
I can’t stop making tomato sandwiches. Do you blame me?



16 Friday Feb 2024
Posted in azahars kitchen, homecooking
07 Wednesday Feb 2024
Posted in andalucia, food & drink, seasons, sevilla
24 Friday Feb 2023
Posted in food & drink
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For the past week or so I’ve been hearing about the big tomato shortage of 2023 in the UK, who are laying the blame at reduced crops in Europe (and specifically Spain) due to drought conditions. Ladies and gentlemen I give you these lovely seasonal tomatoes from Almería and Málaga, bought at the Triana Market this morning. There were also tons of the usual hothouse tomatoes, but why the fuck does anyone want to eat tomatoes out of season? We’d all be better off if we stopped thinking we can get EVERYTHING ALL THE TIME when it comes to food. That’s not how nature works.
It seems the main reason the UK is experiencing fresh produce shortages is that most European transport drivers don’t want to spend up to 70 hours in a queue to deliver their products, and who can blame them? Well then, that means more for us.

16 Tuesday Aug 2022
Posted in casa azahar, cooking, homecooking, sevilla

Probably my favourite seasonal vegetable (after asparagus) are tomatoes, and possibly my favourite tomato is the ‘bombón colorao’ from Los Palacios, a town about an hour from Sevilla. But when I saw these beauties at the market I decided to get a few, which were eaten over the next couple of days in a greek(ish) salad and my weekly BLT. However, I’d forgotten to take note of the type of tomato I’d bought and so later on, with the help of my friend Janet @mykitcheninspain, we deduced that it was a variety of RAF tomato. Some wiki info…
The name Raf derives from the fact that it is resistant to a fungus called Fusarium oxysporum lycopersici (in Spanish, “resistente al Fusarium”). This was one of the causes of its popularization in greenhouse cultivation. Raf is the product of a selection of traditional tomatoes so it is not a hybrid tomato.
If you’d like to learn more about Spanish tomatoes have a look at Janet’s excellent blog post where she takes us through a tomato tasting…
