So far we have made green tomato and corn soup and green tomato and vegetable pickles. I cannot give formal recipes because we did not measure anything, just threw it all together and adjusted the flavour until we liked it. But at least I can give you some ideas.
Green tomato and corn soup:
Green tomatoes puree, onions, celery, garlic, chipotle hot sauce, black beans, roasted red pepper, cooking sherry, olive oil, sesame oil, rosemary, thyme, oregano, salt, pepper, lime peel, lime juice. grated cheddar cheese and hot pepper sauce added when served. This was Josh's idea of what a Mexican green tomato soup should taste like. We did not check out recipes nor have we ever tasted a green tomato and corn soup, so I have no idea if it is anything like traditional recipes. I am happy because it reduced the population of green tomatoes in my dining room and it tasted good enough for one dinner and two lunches last week. The kids did not like it, though, so the leftovers have been packaged and put in the chest freezer on top of the mostly repatriated bags of red tomato pulp and the new additions of green tomato pulp.
Hot Mixed Pickles:
Today I took on pickles. I got a recipe much like the one I just gave you for green tomato and corn soup from my neighbour Iulia last week, but was not comfortable "winging it" with pickles, so I looked up recipes. Unlike Iulia's though, nothing else I found was as simple. The others involved splitting or pureeing the tomatoes, using vinegar and salt, boiling and canning. Iulia's traditional Romanian recipe involves dumping washed whole tomatoes into a bucket with sliced carrots, celery greens, cauliflower, onions, garlic cloves, hot peppers, celery root with salted water and a bunch of spices: mustard seed, peppercorns, savory, thyme, rosemary. No cooking, no canning. She just leaves the bucket in the basement to pickle and takes out as much as she wants as needed. I set out this morning, harvested savory and rosemary and picked up some garlic, carrots and cauliflower at the grocery store. We just ran out of our own garlic : ( . I picked through all the tomatoes and separated the ones that have started to ripen from those that have spots or blemishes indicating possible bacteria infection and found the perfectly clean green ones. Once I had washed them, washed and cut the cauliflower, peeled and cut the carrots and onions and garlic cloves and dumped them all in a 20 litre bucket Josh picked up at a paint store, I called next door for help. Iulia was out, but her mother was visiting. Elena speaks some French but both of us have some limitations in vocabulary as neither of us usually cook in French. With a lot of miming and trial and error, she showed me how much of each spice to put in. Elena tossed in the hot peppers (I wasn't sure I wanted to try hot peppers in my first attempt, but Elena got excited when she saw the bowl and tossed some in). I am not sure there is enough salt in there. Iulia told me to put one tablespoon of kosher salt (that is coarse or pickling salt) for each litre of hot water, but Elena showed me to dissolve 20 tablespoons of salt into a litre of hot water (one spoon for each litre capacity of the container) and then enough hot water to fill up the bucket, which was not quite the same. She told me to swish the bucket around to mix the salt up and taste it, it should be salty but not too salty. I am going to invite Iulia over tomorrow to tell me if it is salty enough. I am not sure what too salty tastes like for pickles. She also told me to cover the top with celery leaves. I picked up more celery tonight, so will do that too.
Josh came home after I finished and asked me why I did not cover the vegetables with the liquid. It seems that they float, so adding more water still did not cover them completely at the top. Josh stuck a plate over the top of the vegetables to sink them under the brine. I am not sure that this is a traditional approach, but I will seek out more advice tomorrow.
Our next project: making and canning more hot sauce (using more green tomatoes in the process.
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