It’s a fact of gardening life: tomatoes—particularly the indeterminate varieties—produce fruit far into the growing season, when there is no hope of them ripening before the real cold sets in.
Despite the liberal use of sprinklers, blankets, sheets, row covers, and a hearty prayer or two, even the most devoted grower usually ends up tossing a bunch of immature tomatoes into the compost heap when frost finally reduces the mother plants to wretched tentacles of blackened stems and leaves.
Alas, the ambitions of tomato lovers, renewed each spring as their stocky little charges are nestled into the soil, are rewarded every autumn with a surfeit of produce that will spoil on the counter long before it ever ripens to a usable form.
But gardeners are an optimistic bunch. When presented with a challenge, they invent solutions; when confronted by a rotten apple, they manufacture butter.
Thus, green tomatoes have attained a dubious sort of folk status among gardeners: Like the legendary zucchini, an unripe tomato is a subject for contemplation, the topic of dinnertime conversation, potential fodder for even the most unorthodox of recipes.
From sauces, relishes, and chutneys to piccalillis, pickles, and pies, green tomatoes have found their way onto the menu of anyone who has ever scratched a hole in a plot of humus and plunked in a tomato seedling.
One way to dispose of a bucketful of green tomatoes is to preserve a few jars of salsa. Come winter, those verdant receptacles standing on a pantry shelf will be a welcome sight.
Canned Green Tomato Salsa
Ingredients
- 8 lbs green tomatoes (approximately 16 cups chopped)
- 6 large onions
- 6 green peppers
- 3 sweet red peppers
- 3 – 6 jalapeño peppers (depending on taste)
- 6 garlic cloves, minced
- 1 cup fresh cilantro, finely chopped
- 1/4 to 1/2 cup salt (start low and work up to taste)
- 1/2 tablespoon black pepper
- Cayenne pepper to taste (1/8 to 1/2 tsp)
- 2 cups vinegar
- 1 cup lemon juice
Method
- Coarsely chop tomatoes, onions, and peppers
- Combine all ingredients in a large kettle and mix well
- Heat to boiling, then simmer uncovered for 25 minutes, stirring frequently
- Ladle mixture into hot pint or quart jars, filling to within ¼ inch from top
- Wipe jar rims with damp cloth or sponge
- Adjust lids
- Process in hot-water bath or steam canner: 15 minutes for quarts; 10 minutes for pints (start timer after jars have been placed in canner and water in canner has returned to boiling)
- When processing is complete, remove jars from canner and allow them to cool to room temperature. Check seals. Label sealed jars and store in pantry
- Jars that don’t seal can be placed in refrigerator (use within three weeks) or immediately reprocessed with new lids
- Makes about 3 quarts (6 pints)
When the family has gathered around the television to watch a late-season football game or hunkered onto the carpet for a round of cards, a heap of chips and a bowl of green tomato salsa will transform the event from mundane to magnificent.
Stephen Allen Christensen - Dr. Steve Christensen's writing has appeared in magazines, professional journals, poetry anthologies, and children's books since 1976.
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