Tomato relish.

This Christmas I will be filling the stockings of my nearest and dearest with homemade food items. This weekend I whipped up a batch of tomato relish, following an old family recipe. I can't share it with you, but I did find one that is quite similar here.

Having planted eight tomatoes plants a few months ago, I am now flooded with ripe tomatoes ready for picking. This causes a little trouble seeing that my dear hubby hates tomatoes, so there is no way we I am able to eat through them all. That's where tomato relish comes in...

My recipe calls for 3kg of tomatoes. I was able to provide this purely from my veggie garden (and yep this did make me feel kinda good!).

Here's a tip. If you need jars to store this sort of thing, but just don't have enough stockpiled, instead of buying empty jars from the supermarket (these were $2.45 each) try finding a food product sold in jars that you can store another way at home. For example, I purchased spaghetti sauce ($1.89), was able to transfer the sauce into bags and store in the freezer to be used later on. I was then left with six large jars which I washed, then sterilised in the oven. Here's a how to guide for steralising jars.

I transferred the hot mixture into the hot jars, sealed then left them standing on their lids to dry. This creates a seal.

Once cool I covered the lids with scraps of fabric cut into circles with pinking sheers, then secured with twine. I labelled each jar with homemade labels I found here. I simply opened the image in 'paint' and added the text in the space.

Sam xox