Green Tomatoes

Oct 20, 2009   Green Tomatoes

 

It’s one of the garden’s many rich ironies that in the year of the tomato blight, my plants have more healthy fruit on them than I have ever seen. A hundred pounds, I’ll bet, on about 22 plants. Every fruit but one is green.

I picked the red one, sliced it up and put it on a plate at supper. My dear, innocent family took it for granted. Everyone had a slice, politely complimented me when prompted, not knowing that several suitcases of green tomatoes were in their immediate future.

It must be Boomer Guilt at having missed the Depression that makes so many of us embrace localvore eating so zealously. I would no more throw away these green tomatoes than spray my garden with Round Up just to watch things wilt.

Days are not getting any warmer. I’m not seeing much ripening going on. Here and there, just a shade of pink blushes a few fruits, but really, nothing you could ever call red. It’s time to pick the rest and get inventive in the kitchen.

I’m not sure we can eat 100 pounds of green tomato relish. We can do in a few fried tomatoes, but they’re no one’s favorite. Could you use green tomatoes in place of tomatillos in a sauce? It might work. So might green tomato salsa. Rhubarb salsa is great, though it has to be fresh; it gets too mushy canned.

I tried Melissa Clark’s recipe for Cream of Green Tomato Soup, from the New York Times of September 16, 2009. It’s good, and I’ll make it again. To do that, I’m going to freeze re-sealable bags of diced. She also recommends making a green tomato salad with anchovies, which sounds good, but the tomatoes have to be fresh. No problem there.

Do you remember Patricia Polacco’s picture book, Thunder Cake? Why not substitute green tomatoes for the over-ripe ones in the recipe? What is it that tomatoes actually bring to chocolate cake anyway? I made a lot of basil gimlets this summer, to the general approval of the cocktail set. What about green tomato gimlets? I also developed some wonderful new ice creams. (Yes, I know, hardly low carb, but it was the diet that inspired this burst of creativity, I’m sure). Would green tomato ice cream be good? Green tea ice cream is, very. We’d better stop there.

Here, so far, are the recipes.

 

My Cream of Green Tomato Soup, after Melissa Clark’s     serves 4

 

2 T olive oil

1 T coriander seeds (I had some on cilantro plants gone to seed. Fronds      went in, too.)

1 onion, chopped

3 cloves garlic, minced

5 green tomatoes, diced

1 t red pepper flakes

2 C chicken broth

½ C low fat sour cream

1 t chopped fresh oregano

salt, pepper to taste

croutons sautéed in olive oil with parsley, garlic

 

Saute coriander, onion and garlic in the olive oil until the onion is translucent. Add the tomatoes the pepper flakes and the broth. Simmer for ½ hour. Puree in a blender until very smooth. Return to the pot and add the sour cream, oregano, salt and pepper. Serve with the croutons.

 

Hot Green Tomato jam

 

This worked well, and has the added charm of using up a lot of green tomatoes, unlike green tomato tea cake, which only used 1 cup of green tomato puree, and flopped, literally.

 

4 C finely diced green tomatoes

1 1/2 C sugar

1/4 C white vinegar

5 cloves garlic, diced

1C diced onion

1 t salt

1 T red pepper flakes

 

Throw this all in a pot and simmer on medium heat until it’s reduced to the consistency of sweetened condensed milk. This should take at least ½ hour. Stir occasionally, then pour into clean jars. My batch yielded 2 pints, which firmed up in the fridge, where you will have to keep them, because they haven’t been sealed. Or give away to friends with dire warnings about refrigeration, which I also did.

 

It’s been a week since I packed all those green tomatoes in hay, wrapped them in newspaper and the like. They have been lurking under the Hoosier cabinet, in the much cooler living room, turning, I hoped, red. Well. As for ripening, these semi scientific methods were all dismal failures. I got one reddish tomato out of about 200. The rest had started to go brown at the top. The only even moderately successful ripening method was ye olde windowsill. North or easterly light both seemed to work. Besides, you don’t forget about them quite so easily.

On the other hand, all that rotting has pretty much solved my Abundant Green Tomato Problem. I am left with ten mostly-usable tomatoes and that’s it.