When life gives you green tomatoes, you might as well make Green Tomato Cake and Green Tomato Chutney. Some people would also make Green Tomato Pickles. I probably should have. Here, in any case, is the story. The setup Sure, I told my sister. I’ll take some of your green tomatoes. Don’t just throw them [...]
What do you do when someone gives you nearly a peck of (unpickled) hot peppers like these? If you’re like me, you freeze them. (Of course, you could also pickle them.) I no doubt harmed their quality by letting them sit in the fridge for a week, but then I dug in. I washed them, [...]
This post is for the edification of wannabe canners and for the amusement of those of you who have been pickling, canning and generally “putting up” for years. No, I am not a canner. I am, however, foolish. Despite my awareness of the endless rules that accompany canning, I nevertheless subconsciously bought into the many [...]
Home canning has enough rules to fill a peck of pickled peppers, which is probably why: Most canning seems to be done by people who learned it from their elders. Most canners break the rules. I arrived at those conclusions after years of interviewing home cooks, including some who canned. They included individuals who: Never [...]
If I knew then what I know now, I probably wouldn’t have undertaken this exercise in freezing apples. But this is how we learn, right? It started because I wasn’t of a mind to turn on the oven, so I decided to prep half my apples, freeze them and turn them into pie at some [...]
I finally got around to those apples, and my second adventure in food preservation for the year. (The dried mint was the first.) Seeing as I prefer to do things the hard way, I decided to turn some of the apples into applesauce and prep the rest for future pie-baking. Turns out I had a [...]