recipe

Jammin' with Tomatoes

One of my stronger childhood memories is of visiting my paternal grandparents for the weekend, waking up earlier than mum and dad, going upstairs to where my grandparents were already up and about and being given a couple of pieces of bread with butter and tomato jam. Yummo. Since we have a reasonable crop of tomatoes coming on at the moment I thought I’d turn some into tomato jam. I did make tomato jam around 10 years ago but didn’t have the recipe accessible so went searching online…

Barbeque Rub

We bought a new barbeque a couple of months ago and I spent a little time looking online for barbeque rub ‘recipes’. Most (all?) recipes have added sugar, but we wanted to avoid that so we just leave the sugar out. That may affect the flavour and caramelisation a little, but it doesn’t bother us. I narrowed down the choices to a couple of recipes and merged/deleted items to arrive at the following:

steak

When I was young my parent’s house back onto bushland. This meant that the shortage of neighbours was more than offset by the availability of firewood. Often on a weekend we would have a barbeque for lunch (generally on a Sunday, Saturday was golf day). Standard fare was steak, sausages, tossed green salad and sauce. Almost invariably the steak was cooked to within an inch of its life - well, a few feet into death, really.

Bread and Butter Pudding

One dessert I can distinctly recall from my childhood is bread and butter pudding. The best bits were the bread that had sat on top of the baking custard - they had the flavour of the custard but a more substantial texture because they had been on top. The sultanas were acceptable, but optional in my view. Those sultanas that had managed to breach the surface were quickly dispatched to the bin because, in my view, there is little that is supposedly edible that could taste worst than a burnt sultana.