Green Tomato Relish

What can I say... This recipe is simply delicious and VERY unexpected also! Because the fall is upon us and because the temperature was starting to dip low at night, we figured that it was time to pick the remainder (a large remainder) of our tomatoes before they got damaged by the frost (never mind this AWESOME stretch of weather we're currently on!). Aside from a few really nice ripe fruits, we had lots of green tomatoes... lots!

What to do with all of them? The only thing we've ever really done with green tomatoes back in my native country was to pickle them (they are delicious, might I add!). But I felt like I wanted to do something interesting instead.

Once again, I scoured the Internet for an idea... I found 3 or 4 interesting things, but finally stopped at a recipe for a Green Tomato Relish. Although I WAS hesitant at first (I'm not a big fan of relish), but I decided to give it a try, and I was not disappointed that I did! It's sweet, yet soft and mild, there is something about it that makes me want to put it on everything!

Green Tomato Relish

Homemade Salsa

HERE WE GO!

As promised, and a bit overdue, I'm sharing a recipe of salsa I made for the first time ever. I've never actually made salsa before - my adventures in preserving have mostly been in jams (posted here and here). But this year our garden provided us with an overabundance of tomatoes, so it was TIME to do something about it. After looking around the net for a few simple, but interesting recipe, I stopped at one that I felt would be a) easy to prep and b) easy to modify - I adopted (and tweaked) from the Stop Lookin Get Cookin blog.

And here it finally is!
(Note that I skipped the step of peeling the skins off tomatoes and I did NOT add sugar to the jars before pouring in the cooked salsa, in part because I just forgot, but also because there's enough sugar as it is.) 

Homemade Salsa

Yup, MORE jam!

If you thought that I done jammin' you were wrong! He-he... :)
Zucchinis keep growing, which means I have to keep doing something with them (other than eat them right away, like I said I don't want to eat zucchini-something every day!).

This time I made zucchini jam with................ KIWI! That's right, kiwi! Only this time I photographed a step by step procedure for you so I dare you to try making this jam.

Time for jam!

Okay, so you remember that zucchini. That's right that SAME zucchini!!! There was still some left after making soup and zucchini bread... So I was trying to figure out what else I could do with it, and my mom tipped me off that I could make jam. What she had in mind was zucchini+kiwi. I've never heard of jams being made out of zucchini, but when I started searching online, turns out that there are quite a few recipes out there. And after I made it, I wanted to make more! So I asked my mom for her strawberry jam recipe. And the reason this last one is my favourite is because you get whole berries swimming in jam (it's the second recipe in this post, so read on).

Strawberry and Zucchini & Pineapple jams