Splendid Green Tomato Salsa
Tuesday, September 18, 2012 at 07:40PM I knew something had to be done about the current situation, but I was paralyzed with indecision. There had to be over 30 of them, just hanging there practically staring at me. What were we thinking when we opened that seed package back in the spring? We could have stopped with 10, but I think we were both still feeling the leftover effects of our tremendous failure from last year. We thought, what was the worst thing that could happen and we tipped the contents from the package into our hands and began to plant.
You see last year was our first attempt at growing tomato plants from seed. The first batch we made the fatal error of having the lights too far away and our plants were stringy and pitiful. So we dumped those and tried again. This time, our lighting was perfect, but still something went wrong and they got some terrible fungus. Let’s just say there wasn’t a happy ending with that round either.
So this spring, we went and got seeds for 3 different types of tomatoes (roma, cherry and beefsteak). We were using our success rate from last year as our measuring stick for success and decided to plant 8 plants of each assuming we would lose 50% of them.
Well we didn’t. We lost 3 plants in total. The rest did just what we had hoped would happen. They weren’t stringy and they didn’t get a fungus. So what did we do? We planted all 21 of them. Do you have any idea how many tomatoes 21 tomato plants produce? I am not complaining…in fact I love it and I would change very little about the number of tomatoes I would plant next year. I have had the most delicious cherry tomatoes in my salads, some are frozen in my deep freeze, I shared some with my neighbours and made the rest into jam.
But it is September and there are still a lot of tomatoes on the plants in my yard. Green Tomatoes – and I was at a loss as to what to do with them. I found myself standing in the garden looking at them and hoping for inspiration. None came.
So I did what any social media savvy person would do, I put a call out on twitter asking for suggestions.
I received a fabulous fried green tomato suggestion from someone as well as Green Tomato Pickle and the offer for the family recipe, which I thought was fabulous. But the suggestion that piqued my interest was for Green Tomato Salsa. They even included the specific recipe they would like me to use.
How could I refuse a request as specific as that? I changed a few small things. I added more jalapeno’s because I prefer my salsa on the spicier side. I only used 3 red peppers, used 8 garlic cloves and ½ tsp cayenne pepper. The rest I followed exactly as outlined and the result is delicious. Slightly tart, somewhat spicy with almost an earthy flavour. The great thing about this recipe and I am speaking personally and it might be grounded in my intrinsically selfish side is the YIELD! I got 12, 250ml jars from one batch.
I have put aside a jar for you Nolin seeing as the request was yours. Come and get it!
There are still plenty of green tomatoes awaiting a home, so if you provide me with the inspiration, I will provide you with a jar of the final product.
Reader Comments (2)
What, no picture of the finished product?! :)
You got your own jar Nolin, that is better than a photo wouldn't you say ;)