprising, none of them were bad, or mouldy. Quite a few had split, some were a little squashy, and some had slightly brown skins, but they all smelled good. So I thought I might as well boil them quickly to produce juice, and then freeze them for future use. There were this many in the saucepan:


.. and after simmering for a few minutes and cooling, I froze five tubs, each with a little over 400g tomatoes - the equivalent of one medium sized can:


Then I looked at the large tomatoes I had also bought. I kept a few out to bake, then cleaned, chopped and simmered the rest of those too. Those eventually made NINE tubs, again at a little over 400g each:


And that would have been fine, except that when I opened the vegetable drawer of our large freezer, I realised that I already had six tubs of tomatoes, frozen from previous batches.

So now we have the equivalent of 20 cans of tomatoes in our freezer. They will be useful for making soup, and ketchup, and for general cooking use in the next few months...

But I really must try and resist buying more tomatoes when I see them on special offer!

1 comment:

taueret said...

It's hard to resist a bargain.