Lovable 'Love Apples'

Initially thought to be aphrodisiac, the French call them 'pommes d'amour' (love apples), Italian 'pomodoro' (golden apple). Tomatoes are our most popular fruit but used as a vegetable, mandatory in Mediterranean cooking.  Assorted sizes, shapes, colours and textures, their uses vary; some are nicest raw, others best cooked. Keep them OUT of the fridge; store at room temperature to retain their full flavour.

How about adding some of these to your ‘fruit bowl’? Banana Legs with long, thick fleshed fruits which start off striped green turning ‘banana’ yellow when fully ripe. Add some Christmas Grapes with its clusters of grape-sized fruits. Alternatively Hartman’s Yellow Gooseberry, a lemon-yellow medium sized cherry tomato or the more conventional Black Cherry, not truly black but a deep red sweet cherry tomato. Finish off with an Orange Slice, a relative newcomer (2011) producing zesty orange beefsteak tomatoes.

Homegrown ones picked straight off the vine taste divine (!) but we need to relish our fruit and veg more. Every day in UK homes we throw away approximately 1.2 million whole tomatoes*. Possibly not at their best but providing they are not mouldy, they can be added to soups or sauces, fried up for a snack on toast or pureed and frozen for later addition to stews rather than chucking them in the bin. After all you have spent good money on them, why throw it away?

 *. https://wrap.org.uk/sites/files/wrap/Food_%20surplus_and_waste_in_the_UK_key_facts_Jan_2020.pdf