If you are looking for a great recipe for green tomatoes at the end of the garden season, may I suggest trying green tomato relish? Green tomato relish was the first thing I canned as a young wife and mother. My minister’s wife, Marie Beck, taught me how to make it, and I still have the recipe card she wrote for me more than 30 years ago. It only requires a few ingredients, is easy to make, and is delicious served with roasted pork or on hot dogs. Yields about 7 pints.

Ingredients:
25 medium or 35 small green tomatoes
3 medium green bell peppers
2 medium sweet red peppers
3 medium onions
4 tbsp pickling salt
4 cups sugar
3 cups white vinegar
3 tbsp mustard seed
3 tbsp celery seed

Instructions:

1. Chop, process or grind all vegetables into a fine dice, then cover with the pickling salt and stir to coat. Let the mixture stand for 3 hours, then drain well.

2. Boil the sugar, vinegar and seeds for 5 minutes, then add the vegetables and simmer for 10 to 15 minutes.

3. Seal in hot, sterile pint jars in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes.

See also:

• Fried Green Tomatoes with a Cheesy Crust
• Thai Green Tomatoes with a Coconut Crust
• Roasted Green Tomatoes
• How Do You Use Green Tomatoes?

Do you have tricks up your sleeve for storing tomatoes into the fall and winter? What's the longest you've been able to keep your summer tomatoes around? If you've got any tips and ideas for storing tomatoes, please share them by posting a comment below.

See also: 

• Enjoy Fresh Tomatoes All Year
• Winter Tomatoes 

Photo by L. Shat/www.fotolia.com

Even though it's October, I'm canning away the last of the summer berries. We've still got raspberries coming in from a local farm and I wanted to do something a little different than the standard raspberry jam recipe. When I spice up a jam it usually includes some interesting addition or flavoring and some sort of liqueur or liquor. Most of the alcohol gets burned off and you are left with a very complex flavor profile. This recipe makes ordinary raspberry jam seem, well, ordinary. Since I've started tinkering around with jam recipes, I really have a hard time going back to the basics. This recipe can also be used as a dessert topping as well if you lower the amount of pectin and keep it a little more liquid.

Ingredients

5 cups raspberries, crushed  (use a potato masher or other implement to crush the berries)
6 cups sugar
1 pack pectin
1 cup white chocolate chips (spring for the Guittard or other gourmet chocolate if it's available in your area)
1/4 cup coffee liqueur (Starbucks or Kahlua)

Heat raspberries while slowly adding in the pectin. Once the raspberries are at a full boil that you cannot stir down, add in the sugar. Return to a full rolling boil, stirring for one minute. Take the raspberry mixture off the heat and add in the white chocolate. It will take awhile to melt, so be patient (unless you want chunks of white chocolate in your jam). After the white chocolate has melted, add the coffee liqueur and stir until well blended. Because the raspberry jam is quite hot, the alcohol will burn off, so if you want to have more of the alcohol flavor, add it in at the very end. Pour jam into sterilized canning jars and process in a hot water bath for 10 minutes. That is, assuming you haven't eaten half of it already. Yields 10 pints.

If you are interested in other concoctions that I've made with my jams, check out my favorite strawberry jam recipe (Spiced Sangiovese and Strawberry Jam) and my favorite peach recipe (Cognac Vanilla Peach Preserves). All of these make for great holiday gifts as well.

Cleaning out the freezer of past-dated food to make way for new offerings from the garden and orchard is a semi-annual task. I find it somewhat embarassing that any of the produce I so lovingly grow and harvest becomes a leather-hard, freezer-burned bag of useless vegetation, good only for the compost heap. But it does happen to most food preservationists. So it is especially rewarding when I invent a creative way to use what otherwise might have ended up as compost.

This year I discovered in the very bottom of the freezer a couple of quarts of whole strawberries that were labeled 2004. Oh my!!! They looked a bit desiccated, but actually smelled OK. But what to do with them? Who knows where inspiration will come from?

I left the berries in the sink for a few hours to thaw. Then I dumped the thawed mushy mass into a saucepan, added about a cup of sugar and slowly brought the mixture to a boil while stirring to disolve the sugar. Once the liquid looked clear, I turned off the burner and let the pan cool. I then poured the pulpy juice into a strainer and was rewarded with a few cups of lovley red strawberry sauce. Ice cube trays are handy kitchen accessories for freezing small quantities of heavily flavored concoctions, such as pesto or strawberry sauce. My "recipe" produced 36 cubes of frozen sauce.

You could no doubt use other berries or peaches to make this fruit sauce, and even add a few spices to make the flavor a bit exotic. I think the sauce will be heavenly over angel food cake or fruit salad, or mixed with some oil and vinegar to make a strawberry vinaigrette.

After spending two hours on a canner load of cardamom-spiced pears, I have plenty of other things to do. But until the last lid sucks in its breath with a tenor pop, leaving the kitchen would be like exiting a concert just as you hear the first notes of your favorite song. Why be in a hurry to go?

On the other hand, it does seem that the same power that prevents watched pots from boiling causes lids to pop when you've almost given up. Then comes one, then another, each pop announcing that all is well.

It's the sound of accomplishment, with a strong undercurrent of relief. The food you've grown, harvested, washed, cut, cooked and canned is safe for a couple of years. So what if next season's crop comes up short? This year's bounty is in the can.

Some may argue that the bigger thrill comes when you open a jar of tomatoes or grape jelly or whatever in January and smell summer for one brief moment. I disagree. The gentle whoosh of a seal opening is nothing compared to the cracking pop of a lid closing itself to the outside world. What a wonder, to be able to cook now and eat a year later. Each pop says that it is done.  

I have a suggestion you won't find in canning books: home canners should listen to lids popping as a rewarding ritual to be observed as each batch is set aside to cool. Simply sit for five minutes, giving yourself over to one of the more wondrous sounds of a self-sufficient life. When you take the time to listen, each pop brings a spurt of joy.

You may have already discovered that supermarket peaches are often hard and flavorless. They are picked so green that they just never ripen once you get them home. What you may not know is that REAL peaches are superjuicy with luscious, to-die-for flavor. During peach season (July and August) local farmers markets usually sell real peaches. Even when they ship them in from a neighboring state, they're almost always infinitely better that what you’re likely to find in supermarkets. Here’s a superquick and easy way my mom freezes peaches for eating later: 

Drop the whole peach into a plastic sandwich bag, zip shut and toss in the freezer. When you want a fruit snack, just run the frozen peach under water for a moment, and the skin will slip off. Slice into a bowl and wait until the icy-ness is gone. Then enjoy the next best thing to fruit fresh from the tree!

 P.S. Peaches are one of the easiest fruit crops for home gardeners — for a low-cost way to grow your own peaches, see Grow Free Fruit Trees.

Twice a day, I take my bucket out to the apple trees and pick up fallen fruit. The hard green ones under the fall-maturing ‘Liberty’ and ‘Enterprise’ go straight to the compost pile, but many of the apples beneath the early-bearing ‘Williams Pride’ are ripe enough to eat.

The tree has its reasons for shedding this "early windfall" crop. Some of the apples have strange puckers, others show ominous black patches, and many suffer cuts and bruises when they fall to the ground. I shake off the ants and pick them up. If you want to grow high-quality apples organically, gathering up fallen fruit is mandatory. Doing it daily prevents problems with a dozen widespread insects and diseases — and mighty hordes of irritable yellow jackets, too.

After sorting, I have about 10 pounds of apples a day in need of attention. I don’t want to invest much time and energy in them, because there are much better apples to come. But it goes against my nature to waste something that’s perfectly usable. After doing some research and trying various options, here’s what’s working for me.

 Pink Juice

The apple industry funds fabulous research into every imaginable nutritional benefit of apples. Eating them fresh and whole is best, but a cloudy pink juice made from whole apples, with skins intact, contains four times as many beneficial nutrients as clear, pressed juice. It’s fast to make, too. Wash the apples, cut away obvious bad parts, and cut them in halves or quarters. Place in a large pot with an inch or two of water. Bring to a boil, cover, and cook about 20 minutes. Mash with a potato masher or big spoon, and then dump the pulp into a large colander lined with a piece of lightweight cloth such as cotton sheeting or cheesecloth, placed over a deep pot. After it has drained for an hour or so, squeeze the pulp a few times to get as much cloudy juice as you can, because the cloudier the juice, the greater its fiber, heart-healthy flavonoids and antioxidants to charge up your immune system.

Speaking of fiber, slightly immature apples are high in pectin, the natural water-soluble fiber that makes jelly jell. Before commercial pectins became available, jelly makers canned juice from early windfall apples, and combined it with other fruits later in the season. The syrupy texture of early windfall juice is due to the high levels of natural sugars and pectins. Take a swig to sample the best natural fiber supplement you’ll ever taste.

Skin-On Chips

Apples are easy to dry, and it’s up to you as to whether or not you remove the peels first. The skin-on version is way more nutritious, but peeled dried apples are sometimes nicer to eat. But I actually prefer skin-on dried apples for cooking with oatmeal and other grain cereals. To make quick work of windfalls, I quickly cut the plump cheeks from the biggest and best washed apples, slice them into a lemon juice solution, and pop them in the dehydrator. Four to five hours later, they’re done! (To learn more about drying food, see Reap the Garden & Market Bounty: How to Dry Food.)

Tips

* Windfall apples are not good for cider-making because they are often immature and contaminated with microorganisms.

* Strips of peel are barriers to dehydration, so cut the pieces small when drying apples with their peels intact.

* Share your early windfalls with your animals, but don’t go overboard. Horses and other animals will make themselves sick from eating too many green apples. Limit them to two or three a day.  

* Chop cull apples with a spade before layering them into compost. Cover with two inches of pulled plants, straw or other compostable materials to prevent problems with nuisance insects and animals.

Cloudy pink juice made by heating apples with their skins on contains four times as many health-enhancing nutrients as clear pressed juice.

Photos by  Barbara Pleasant  

Making pickles can be time-consuming, but this method for easy garlic pickles couldn't possibly be any easier. Or tastier!

1. Slice peeled garlic cloves in half. Drop in a canning jar.
2. Pour your favorite kind of vinegar over the garlic cloves.
3. Add a tablespoon of coarse sea salt.
4. Screw lid on, shake jar, and store in the refrigerator for up to a couple months.

Feel free to add other veggies, such as hot and sweet peppers or cucumbers, to the mix. You can also add herbs, such as dill, thyme and rosemary. For sweeter pickles, add a tablespoon of sugar along with the salt.