There will still quite a few green tomatoes left even after I’d made chutney and the tomato flans. A couple of readers suggested a green tomato loaf. I had come across the idea when looking for recipes but dismissed it. I make carrot cake but felt that the tomatoes wouldn’t be sweet enough for cake. Then I read that it goes well with a bit of Cheddar and changed my thinking from sweet cake to savoury which seemed to make more sense. I chose a recipe but tweaked it, leaving out the sugar and making up the volume with some chopped nuts and a bit of garlic. Then I realised that the remaining green tomatoes weighed only 300g instead of the required 400g, so I diced a small onion and some yellow pepper. By now it was quite removed from the original recipe but I used the 170g flour (I decided on wholemeal) and the two eggs that the recipe required.

Well, I thought it tasted great, especially with the aforementioned Cheddar.  It had a cake texture but a bread-like taste; a savoury cake, though it had firmed up a bit by the second day. Husband didn’t like it and that didn’t surprise me – not his kind of thing at all. After we’d tried it I sliced up the rest and froze it.  And that’s it … no more green tomatoes. I shall have a piece this evening (after the SW weigh-in) with some of the parsnip and apple soup that I froze last week. There’s never been a problem with non ripening before this year, but I won’t mind if we find ourselves with some next year.

I’m now setting myself the challenge of freeing up some space in the freezer so that I can start squirreling away some bits and pieces towards Christmas, so it’s time to call a halt to any kind of bulk cooking. That’s something I always find hard.

The green tomato bread/cake