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4 Recipes For Wonderful Green Tomatoes

March 06, 2024 17:51 IST

Green tomatoes

Photographs: Zelda Pande

It's barely 15 degrees Celsius outside today and my winter garden overflows with an abundance of lovely harvest-ready vegetables.

Lettuce is shooting up. Patches of tender spinach are all over the place. Also lal math (red amaranth), green chillies, delicate leaves of basil, baby baingans (eggplant), doodhis (bottle gourd), dhaniya (coriander leaves), methi leaves (fenugreek) and more.

The lemon tree groans with great-tasting neebus, larger than the regular bazaar variety and turn a wonderful shade of orange and are a tad sweeter than usual lemons. We also got a giant branch of green bananas that ripened into the sweetest fruit.

Quite a few tomato plants are in the garden patch too, bearing green fruit slowly blushing red.

There are scores of uses for fresh garden tomatoes, both green and red. The nicest, plumpest ones make tasty passata (tomato paste) that you can freeze and add to pasta or on pizza as when you need it. Just-plucked tamatar is good for making tomato chutneys, salads, soups, sambar, juices, kofta curries or sliced in sandwiches.

And green tomatoes? Oh, there umpteen ways to utilise them too and they are said to be even healthier than their lal counterparts. In rasam, in chutneys, on your spaghetti, part of simple salads, tucked in BLTs, as sabzi. They have a unique taste -- a little sour and only subtly, well, tomato-ey.

Now is the season for green tomatoes. Look out for them in the market and go ahead and try these four recipes -- Green Tomato Chutney, Spaghetti With Green Tomato Sauce, Rasam With Green Tomatoes and a Green Tomato Salad.

 

Green Tomato Chutney

Green Tomato Chutney

Serves 3-4

Ingredients

Cooking green tomatoes with onion and garlic for the chutney

IMAGE: Frying green tomatoes with onion and garlic for the chutney.

Method

 

Spaghetti With Green Tomato Sauce

Serves: 2

Ingredients

Method

Zelda's Note: Tomato sauce pastas served in many a restaurant have too much red chilly, which takes away from the flavour of the sauce. But if you can't do without your chilly, add 2 pinches or 1 tsp Tabasco, not more.

While other cheeses will work, try and procure authentic Parmesan for this recipe or use the Greek feta cheese.

While making the sauce you could add 1 cup of chopped mixed vegetables like red capsicum, green capsicum, mushrooms, broccoli, zucchini or non-vegetarians may prefer to add a handful of de-veined, peeled and tailed prawns.

Skip the garlic for a Jain version of this pasta and use vegan cheese to have veganised pasta with tomato sauce or skip the cheese altogether.

Green Tomato Rasam

IMAGE: Green Tomato Rasam (in the katori on the left) served with rice, methi pakora sabzi, methi alu, rotis and rice.

Green Tomato Rasam

Serves: 3-4

Ingredients

Method

Zelda's Note: You can use branded South Indian rasam powder like MTR or make a litte of your own. Coarsely grind ½ cup whole red chillies (a mix of boriya chillies with Kashmiri chilies) with ½ cup whole dhaniya or coriander seeds, 2 tbsp black peppercorns, 2 tbsp jeera or cumin seeds, 4 tbsp toor dal or pigeon peas. Store the excess for a future use, idealy in the fridge or freezer.

Green Tomato Salad

Photograph: Kind courtesy: Georgian Recipes/Wikimedia Commons

Green Tomato Salad

Serves: 2-3

Ingredients

For the dressing

Method

ZELDA PANDE