Tomato Glut; More Pesto; Baked Beans

Finally a tomato glut! It’s been a rare sight last year and this but it’s nice to know it can still happen. While I also get tomatoes in my Food Connect box, the tomatoes in this bowl have all grown on my upstairs patio.

I’ve also had the biggest bunch of tomatoes in the five years I’ve been growing them. Including the two I had already harvested this bunch had eleven tomatoes on it. I’ve found the Father Tom tomatoes from Floriana have been particularly productive and this bunch just goes to prove it.

Tonight I’ve had the pleasure of working out how I’m going to use them. Homemade baked beans sprang to mind and I also decided to include some tomatoes in the kale pesto I had been planning to make tonight. The remaining tomatoes will go well on my lunch time salad so I’m sure this glut won’t become a burden.

So I decided on a triple whammy! I made the kale and tomato pesto followed by cooking homemade baked beans and then finished off by making my dinner for tonight – all in the Thermomix and only washing it after my dinner had come out. Now that’s what I call efficiency!

I made the pesto the same way as last night except that I added 120g tomatoes to the mix. Adding the tomato gave a new dimension to the overall taste that was quite okay so I’ll probably continue adding tomatoes to pesto in the future. As much of the pesto as possible was placed into the ice cube tray leaving a small quantity in the Thermomix bowl to supplement the next item on the list.

Navy beans were on my shopping list today but since they weren’t available I picked up some black-eyed beans instead. I prefer navy beans as once I’ve cooked them up into baked beans they look just like the canned variety available in the supermarket but with a superior taste of course.

This afternoon I had covered the black-eyed beans with water in a saucepan and boiled the beans for 5 minutes. Then once the heat had receded I boiled and then topped up the water in the saucepan and covered it. An hour or two later I tested the beans and found they had finished cooking and were perfect. 

The absorption method really works for me when cooking quinoa and these black-eyed beans. However with both brown rice and chick peas I have found that after the absorption time I need to refresh the water and cook them a little longer to achieve a good result.

I followed a modified version of the Molasses Baked Beans recipe in the cookbook “America’s Best Slow Cooker Recipes”, which included blending the tomatoes in the Thermomix instead of using tomato paste or sauce . Then I noticed the downside of keeping the remaining pesto in the bowl as the normally red mix had turned brown. 

Recipe ingredients:
350g tomatoes chopped
Small onion chopped
4 tbsp sugar
1 tsp dry mustard
half tsp salt
1 tbsp molasses
sprinkle of black pepper
cooked black-eyed beans

Instructions:
Process the tomatoes in the Thermomix for 10 seconds on speed 9.
Add onion, sugar, mustard, salt, molasses, pepper and the cooked black-eyed beans.
Process for 15 minutes at 100 degrees C on reverse speed soft.
 
The pesto’d baked beans tasted very nice. After placing most of the mix into pyrex dishes I then added the ingredients for my stir-fry dinner into the Thermomix which along with a fried egg finished off my marathon cooking effort. Now there’s just a few more dishes for me to deal with and then I’m well and truly done for the night.