Rob Masters

Well, that was a fairly epic long weekend. The epic bit started on Sunday morning, when we dropped by the Stirling Farmers' Market to pick up our tomato order. 45kg of them. Plus capsicums, onions, apples, chillies, and some other vague veggies. Then it was back home, and dusting off our old Weber kettle BBQ, and pulling out the GoSun Fusion. Into each we tossed as many tomatoes as would fit (in trays in the Weber), and set them to roasting. Inside, we started chopping onions, more tomatoes, and capsicums - which then went straight onto the stove to become salsa.  Around the same time, we bolted the tomato mill to the kitchen island, and brought in the first batch of tomatoes. These went into the mill, and quickly became the first of many batches of passata. The squeezings joined still more tomatoes, onions and apples in another pot.  By the time we hit 11pm, we had produced and processed in the preserver 22 bottles of passata, and 10 jars of salsa, representing about 3/4 of t...

It will come as no surprise to folks that I tend to acquire a variety of cooking devices - some of them traditional, some of them on the bleeding edge of technology. What I do avoid are devices with one purpose - unless they happen to do it extraordinarily well, and take minimal space. My pear corer, for example, or the peach pitter. Everything else serves multiple uses. A rice cooker, for example will also cook many other rice-based dishes, and will serve as a steamer as well. Today four of these devices met in in the creation of a simple dish, but made so much simpler and tastier as a result. The first two tools were actually used nearly four months ago. Our Fowlers Vacola preserving system, and our tomato mill. These were used together to produce two of today's ingredients - a bottle of preserved tomatoes, and a bottle of passata. The Fowlers Vacola domestic kit. The Fowlers preserving system has been around since the 1880's, and the Australian company since the ...