Roasted tomatoes pasta

I am definitely enjoying my garden this year. We have been blessed with nice weather so far and thanks to that everything is growing and flowering like mad.

My tomatoes have just started to form, I have to give them couple more weeks.

Well, I was craving tomato pasta right now so I got inspired by beautiful Sophie Dahl. I used her Roasted tomato soup as base for sauce and shop-bought cherry tomatoes.
No measurements this time, just feel free to add everything according to your taste.
Put cherry tomatoes into ovenproof dish. Add unpeeled gloves of garlic, a few springs of thyme, rosemary, oregano and season with freshly ground pepper and salt. Add good splash of olive oil and roast in oven for 175 C degrees for at least 30-40 minutes or until tomatoes start bursting.
Meanwhile cook the pasta (I used tagliatelle).
Take the tomatoes out of the oven. Fish out springs of herbs (leave leaves in sauce). Squeeze the garlic out of its skin and mash everything slightly with fork. Add the cooked pasta. Crumble over some feta cheese (mozzarella would work very well too, but I didn't have any) and scatter some basil leaves. Enjoy with glass of wine.

Green jam

I know it is December, Christmas is coming and there should be some gingerbread recipe published now. Well, maybe next time. Today I am finally going to post my not so green jam made from green fruit.

Last year my brother gave me nice present from his holiday in France - green tomato, apple and orange jam made in one of the manor houses where he stayed. We had lots of green tomatoes from our garden - well, we did not have any greenhouse and Irish summer 2008 wasn't great. So inspired by the gift I made my own version of it and it turned out very well.

This year having greenhouse we actually had some red and yellow tomatoes, but still, some of them didn't have a time to ripe, so again the same question came up: what to do with them? I remembered this jam and the one we tasted in France - apple and kiwi. So I decided to try a combination: green tomato, apple and kiwi jam.

All the fruit was so beautifully green... Green is my favorite color, and that must be a reason why I like this green island so much...

Here is the easy recipe:

Chop 0.5kg of green tomatoes, 0.5kg of peeled and cored Bramley apples and 0.5kg peeled kiwis. Put them into a big pot together with 1kg of caster sugar and juice of one lemon and bring it to boil. Then let it simmer for good while. For testing if your jam is ready put one spoon of jam onto cold plate and run your finger through. If gap stays there and doesn't close, jam is ready.

Pour it into sterilised jars and screw the tops. Turn it upside down for few minutes just to seal. You can turn it back after short while.

Enjoy with nice bread or scone and cup of tea. And save some for later.