Garden Lover answers:

Basic Tomato Sauce

Makes 4 cups

Ingredients:

1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1 Spanish onion, chopped into 1/4-inch dice
4 garlic cloves, peeled and thinly sliced
3 tablespoons chopped fresh thyme leaves, or 1 tablespoon dried
1/2 medium carrot, finely shredded
2 28-ounce cans peeled whole tomatoes, crushed by hand and juices reserved
Salt to taste

Preparation:

In a 3-quart saucepan, heat the olive oil over medium heat. Add the onion and garlic and cook until soft and light golden brown, about 8 to 10 minutes. Add the thyme and the carrot and cook 5 minutes more, until the carrot is quite soft. Add the tomatoes and juice and bring to a boil, stirring often. Lower the heat and simmer for 30 minutes until as thick as hot cereal. Season with salt and serve. This sauce holds one week in the refrigerator or up to 6 months in the freezer.

Garden Lover answers:

On your supermarket shelf you will find a product called Ezi Sauce or Ezy Sauce (a kind of concentrated spiced vinegar). It contains all the spices, etc., you need to make different sauces & chutney etc. It also has the recipes on the label.

Here is a simple Tomato Chutney recipe:

Virgin olive oil
2 tb Ginger root; freshly grated
1/2 tb Jalapeno pepper; minced
1 ts Cumin seeds; crushed
1/2 tb Coriander seeds; crushed
5 1/2 c Tomato puree
2 c Tomatoes; diced, with juice
1/2 c White grape juice

Heat oil in a large saucepan. Add ginger, pepper, and cumin and coriander seeds. Cook until fragrant, about 1 to 2 minutes. Add remaining ingredients and bring mixture to a boil. Reduce heat an simmer, uncovered, for 35 to 40 minutes. Makes about 1 1/2 cups. Hints: Chutney can be made up to 2 days before serving. Store in the refrigerator. If you double the recipe, increase cooking time by 15 minutes. If you freeze the chutney, season with salt and pepper before serving.

Here is a link for Green Tomato and Apple Chutney.

Garden Lover answers:

Some commercially grown produce and fruits are now are designed by companies, like Monsanto, to not have viable seeds that produce fruit. This gives them a monopoly the seeds on those particular crops…

Another possibility is that the seed packet tomatoes have been screened for greater fruit production -and thus are more successful while your store bought tomatoes just aren’t very productive.

Garden Lover answers:

Yes, they are frozen.

Garden Lover answers:

Yes, that is very normal soon the green ones will catch up…