Sunday, November 3, 2013

Garden Progress: Green Tomatoes by the Peck!

We had our first frost last week and so the kiddos and I set out to harvest the last bits of peppers, eggplant, and tomatoes from the garden. We filled more than half of a bushel box with green tomatoes. I began flipping through cookbooks and calling on friends for ideas on what to do with green tomatoes. I came up with several. Green tomato pickles sounded fabulous, but was set aside for another time since I still have bottled pickles from last year to eat up. Brother M and I are the only real pickle fans so far.

Here are the two consumer tested winners for using up our green tomatoes:

1. Green Tomato Salsa - It's gorgeous and it tastes great! We eat salsa by the pint so no chance of it lasting until next canning season! It took me 2 days of snippets of time here and there to get all the requisite ingredients chopped up fine for this large pot full.



2. Mince Meat Pie - I know I have eaten this at thanksgiving some time in my life, but as I looked at the recipe I could not recall what it actually tasted like. It calls for "suet" which I had never heard of and had to look up. I decided that leftover fatty ham bits would do instead - since I already had them on hand. I made up a small batch using the Ball Canning Book recipe for Green Tomato Mincemeat and baked it.
This is what it looked like after 24 hours:
A hit! Husband heard the word suet and did not have much - this decimation is mostly from the kids and I. It was a delicious pie, very "spiced". Not hot spicy, just Fall spicy - cinnamon, orange zest, nutmeg, cloves, etc. I made 2 batches of it the next day - enough for 7 more of these pies this winter. Instead of canning it,  I measured enough for a pie into 7 ziploc bags and froze it.

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