How to Make Green Tomato Salsa

It's end-of-the-season garden time.  When we look at the piles of garden produce that we desperately grabbed before the killing frost.  What do we do with it all??

A box of jalapeno peppers... a BOX!  There's only so many poppers one can make.

And green tomatoes!  We're not in the south, so frying them is out of the question.

Green Tomato Salsa it is!!  I have a hard time waiting until frost to make this deliciously simply salsa.  I got the recipe from my dear friend Sue.  As we're not big chip eaters, salsa is more of an ingredient in this house.  I use this salsa in recipes that call for diced green chilis.  And if you've ever paid the horrendous price on cans of diced green chilis, this end-of-the-season salsa is very economical!

I do the peppers first.

Chop off the stem end.

Then halve them.

And now for my secret weapon...the grapefruit spoon!

I use the spoon to quickly and easily slide out the seeds and ribs of the peppers.

Works like a charm!

Toss the halves in your food processor.

Chip, chop, chip!  In just a few minutes, a processor full of pepper halves.  If they are tiny peppers, I just cut off the stem and throw the whole thing in.

Pulse until the peppers are between diced and minced.  We need 4 cups of peppers!  Like I said, it's a great way to use up those excess peppers.

Now the green tomatoes.  Remove the stems.

Halve them.

Quarter them and remove the core.  It's woody and doesn't make for good salsa.

Pulse the tomatoes to the same size as the peppers.  You'll need 16 cups of tomatoes.

Then your camera dies and you need to finish this eternal canning.

Green Tomato Salsa Recipe

16 cups green tomatoes

4 cups jalapenos

1 cup vinegar

1/4 cup salt

Heat to boiling.  Ladle into hot jars.  Process for 10 minutes for pints, 5 minutes for half-pints in a boiling water bath.

That's it!  

Ask Annie - Volume I

Thanks for the great questions here on the blog, via facebook and email!

1.  Dear Annie - What do you recommend for winter watering of chickens and livestock?

Our laying hens spend the winter in a hoophouse.  Our HoopCoop has no supplemental heat or light and no electricity.  

But this picture doesn't show what we use for watering.  We use those black, rubber tubs you can find at any farm store.  Like Tractor Supply Company.  They are cheap, indestructible and because they are rubber you can pop an ice chunk out very easily.  We don't often do that, however.  Hubby takes a pail of water out each morning and pours it in onto the ice.  The hoophouse warms up quickly once the sun comes up and stays above freezing for most of the day.  The chickens drink their fill and come night time, when it freezes, they don't drink anyway...they're sleeping!


When it comes to larger livestock, we had frost-free Richie Fountains on our farm growing up.  They are pricey, but last forever.  If you're watering on the cheap, we have a rubber 40 gallon stock tank that the flerd is using now.  You can add an electric tank de-icer to keep the water open.  Like this one.

Of course, you can always take the advice of my favorite rancher, Gabe Brown of Brown's Ranch.  He doesn't water his cattle when there is snow on the ground.  He has selected and bred his herd to eat snow like cattle did years ago.  As he says, "I'm not running a bed and breakfast here!"

2.  Dear Annie - How do you keep your free range, organic children busy on rainy days?

First, I love that you called them "free range, organic children"!  We are firm believers that children need to have fresh air every day and use their big muscles every day.  EVERY. DAY.  Children will not melt and if they are moving they will keep warm.  We have coats of all shapes and sizes, footwear of all shapes and sizes.  

Rubber boots are the farm kids best friend!  Our kids spend about half the year in rubber boots.

There's also no shortage of things to do outside!

Unless it is a raging blizzard, our kids go outside every day.  My winter-time rule for babies is that if they can sit up (around 4 months) then they can go outside unless the temperature is below zero.  Sometimes it's only for 10 minutes, but they get fresh air and use their big muscles!

The kids' favorite family game is "Ready, Set, Go".  We all stand in a line and mom or dad says, "Ready?  Set?  GO!!!!"  And we all take off running to a pre-determined finish line (like the back of the van or a tree).  Sometimes a parent picks up a slower kid and helps them win the race.  We repeat it again and again until we giggle so hard we can't run anymore.  

We also do family walks down our driveway.  Kiddo1 will ride her bike and Kiddo3 usually gets a stroller ride for at least part of it.  Sometimes the kids ride their stick horses.  In the winter, we'll do it after supper and each kid has a flashlight.

But if we positively can't go outside that day, we do our best to keep them occupied in the house.  These books have been lifesavers for me:

In fact, I give them as second (or more) baby gifts as a way to help mamas keep the older kids busy with a new baby in the house.

What else do we do?  We bake and cook. 

And sometimes we destroy the house.  And cheap rolls of wrapping paper. 

We don't have TV, the little television we watch is a few selected movies.  We also don't believe in video games or computer games, especially for children.  

What do we believe in?  We read to the kids alot.

We color and paint and play with playdough. 

We do folder games and puzzles. 

And play with other hands-on active play toys.

Of course, we clean it all up right away!  {wink, wink}

3.  Dear Annie -  Where do your kids get their blond hair?

Well, Hubby has blond hair and I am, quite literally, the black sheep of my family.

See?  Blond sister, blond brother, blond husband = blond kiddos!!

On a side note, that is indeed my sister.  We have the same parents, just inherited exactly opposite genes.  Usually when someone has known one of us and then meets the other, there's always a comment like "Wow!  You guys look NOTHING alike!"  No, no we don't.  She is very blond, very tall, very thin and a very good singer.  I am not. But she doesn't butcher chickens...

Thanks again for the fun questions!  If you have more, feel free to leave them in the comments, or facebook, or email.

The Big Debate

According to my friends on Facebook, there was a debate last night.  Someone wore a red tie and someone wore a blue tie.  There were mixed reviews as to who actually won.  However, THAT debate had nothing on the debate that was going on in my kitchen!

One of the candidates was taking things that didn't belong to her.

And she got caught in a rebuttal when the butter dropped out of her mouth.

But she looked right into the camera with those big blue eyes and she just needed another 20 months to right all the wrongs done by her predecessors.  

The debate continued over who would stir the caramel and who would spread the butter and brown sugar.  But they reached across the aisle of their chairs and agreed to each take a job.

There was some slashing and cutting.  Not budgets, just dough.

And in the end we cleaned up our mess, put on our jammies, snuggled on the couch to read "Little Town On The Prairie" and prayed together.

Caramel rolls for breakfast is a great way to work together and a lovely way to start the day.

Should we send some to Washington??

How to Make Kuechla

Long, long ago when I was a small child (or 18), I would love to enter my grandma's kitchen and see a tupperware container full of kuechla on the counter.  If you don't know, kuechla is a deep fried dough that German-Russian women have made for centuries.  

We German-Russians are great with doughs of all kinds.  Hubby asked me once "What's up with all the dough?"  We're Germans from Russia, dough is all we had!  Of course, he's a Scandanavian, I should ask him "What's up with all the pickled fish?"

In all my 35 years, I had never made kuechla.  Then Kiddo3 dumped my overstuffed recipe box and recipes went everywhere.  As I was picking them up, I found this gem:

It's not my grandma's recipe, but a local cook put her grandma's recipe in the local paper.  And we NEVER put questionable recipes in the PAPER!  Only the tried and true....

I didn't take pictures of the whole process, because I wasn't quite sure how it would turn out.  I did have to make a phone call to my mother to make sure I was pulling them correctly.

So basically, you follow the recipe above and deep fry them.

Beautiful golden brown twisted pieces of dough.

Look at that pile of kuechla!

Hubby was surprised that they weren't sweet.  There's a bit of cinnamon and nutmeg in the batter (I added that, surprise surprise) but not much sugar.  The kiddos loved them!  And Hubby only ate 20 or 30 of them.

Tuesday Tidbit - Have You Hugged Your Pig Today?

Have you hugged your pig today?

Just one of the joys of pastured pork!

TomatoFest 2012

Our friends, the Podolls, of Prairie Road Organic Farm grow, breed and select vegetables for seed.  Theresa's passion is tomatoes, wonderfully delicious and beautiful tomatoes.  Earlier this year, I asked if they ever let people come and glean their tomato fields (yes, they have fields of tomatoes) because we never have enough tomatoes and I love to can with them.  She said that she would call us when frost is imminent and we could come and pick all we wanted.  They only select the best fruits to harvest for seed and they can't possibly use the thousands upon thousands of tomatoes that are left.

As we were butchering chickens on a Friday morning, she called and said, "Tonight's the night!  Come and get 'em if you want 'em!"

Hubby and I had plans to go to Bismarck for a date night, I had a gift card to Red Lobster and it was endless shrimp.  Plus, a friend of ours had the lead role in a movie set, filmed and produced in ND and we wanted to go to the premiere.  Grandma was already lined up to babysit.

I looked at Hubby and said, "Let's go pick tomatoes!"  So we traded in our big city date night for an evening in the organic oasis that is the Podoll farm.  As always, we were welcomed with warm handshakes and hugs, treated to laughter and great conversation, and left enlightened and inspired.

What did we come home with?  These boxes...

 and these boxes!

What do you do with over 400 pounds of tomatoes?

Begin TomatoFest 2012!

Start by halving or quartering the tomatoes.

Then put them in your Victorio food mill.  Hubby bought me this one for my Christmas present our first Christmas together as man and wife.  Best present I ever got! 

Use the "strumpfer" (that's the German word for it) to push the tomatoes down the hatch.

The juice and pulp is pressed through the screen and the tomato "guts" go out the end.

Like that!

I cook down my sauce to remove the water and thicken the tomato.  You can do it on the stove.  But be very careful, it will scorch easily and will be useless if that happens.  You better be stirring quite often to make sure that doesn't happen.

My preferred method is cooking down in the oven.  The chance of scorching is much less, but you do have to give it a stir every couple of hours.  During the day, I cook down on 300 degrees.  But I also cook down overnight, but I put the oven on 200 degrees because I won't be stirring it.

This year I also employed my countertop oven.  It worked like a charm!  I also used this for cooking down overnight at the same temperature.  I do NOT cook down overnight on the stovetop.

Another technique I use is decanting.  I was making gallons and gallons of tomato sauce.  And these weren't all paste tomatoes.  Paste tomatoes have much more tomato pulp and less water than regular tomatoes.  I had about a 1/3 paste tomatoes, the others were Crimson Sprinter and Cherokee Purple.  Fabulous tomatoes, but lots of water.

If you let your juiced tomatoes sit for 12-24 hours, the pulp will rise to the top and the water will sink to the bottom.  Then simply use a ladle to scoop up the pulp.  If you like tomato juice, the water would be just fine to can as juice.  No one in our family likes tomato juice, so I didn't can it.  The pigs LOVED it with their feed the next day!

I also harvested all the peppers from our hoophouse:  jalapenos, sweet bananas and green bells!

I wish I had the time, energy, or space to take a picture of all the jars resulting from TomatoFest2012, but I didn't.  My kitchen was covered in jars, boxes of jars, and tomatoes.

Here's some vegetable soup bubbling away in the counter top oven.

What was the result of TomatoFest 2012?

3 days (I was leaving on Monday for a conference in Michigan)
14 pints BBQ sauce
4 pints and 14 quarts of salsa
10 quarts of ketchup
6 quarts of spaghetti sauce
21 quarts of vegetable soup
21 quarts of tomato soup
7 quarts of tomato sauce (I save the tomato sauce for the end because by then I'm sick of tomatoes and just want them done with)

All of the above (except the tomato soup) I canned using recipes from my favorite canning book of all time, Growing and Canning Your Own Food by my canning hero, Jackie Clay.  This book is my go-to manual for all things canning.  Her meals in a jar are my winter-time canning regimen.

The tomato soup recipe is from Georgean Lick and the lutheran ladies cookbook from my highschool days.  I never liked tomato soup growing up.  We had it every other Friday in school with grilled cheese sandwiches.  Ick.  But Hubby loves it and asked me to make it for him when we got married.  

{sigh} Fine, but I don't want to eat it.  I looked and looked for a recipe and found hers.  Georgean is a wonderful cook and I knew that if I didn't like her tomato soup, then I would never like tomato soup.  It is delicious!!  Here's the recipe:

Tomato Soup

16c tomatoes

1 bunch celery

6 onions

4 cloves garlic

1c sugar

1/4c salt

Cook the first four ingredients together until soft.  Process through food mill to puree.  Cook down until desire thickness, add sugar and salt.  Pour hot soup into hot jars (I use quarts), process for 40 minutes in water bath canner.

When serving:

Melt 2Tbsp butter.  Add 2Tbsp flour to make a roux.  Add milk (an equal amount of the soup, if you are using a quart of soup you'll add a quart of milk) and a pinch of baking soda.  Heat through and add soup.  When heated and bubbly, serve.

(I often add tiny, thin egg noodles to this soup so that my kids have something to use with their spoons.)