Holy Jalapenos, Batman!

Today was a crazy day.  Every year, we end up with a frost that sneaks up on me.  Possibly because I'm a little lazy in the fall and I don't harvest my garden like I should.... but this year caught me totally off guard.  So, the kids and I were frantically harvesting each and every item out of the garden.  Tim even drove the van out to the garden to illuminate our harvest with the headlights.
So, we got all of our veggies into the house.  Great.  But, that just means that I need to do something with all this food.  *sigh*

So, I woke up this morning with hardly a clue what I was going to do.  I came into the kitchen and found the veggies, just as I had left them.  There wasn't a veggie fairy that came during the night to help me take care of all this produce.  Before I went to bed last night, I had started organizing the tomatoes.  The green tomatoes went in one section of the kitchen.  The ripened tomatoes went into another section.  And, the orange in-between tomatoes went to yet another section of the kitchen.  If you take just a moment to visualize this, you can probably imagine that my entire kitchen is filled with tomatoes.  That is as far as I got last night.

So, this morning, the veggies were still there.  Staring at me.  Daring me to do something....

First up, Green Beans:

I didn't have a ton of these, so they were easiest to tackle.  Tim got to work washing them and I cut them up.  After a quick little blanch bath, they were bagged up and thrown into the freezer.  Check!  1.5 lbs of beans for the winter.  Mackenzie shelled the peas.  Both she and Tim got hand injuries from their work in the morning.

Next up, Green Peppers:

I still had some sliced peppers in my freezer from last year.  So, I set aside some green peppers to eat fresh. I sold some to my mom, and then the rest I filled with a mixture of bread crumbs, beef, and other spices.  I was too lazy to look up the recipe, so I just made it up.  Check!  10 green peppers stuffed and frozen.

On to ripened tomatoes:

Mrs. Wages salsa mix is my friend.  Peel tomatoes, chop tomatoes, throw into pot with vinegar and packet of spice, cook and can!  It is really easy.  My mom had come to help me, so I had some help in figuring out what I was doing.  It took me a little while to get back into the canning routine.  We made two batches, using mostly San Marzano tomatoes.  By this point in the afternoon, my feet were killing me.  It didn't help that my body was still sore from hauling around all those pounds of veggies last night.  Check!  7 pints of salsa canned and 2 pints frozen.

Next up, eggplant:

Whew.. I was starting to burn out at this point, but Tim and Mom made me keep going.  Tim was cutting the eggplant up so I could blanch it and transfer it to freezer bags.  This stuff looks gross.  I have two gallon bags done now, but I am unsure what I'm going to do with it yet.  I still have 40 eggplant (yes, that is not even an exaggeration!) to do something with.  I can't even give those things away!  Check!  Two gallon bags of eggplant (hmmmmm.....)

Last on the list, green cherry tomatoes:

The Ball Blue Book has a recipe that I had heard about (thanks Linda!) and wanted to try.  Pickled green tomatoes.  I used cherry tomatoes.  Hopefully, I am going to like them a lot, as I have many jars of them.  They were pretty easy to make.  Just a normal kind of pickling recipe... only you use green cherry tomatoes. Let's just say I have green tomatoes coming out of my ears.  So, any recipe using green tomatoes is going to get tried at my house.

I still have a recipe for a green salsa to try, Salsa Verde (I also have tomatilloes to use) to make, and I hope that many of them ripen inside.  We're going to hope... because I sure would like some more salsa and some pasta/pizza sauce!