Tomatoes

 

Thanks be to God, we have so many tomatoes!

Our back garden faces south and the sun has been blazing down this last couple of months.

We only put in three plants! I chose the Moneymaker because it's the one my mother always liked.

I can't eat tomatoes because I have oxalate toxicity and tomatoes are terribly high in oxalate. 

I wanted to grow them for Tony because he likes them — as do I even, though I can't have them.

Tony ingests quite a lot of oxalate because he drinks several large cups of strong tea every day, and has high-fibre wheat-based breakfast (though not every day now and he's reduced his bowl size) with dried fruit in. All of that is very high in oxalate.

But I cook for us both so, without really intending to, he's been on a much reduced oxalate intake over the last year. What he chooses and gets for himself (breakfast) has a lot of oxalate in, but nothing else does. This works quite well, because you mustn't step off a cliff with oxalate reduction, you have to take it down slow and toggle the intake amount, or you get dumping symptoms which can be horrendous, quite extreme (as I discovered when I went carnivore, which is zero-oxalate).

For years he used to have trouble with gout, but oddly he hasn't had any problems with it for a long while. Oxalate toxicity can cause what they call 'false gout' (same symptoms, different cause.

But when our tomatoes began to ripen I gave him a tomato each day with the cold meat and cheese and pickles/apple he has for supper every day — and the gout came back with a vengeance, both feet.

So he stopped the tomatoes and the 'gout' went away.

Good to have a solution, shame about the tomatoes.

I have been giving them to Alice and Hebe because they eat a lot of tomatoes. Right now they have all the fresh ones they can cope with, and their freezer is also too full to add any in.

I have freezer space though, so I am going back to what we used to do in my childhood when we had a 12ft greenhouse full of tomatoes and cucumbers and Galia melons.

To freeze tomatoes for soup and stews and relish for the winter, it's best to skin them. This is easy if you blanch them first. You have to bring a pan of water to the boil, and put in a few at a time into the boiling water for one minute. Then lift them out and skin them — the skin slips off easily.

That's my job for the day! I will bag them up and put them by in the freezer for Alice and Hebe to take as needed for their soups and stews in the autumn and winter.

But I will leave two or three nearly-ripe ones in the bowl with the green ones, because ripe tomatoes give out a hormone that encourages the green ones to ripen.

We still have a lot outside in the sunshine, and they will ripen in the next week or two as this hot weather is continuing; the plants beginning to die back now.

Imagine! Just three plants! Well worth it.