Dad's tomatoes

Today's blip comes courtesy of Dad at the other end of the country.

Dad has a proud history of growing amazing tomatoes. He told me last week he'd weighed one of this Beef Steak type tomatoes at 730gm. I told him it was worthy of a bit of time in the pan following the cooking of bacon and eggs ;-)

When I was growing up Dad used to plant more than 100 tomato plants. His aim was to end up with 100 plants, once blight and other diseases had weeded out the weaker plants. They were a mix of Money Maker and Beef Steak.

For a family of 5 this was a lot of tomatoes! We'd come home from summer holiday and the tomato season would be well under way. Mum produced wonderful home made tomato sauce, tomato soup, spaghetti (we were appalled the first time we had spaghetti out of a can) and tomato puree. It must have been incredibly hot and tiring to be in the kitchen for days/weeks on end cooking and bottling.

We had tomatoes at pretty much every meal and I'm sad to say I went off them in a big way for a little while. We had them on toast - alone, or with vegemite and then later with avocado when our NZ taste buds became more sophisticated. At lunchtime they featured in salad or sandwiches and at dinner either lightly cooked from the bbq or in a salad.

While preparing photos for the slideshow at Mum's funeral there was a photo that included Dad cooking on the bbq he made and lovely large slices of his beef steak tomatoes on the grill.

Dad's email to me today said "hpx I got my chainsaw to start today so could harvest a few tomatoes". He'd just taken this photo. Dad's tomatoes taste like tomatoes, they have all the flavour of summer and wonderful memories to go with them. I had to make his photo today's blip.

The 8th blip I did shows Dad holding one of this tomatoes

(Blip mods, the photo was taken today but Dad's camera has the date set wrong on it).