Green Tomatoes

Ahhh . . . summer produce. So much color and variety and freshness. My garden produced as well as it ever has, this year. Lots of tomatoes, great cucumbers, a variety of peppers and lots of herbs. By the end of the summer, however, the bumper crop starts to overwhelm me . . . I mean how many caprese salads and vegetable stir-fries can you eat, right? And you can only give so much of it away before your neighbors start to hide from you when you schlepp yet another grocery bag of produce over to their house. The problem is that I have a hard time tossing any of it out, including the bumper crop of green tomatoes. What to do with them all? I know that you can bring them in and wrap them in newspaper and let them slowly ripen but I had a yearning to know what to do with green tomatoes, besides frying them or wrapping them up to turn them red. So I did a google search for "recipes using green tomatoes". And you know what? There are a lot of them! The two that particularly caught my attention were recipes for green tomato salsa and apple and green tomato pie.

Don't green tomatoes look pretty when they're all sliced up! These ones were for my pie.
I added sliced apples to them, with a little lemon juice to prevent the apples from darkening. Then I added some tapioca, brown and white sugars, spices and of course . . .
butter (lots of butter!). Then I put on the top crust, vented it and baked it and it was a surprisingly delicious pie.
These are the green tomatoes that are ready to be chopped up in the Vita-mix for my green tomato salsa. I added a lot of chopped onion, hot peppers from my garden (I seeded them because I don't mind a little heat but I'd prefer not to strip my gears!) , spices, fresh garlic, lime juice, honey and then. . .
I processed the salsa for twenty minutes in my steam canner. It has a delicious and different flavor. Great on a pulled pork burrito or just scooped up into a tortilla chip. All the while I was listening to my Jay Unger and Molly Mason Pandora radio station . . . lots of fiddle music, old time waltzes and blue-grassy stuff. I LOVE Pandora. You can create any mood that you want to with your own personalized radio stations. I was going for the "farm-wife living off the land and wasting nothing" kind of a feeling. If you want actual recipes let me know. I'll be happy to share. Til next time . . .