Smells like relish, too. I admit I haven't tasted it yet, because with pickles you usually wait two to three weeks for it to finish pickling after you've processed it. But the jars all sealed and I now have nine beautiful pints of green tomato relish on my counter. The bad thing was how much of my time was eaten up by the process of making this stuff. The good thing is that assuming it tastes good, I now have all the relish I'll need for quite a while, since we don't use all that much, and I was able to use most of my remaining green tomatoes. It's nice that the early frost didn't make the garden a total loss. (No, that would be the Boy Scouts...oh, well.)
Apparently the homeowners' association is going to try to make some kind of amends for the damage the Scouts did with their stain, but they're hoping they can just clean the stain off the side of the house rather than repainting. News for them...it was oil-based stain on a porous surface. We can wash the stain off our bikes easily enough, since it didn't want to stick to the automotive paint or the steel, but we can't wash it off the leeks and green onions and probably not off the side of the house. Again, oh, well. At least they're willing to address the problem somehow.
I still have enough counter-ripened green tomatoes to make one more batch of that marvelous soup, and tonight we're making pizza with the sauce from the last of our vine-ripened tomatoes. Now that I've mostly dealt with the tomato issue, it's apples next. I need to find a place to pick up a case or three of local apples, and then I'm going to make major amounts of applesauce. I go through that stuff pretty fast when it's available, so I need lots of it to last me and the family until next fall. I think I want to make it out of yellow delicious apples--the stuff I made from our tree was amazingly good, and my teenager even decided she loved it. She devoured the last of what I had made, and now I'm starting to crave more. It makes Tree Top taste like some kind of pale imitation of applesauce. At least the apples will be pretty easy to process. I have the hand-cranked peeler-corer tool for the dehydrated apple chips, and the Squeezo will make short work of the squishing process for the cooked apples for applesauce. In fact, since I really don't need any other ingredients, I'm anticipating that the whole applesauce-canning project could be finished up in two or three days' time once I have the apples.
I do have a container of small Principe Borghese green tomatoes to do something with, and I'm thinking I may just dehydrate them the way I did the ripe ones. Given the dehydration process, I wouldn't think their lack of extra acid would be a problem in their preservation, so it seems like a good way to get a few more sun-dried (dehydrator dried) tomatoes. From the two heirloom Principe Borghese plants we had this year, we got an entire cereal-box-sized container full of dehydrated tomatoes. Not too bad.
The kids and I went out to the pumpkin patch this afternoon--same place we got our strawberries and the few blueberries I managed to go and pick a few months ago. Given our hectic schedule right now, we barely managed the pumpkin picking. We had about one hour today in which to go to the field, find pumpkins, ride the hayride back, pay for the pumpkins, and leave so we could get my younger daughter to her dance class on time. It felt a little rushed, which was a shame, but at least we got to do it in the first place. I also bought some little pie pumpkins for the Huz to process later. Maybe we'll do one pie for Thanksgiving and one for Christmas. I don't know. At least they'll be chemical-free pumpkin.
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