Green tomatoes... a glut!

Well, our tomatoes have not ripened due to the hideous weather (investment in a green house for next year is required...) and lack of sun so a mad search for a recipe of what to do with green tomatoes was required. Mr Frugal has just taken the first steps of preparation for this: Green Tomato Chutney. I got him a jam/preserving pan from Lakeland, so he's keen to use it out! He made a small batch last year, which was lovely, but added some chilli flakes. Having grown some chillis of our own this year, we're ensuring that they're not wasted!

Courgettes galore! And then more veg...

The sister-in-law has been to visit this weekend and brought with her a bag full of courgettes from her garden. Very generous obviously, but there are so many that you just can't eat them all before they go off! So, I've been doing some research into what I can actually do to ensure that they're not wasted.

Some ideas that I'm trying to choose between:

Prawn & courgette linguine
Ratatouille - ideal for a glut as you can freeze this
Courgette & Tarragon soup - also able to freeze this. I originally found it in a New Covent Garden soup recipe book.

As for the tomatoes in our garden, I'm still waiting for them to ripen. My fingers are crossed that we may well get at least ONE ripe tomato this year.

And so the story begins

Well, my first blog post should be telling you about how wonderful I am at this thing already and how I can help others. Sadly not! Although I love Martin Lewis and the Old Style boards of Moneysavingexpert.com, I'm still a bit of a novice in comparison to others. Ok, so I'm a lot of a novice...

Just to set the scene, my husband and I are in our 30s with no children. Him and me in our new (to us) house! We have a dream of growing more veg and in fact last year we grew so many green tomatoes that he made Green Tomato Chutney. So, we've already managed to kill off a couple of courgette plants, our pumpkin plant hasn't produced any female flowers yet, our two strawberry plants cropped early but haven't since... oh and we have one bay tree which actually seems to be ok after a dodgy moment last year when it didn't like anything! Our tomato plants may grow RED tomatoes this year. Let's hope so, eh?

In order to be able to afford the things that we still need to do on this house, I'm taking a summer job working in a grain laboratory. It complements the teaching quite well, I don't have to think much and I can leave it at the end of the day. Husband will be staying at home whilst I live with my parents during the week, 60 miles away from home.