I love the fall in our little valley. It is just beautiful with the fields gold and green, and the trees yellow and orange. We have been spending some time making sure that everything in the barn and garage is organized so that when things freeze to the floor they are where we want them. We also are cleaning up the yard and garden and since we have moved up here we have run into the same problem. There are tons of green tomatoes on the vine. I am going to pen lyrics to a garden shanty called “What Shall We Do with a Green Tomato?” that can be sung each fall at this time.

Last year we tried pulling up all the plants and bringing them inside. We hung them upside down in the storage room and waited for them to turn red. They did turn red after a while and we were able to use them. This did create some mess with dirt tracked in and tomatoes that fell to the floor and went splat.

This year we opted for going out and picking all the green tomatoes off the vine. There must be ways to use them. Only frying them came to mind, and only because I had heard of it as a title of a movie. After searching the web we have found some ideas that we have never tried and we decided to experiment and see if our family liked any of them.

Fried Green Tomatoes

I decided that we would try the first recipe that I found on the internet. I did a quick Google search and pulled up a recipe from Simply Recipes. The fried green tomatoes were pretty easy to make and we ate them with some spaghetti that we were making for dinner. They turned out to be really good, everybody in the family thought that they were pretty good. Jeremy Gardner was visiting and even he (a disliker of tomatoes) said that they were good.

Green Tomato Salsa

Salsa and Piccalilli

We made two different green tomato salsas. The first salsa we made was a fresh salsa following a recipe that sounded good at recipetips . It was darn good too. Once again Jeremy Gardner said that it was good and was surprised that, as a disliker of tomatoes, he was liking the green tomato experiments so much.

The other salsa we made for canning. We used a recipe that was posted on a garden forum. We bottled the salsa and we sampled the salsa that did not fit in the bottles. It was very mild but tasted pretty good. Sean said that we could blend it up and use it as enchilada sauce on chicken enchiladas, which I think would be really good.

Piccalilli

We also made Piccalilli, which is something that I had never heard of before I ran across a recipe when searching for things to do with green tomatoes. At suite101 there were several ideas of things to make with green tomatoes and one was piccalilli. It turned out to be very tasty. We ate the portion that did not fit in bottles along with some grilled chicken and it was really good. The family thought that it would be good on hot dogs so we will have to try that soon. I was very pleased with the piccalilli, it tasted good and is very nice looking in the bottles too.

Green Tomato Raspberry Jam and Strawberry Jam

This one sounded very interesting and was really easy to make so we just had to try it. This recipe I found at allrecipes and there were a lot of good reviews. I have not tried it yet, but Sean and Tani both said it was pretty good. I’ll have to add a comment when we break open a jar and try it.

Enchilada Sauce

Enchilada Sauce

We were given a recipe from a friend for green enchilada sauce using green tomatoes. This turned out really good and I think I almost single handedly finished off the stuff that did not fit in bottles. I got a plate of corn chips and melted cheddar on them and dipped them in this sauce for lunch one day. It was really tasty! I can’t wait to make enchiladas with this for dinner one night.

We had to give up on trying to make things out of green tomatoes because the tomatoes have now either turned red, or turned black. I did not know that so much could be made with green tomatoes and look forward to trying some new experiments with green tomatoes next fall when the cold cuts the life of our tomato plants short.