Natural Pink / Red Food Colouring

I said I would find a way, and yesterday we unexpectedly did.    Natural food colouring.  Ok, so this is only two colours, but that is a start.  And it tastes yummy.

Ayla had been grumbling that she wanted different fruit.  Having been used to a daily diet of watermelon, mangoe, paw paw (papaya ) every day for breakfast, she was getting tired of her morning trip to the apple orchard next door.  Seriously.  She would walk next door, either to the orchard to pick an apple off the tree, or to the bucket which is kept for Tammy the horse and Ben the pig.  It was not the walk, she loved that, or the apples, she loves those.  It was just the same everyday.  We are in Kiwi land, and she doesn’t like Kiwi fruit.

So when they were taken for swimming by a friend, we went off to post our applications for an extension for our social visas and went shopping.  We usually only eat according to the season, but we grabbed 4 Phillapino mangoes, one pineapple, some dried paw paw, and some nartjies (what others call tamarinds ) .  I balked at getting plums from Chile as they would probably taste like paste.

We had bought them hot water bottles covered with teddy bears, and laid these out on the bed with the fruit all over.  They were so excited and I had to stop them from eating it all up in one go.  Ok, the paw pay did go.

I had also stopped at our local fruit and vege store TOAD (Trading On Another Dimension ) and picked up two organic tamarillos.

A relative of the potato, tomato, eggplant and capsicum pepper, the tree tomato is native to Central and South America.  Listed among the lost foods of the Incas and known as the ‘tomate de arbol’, tree tomatoes have all but disappeared from their native habitat.

Tamarillos were first introduced into New Zealand from Asia in the late 1800’s.  Originally only yellow and purple-fruited strains were produced.  The red tamarillo was developed in the 1920’s by an Auckland nurseryman from seed from South America.

Other red strains appeared soon afterwards and continued re-selection of these by growers has led to the large, high quality varieties being grown commercially today.

The girls did not like it but I thought they were not ripe enough.  I did think they would do beautifully dried like sun dried tomato as they have a lovely taste.

But what caught my attention, was that Savannah had bright red stained hands.

I quickly grabbed a bowl, mixed some icing sugar and a bit of milk, and squeezed some tamarillo pips into it. Voila !!!  Pink icing.  Added some more and we had red.  No more chemical pink icing sugar !!!  If tamarillo’s are in season, that is.

I was going to take a photo, and am now regretting it.  But I was not feeling well (although hyped from the experiment) so didn’t. Will do next time.