Final harvest (a pickling adventure)

Yesterday I decided it was finally time to put my faithful tomato plants out of their misery. I’m frankly surprised they lived this long, but I guess that’s a benefit of living in California. (It doesn’t balance out the crappy 9.5% sales tax, but what can you do?) The past two months of their lives, the plants have become very scrawny, with brittle branches and yellowing leaves, and in the last couple of weeks some plants up and died for good. That could be because I got lazy about watering them after the first rain, but I’m pretty sure the cold nights and lack of sunlight also played a role.

The last tomatoes of the season. All in all, not a bad run.

Tomatoes have been continuing to ripen (although they’re not as red and sweet as they were over the summer) and there were still a whole bunch of green tomatoes on the vines, which I harvested with the plan to turn them into pickles. I’ve actually been itching to make green tomato pickles the whole time I’ve had these plants. Not sure why, since I don’t think I’ve ever eaten a green tomato pickle. My desire to do this might date all the way back to my childhood (and sometimes adulthood) obsession with Little House on the Prairie. Half Pint would be proud.

Or… maybe she wouldn’t be. I knew that in order to preserve the pickles and avoid botchulism, I’d need to go through some kind of canning process, but I’ve never done this before and wasn’t quite sure where to start. I looked online for instructions and determined that I’d need to buy some canning jars (the kinds with resealable lids) and a canning rack to make it easier to boil the jars. Where to find these things? I honestly had no idea. Ordering online would have been easiest but I’d already picked the tomatoes and didn’t want to wait for mail order. With my last unsuccessful shopping experience still stinging, I bravely decided to take my chances and hit a few nearby stores.

First I tried the Dollar Tree… bit of a ditch effort, but I’d seen some websites that suggested they carried the jars. No such luck. Next I drove down to Bed Bath and Beyond, expecting them to have exactly what I was looking for… but no! I wandered their kitchen department for 45 minutes and found neither canning rack nor jars. It was disheartening, and I was thinking of giving up on the whole experiment. But on a whim I tried Michael’s, because another web post I’d read said that they carried canning jars. I found this unlikely since Michael’s is a craft store, not a kitchen store, but was met with sweet and unexpected success!

Next stop: Safeway to pick up a few ingredients, and to make one last concerted effort to find a canning rack (or something like it). I’d read online that the main purpose of the rack is to keep the jars away from the bottom of the saucepan during boiling. With this in mind, I bought a 9″ pie pan instead, with the plan of wedging it into the bottom of the sauce pan and placing the jars on top of it.

I got home and started lots of pots of boiling water—one to heat up the jars (so they wouldn’t crack when hot liquid was poured into them), another to heat up the lids, and the big sauce pan plus pie pan I would be using to process the jars. I more or less followed this recipe, but halfed the pickling solution since I didn’t have anywhere close to five pounds of tomatoes. I separated out the mostly ripe tomatoes to eat, and divided up the remaining green ones into three bowls. Then to each bowl I added two cloves of garlic, a third of a celery stick (sliced up), a few tablespoons of onion, some dill, and some chopped-up serrano peppers—the last two from my pepper plant, in fact. (Still green, but they’ve been that way for a while, and I don’t think they’d be able to get enough sun at this point to turn red.) Unfortunately I forgot to take any pictures of the mixture, but it was quite the bountiful little harvest.

I used tongs to get a hot jar out of the boiling water, dumped the water out, poured the tomatoes etc. in, then used a funnel to pour in the water/vinegar/salt pickling solution. In retrospect I probably should have divided the tomatoes up among four or even five jars, because with all the other stuff I added, they ended up pretty full.

Here’s where I made a mistake. The canning instructions I was following said to put the jar lids in hot water to prepare them, but not the bands. I got confused and put the bands in hot water but not the lids, so the lids (which are supposed to form the seal) were not hot when I put them on the jars. I don’t know if this will make a difference or not. I realized my mistake too late to fix it so went on with the processing. The internet tells me that 24 hours after processing I can test the seal, and if it’s not good I can try processing again… or I’m thinking I could just keep the pickles in the fridge. We shall see.

Once the jars were full of tomatoes etc. plus pickling solution, I lowered them onto the makeshift canning rack and let them boil for 15 minutes.

Post-boiling, the tomatoes are not quite as pretty as they were when they first went into the jars. They kind of look like bloated eyeballs. I’m not sure if this is just what happens, or if something’s wrong with them…

So that’s my pickling saga. In spite of all the pots of boiling water, it turned out not to be as crazy and messy as I anticipated. Assuming all goes well with the seal, the recipe says to let them sit for 2-3 weeks before tasting. Guess we’ll find out in December if these babies are any good!