October 2016 – Make me eat my words.

It happens every year. Winter comes too soon. I am never really ready to surrender my garden, I retreat under duress. Every year I spend one evening ruefully bringing in all the green tomatoes one step ahead of a forecasted killing frost.

One family can only eat so many delicious fried green tomatoes, and it’s really hard to fry cherry tomatoes. But I hate wasting what I watched grow, so I’ve found a use for those little green garden babies.

I was given a Martha Stewart cookbook that has a really good recipe for tomato relish, and I tweaked it to my tastes.

How I made the relish:

I take all the sad little cherry tomatoes that are not quite ripe and dice them. I add diced garlic, ginger, onions and bell pepper.

To this I add cider vinegar, salt, brown sugar, mustard and some water.
Then I boil it down until the all the ingredients are soft enough to be fully mixed – sometimes this means I add more water as necessary. Easy peasy. And yummy.

I’ve never canned it , there is never enough to bother. I just pop it in the fridge and use it up over the last month of the grilling season.

Keep the relish basics intact – vinegar and salt and sugar – then taste as you go and adjust as it suits your family’s preferences. Word of warning, use only the little tomatoes that had a chance of ripening; using the very small ones tends to make the relish bitter.

In mid September on the way home from saying a final good-bye to my grandmother, my husband and I stopped in Bonnyville for a break and a coffee. We didn’t have time to get much off the main street so when we passed an old house with a sign saying ‘cafe & antiques‘ we parked and headed in.

The coffee was fine. Hubby got an americano, I got a hot chocolate. The fun part was what I found wandering through the rooms of collectibles.

This is a 1929 version of the White House Cookbook. It’s obviously well used, but the binding and pages are intact. There are some annotations next to a couple recipes.

With recipes like lettuce sandwich, creamed tuna fish, pickled chicken, prune and peanut butter sandwiches, chicken pudding, spiced beef relish, eggs in jelly, and brain cutlets I think it will spend most of its time on the shelf as a interesting conversation starter. I may try some of the bread recipes and I already follow some of the health suggestions.

This is a fabulous find. How it ended up in an antique store in northern Alberta I don’t know, but I like to think that it came up in a hope chest with a young bride. A young woman maybe like my Granny Ada Young who came up from Pennsylvania to
homestead near Dunstable, Alberta with her new husband John.

Maybe this was an sentimental buy. The grandmother whose funeral I was coming home from was born to Ada and John on that homestead. I’m less prone to sentimentality than I am to an obsession with history, but this may be the exception.

It is going to be a joy to find this a place of honour in my new kitchen. Somewhere near my other food related kitchen decorations, my mother’s kitschy early 70’s cookbooks, and near the little book that holds my Grandmother’s pastry recipe.

Month: October 2016

When winter comes too soon

Fun food finds