As many green tomatoes as you want!
plenty of salt, olive oil, fresh peppermint and leaves, sliced garlic cloves, and hot peppers
Slice the green tomatoes. Salt them well and let them sit at least 12 hours. Rinse them and, in prepared jars, layer the tomatoes with the fresh herbs and sliced garlic, and fill the remaining space with olive oil. Stuff whole hot peppers down the side of the jar or wherever you can find space.* Put the lids on the jar and can as appropriate. Serve on slices of Italian bread.**
________
It's Lent, and Lent reminds me that springtime is just around the corner, and the fresh bright taste of pickles is just what I need to suit my mood. Technically, pickles tend to be more of a fall-winter thing, I know-- it's what you do when you're sick of eating whatever your garden is producing fresh and what you eat when the trees and garden are bare. Maybe that's why I think of pickles in the springtime, then-- it's the freshest thing around until the first peas and baby carrots come up. Great-grandmom Canduci made plenty of pickles in her day, as well as Great-grandpop Canduci, who is still known for his homemade smoked sausage. Apparently the girls of the family got out of the sausage making and procuring festivities. So while my Grandmom and her sisters were at home making pickles, my Great-uncles were off learning the ins and outs of hog-slaughtering!
*If you're new to canning, I will warn you now: spicy things get spicier the longer they sit. I guess the flavors have a longer amount of time to come out of the food. But the point is: don't put too many hot peppers in your tomatoes, because however hot the resulting combination is today, it will literally double, triple, and quadruple its hotness over the space of a few weeks and months.
**Drool. If there's anything better than good Italian cooking, it's good Italian cooking served alongside a good, fresh, crusty-on-the-outside, tender-on-the-inside Italian bread. It should scrub your gums a little (and hold up to a dip in the soup) but be flavorful enough to take unsalted butter in liberal amounts without a processed bread aftertaste. In Riverside, you can buy this bread at the supermarket and pay about $2 for it. New Jersey shoppers laugh in the face of Trader Joe's and Whole Foods for the most part, which peddle things we can get or make on our own under the guise of "gourmet" or "exotic" items. It is a sad state of things when a good loaf of bread is exotic and saleable at exotic prices.
plenty of salt, olive oil, fresh peppermint and leaves, sliced garlic cloves, and hot peppers
Slice the green tomatoes. Salt them well and let them sit at least 12 hours. Rinse them and, in prepared jars, layer the tomatoes with the fresh herbs and sliced garlic, and fill the remaining space with olive oil. Stuff whole hot peppers down the side of the jar or wherever you can find space.* Put the lids on the jar and can as appropriate. Serve on slices of Italian bread.**
________
It's Lent, and Lent reminds me that springtime is just around the corner, and the fresh bright taste of pickles is just what I need to suit my mood. Technically, pickles tend to be more of a fall-winter thing, I know-- it's what you do when you're sick of eating whatever your garden is producing fresh and what you eat when the trees and garden are bare. Maybe that's why I think of pickles in the springtime, then-- it's the freshest thing around until the first peas and baby carrots come up. Great-grandmom Canduci made plenty of pickles in her day, as well as Great-grandpop Canduci, who is still known for his homemade smoked sausage. Apparently the girls of the family got out of the sausage making and procuring festivities. So while my Grandmom and her sisters were at home making pickles, my Great-uncles were off learning the ins and outs of hog-slaughtering!
*If you're new to canning, I will warn you now: spicy things get spicier the longer they sit. I guess the flavors have a longer amount of time to come out of the food. But the point is: don't put too many hot peppers in your tomatoes, because however hot the resulting combination is today, it will literally double, triple, and quadruple its hotness over the space of a few weeks and months.
**Drool. If there's anything better than good Italian cooking, it's good Italian cooking served alongside a good, fresh, crusty-on-the-outside, tender-on-the-inside Italian bread. It should scrub your gums a little (and hold up to a dip in the soup) but be flavorful enough to take unsalted butter in liberal amounts without a processed bread aftertaste. In Riverside, you can buy this bread at the supermarket and pay about $2 for it. New Jersey shoppers laugh in the face of Trader Joe's and Whole Foods for the most part, which peddle things we can get or make on our own under the guise of "gourmet" or "exotic" items. It is a sad state of things when a good loaf of bread is exotic and saleable at exotic prices.
