By Kathy Blavatt
Halloween seemed the right time to try my scary orange fruit from my Tomato Tree that I started from a seed years ago from Ecuador.
I had eaten the tart fruit raw. I tried some salsa type sauces – not very spicy – in Ecuador made with the fruit, but I wanted to make a main dish from the exotic fruit.
So, I did what most people do these days and jumped on the internet and googled Tomato Tree Fruit. Most of the suggestions of what to do with the fruit included adding sugar and making it sweet or making a curry dish. I opted for the curry.
Tomato Tree fruit. All photos by Kathy Blavatt
Since this was to be a Halloween dish, I decided to create an original new curry receipt. I had some mashed organic pumpkin and a jar of homemade mission figs compote (from my garden) mixed with ginger and lime. I put these ingredients in a saucepan and turned on the stove and the magic began. A creamy orange fragment sauce emerged.
Tomato Tree fruit cut up
Since it was going to be curry, I added coconut cream and a teaspoon of cream sherry (which I add to many of my sauces).
The mixture could be eaten at this point, but I wanted to spice it up with some good olive oil, cooked garlic, white pepper, a dash of red pepper, colander, and some Indian curry powder.
The curry was so good it didn’t need anything else. I just used it over rice. My tart Tomato Tree Fruit was now the key ingredient in making my scary dish into a heavenly orange curry.
Tomato Tree curry.
The day after making the curry I was invited to a pumpkin carving party. Some yogurt mixed in with my curry sauce made a perfect dip for the party. A lady even asked for the receipt! She may have a hard time finding the Tomato Tree Fruit.
In my search for finding out about ‘Tomato Tree Fruit,’ I found a wonderful website called “The Chefs Garden” at www.chefs-garden.com
“’The Chef’s Garden’ has been delivering specialty products with optimum shelf life, quality, flavor, and nutrition direct from the farm to the world’s most discriminating chefs for over 30 years.”
The website had me mesmerized by the selection of all the edible plants, herbs, and flowers that they showed in many beautiful photos. I found several flowers that I grow in my own garden that I had no idea they were edible!
Begonia flowers
My favorite is my white begonia blossoms, from previous generations of Point Loma’s Rosecroft’’s Garden begonia, cultivated by the famous horticulturist Alfred D. Robinson, co-founder of California Garden magazine and designer of San Diego Balboa Park Botanical Building.
This tiny historical begonia’s edible peddles taste like bits of lemon.
Another couple of spicy edible blossoms I learned about came from having the specialty salad at Ocean Beach’s Sandara Indian restaurant. The little yellow and purple blossoms ignited in my mouth with bursts of spiciness, making the salad mixture truly unusual.
Arugala flowers
The next day I was watering my front yard. I looked down at some yellow arugula blossoms and purple flowers on the Goji berry plant. I was dumbfounded, there were the same flowers I had eaten the night before. Tasting a few (and I didn’t die) proved that they were the same savory goodies I had in the delicious salad from the night before!
Best of all, these flowers are blooming now. I don’t have to wait for Spring.
This year’s Halloween “trick or treat” started as a bit of a trick and became a real treat.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Kathy, will you be able to publish your recipe?
The minute I read “tomato tree plant from Ecuador,” I started worrying that Kathy was fooling around with some alluring garden volunteer that would end up being poisonous jimson weed and send her to the hospital. Fortunately, she knows what she’s doing, while I buy my produce at Von’s. I worried again when she described adding white begonias to her salad: she says they’re edible, and she lived to write this charming story. I enjoyed it.