Last weekend we went up to Sinevro, a village in the mountains of Achaia which I adore and I know very well as I had a country home there for years.

I learnt about the village from my friend Andonis Skordilis who I will tell you about in another post.

I will also write about the village in another separate post and about another friend there who has a magical place in the same village. It’s generally an enchanting place but that is not today’s theme.

At the country home of Andonis when we arrived, he gave us a tomato sauce to try that he had prepared from a variety of tomatoes which I knew well, the Brandywine variety.

It is a very old variety, thin skinned with a wonderful taste, firm flesh, only a few seeds and very meaty.

It is like another variety called Batales, another wonderful variety which they cultivate in Vraurona.

I asked where he found the tomatoes after trying the sauce which was, by the way, stunning.

In Akrata (a seaside town below the mountain) he told me- a grocers next to the supermarket Vassilopoulou…they were hydroponically grown and very tasty.

Returning to Athens later that same day, not to miss the opportunity, I stopped at the grocers and bought some.

The next day I was at the supermarket back in Athens getting a few things because we had guests for dinner..and there I saw some wonderful black tomatoes with a special name. Marmande is their name and they are from an old spore which looks like the Kirim black tomatoes which are well known from the Crimean peninsular.

As my friend Kali said as well who has tried them, they are sweet but they don’t have much taste. And that is completely logical considering the time of year, on the other hand in order to have a sweet tomato at this time of year is important…

It makes you long for the summer when the tomatoes are in the local markets and you enjoy eating them with only a little salt on them.

It made me think of two things…when the time comes to prepare the vegetable patch in the garden and I plant some tomatoes and secondly what am I going to do with all theses tomatoes….

One idea is a lovely tart which shows off the wonderful colours and the other is to make a sauce.

We’ll see which of the two….…