Monday, September 7, 2009

Yellow Ketchup, Anyone?

Did you know AH's favorite color is yellow? It has been since he was tiny. Well, early this year AH asked me if he could plant yellow tomato plants and use them to make yellow ketchup. Being the *perfect* homeschool mom I, of course, said yes! Anything to get him interested in tomatoes! We found some yellow heirloom tomato plants at our local co-op this spring and planted them in a nice sunny location in our garden. (I meant to remember the varieties, but I cannot find them in my notes anywhere. I believe one was a Russian tomato?!) It took quite a while considering our weird summer (lots of rain and cool days) but last week we had enough to make a yellow ketchup! While the tomatoes ripened I went in search of yellow tomato recipes. There are none. So, I went in search of a ketchup recipe. There are millions!! Most, however, call for 20 lbs of tomatoes. Even though AH did a good job of taking care of his two plants, there was no way we were going to get even 10 lbs out of them! I finally stumbled upon a recipe at this lovely blog, Eggs on Sunday,which called for 2 1/2 lbs. That was something we could do!!!
AH and I chopped up the tomatoes and onion.
Then added vinegar and a spice bag.



We let that simmer on the stove for around 40 minutes.


We removed the spice bag and AH got to try out the immersion blender! He was a little nervous using it, so I helped him instead of photographing it. After that another 30 minutes to simmer down to our desired consistency. And then the final step: tasting it.


I think he likes it!

Well, it didn't exactly turn out yellow, but a kind of orange. We've never made homemade ketchup before and we were impressed with the flavor and consistency of this recipe. It really wasn't too hard. We would change a few things about it, but what a great way to spend a late summer afternoon with my yellow fanatic!

1 comment:

Jonnia Smith said...

Yellow ketchup! What a fun project!!!I'm adding "make our own ketchup" to next summer's list of possiblities.