The scent of tomatoes is in the air!

I am sitting at my desk and have just looked down to see that my beautiful white linen shirt has pinky-red splodges all down the front. My finger nails and cuticles have also take on a pale red hue, despite being scrubbed before leaving the house. I feel like the poor girl on MasterChef last week who got into trouble for being covered in chocolate (at least she got changed before she left the building!).
My condition is due to the fact that this week in the kitchen has been focusing on tomoatoes. On our way back from the weekend in the Abadares National Park last week I made Jim do our usual road side shopping stop and I filled the back of the pick up with tomatoes. Bought for a fraction of the price we pay in Nairobi, even from the markets.
The green and not so ripe tomatoes went into my Auntie Norma's Whistle Stop Cafe Green Tomato Chutney - a delicious mix of tomatoes, dates, raisins, chillies and other spices that goes well with meat or cheese. It also makes a great emergency pasta sauce when nothing else is available. We had 'the bit that never fits in the last jar' with lamb sausages on Wednesday evening, still warm from the pot - yum!

This morning I decided to get started with bottling the rest of them. All lovely dark red specimens that are going to go whole into the jars, with tomato juice and we will not have to buy tinned tomatoes for months. Hence, my clothes being covered in tomato juice! I thought I would get a head a bit whilst I had some time and spent an hour peeling the tomatoes. The problem when they are so ripe AND you have had then in boiling water to loosen the skins, they tend to slip and slide all over the place.... and squirt when you try to hold them steady! Anyway, job complete and they are in the fridge waiting for the remainder to be cooked and blitzed into juice for the packing, which will happen tonight when I get home.
Although the end results are very satisfying, the one problem with cooking tomatoes on a large scale is the smell that tends to permiate the whole house. As I had the chutney on the cooker for 3-4 hours earlier in the week I remembered something my cousins always used to say when we visited them at the farm each holidays. There was a large canning factory in town and everyone always used to say 'never go into town the day they are doing tomatoes'.  The smell was overwhelming and not at all reminiscent of freshly picked sun drenched produce! Apparently it could be smelt for miles around. This week I have had a nasal glimpse of what they had to put up with.

However, the big difference being that I know the end results will be not only delicous but also saving us money (5 kgs of tomatoes for the price of a 400gm tin) and the satisfaction of knowing that I am such a clever girl filling the pantry myself instead of having to rely on commercial producers! The only down side is that they are not our own home grown, but who knows maybe we will get a big enough crop this season - if we can keep the bugs and the mouse birds out of the veggie garden.