A Season Finale Green Tomato Relish

Over the weekend I pulled out my tomato plants.  The big ones; the cherry tomatoes are still producing and are in a bed that will lie fallow for the winter, so I’ll let those go a while longer.

The tomato plants I pulled yielded a quarter-basket of golf-ball sized green tomatoes; too small to batter and fry (I do like fried green tomatoes!) but too many to just toss in the compost.  I decided to make some green tomato relish.  I also have an abundance of sweet peppers right now; I could put those in there as well.  And of course some onion… and maybe some jalapeno to give it some zing.

To save time, I ran the whole lot of them through a food processor with a grater blade installed.  I get better results – more consistent pieces – if I cut it all by hand, but that is very time consuming and I have other things that must get accomplished today.  I still had to pick out some large chunks and dice them by hand, but not too many.

For the tomatoes, I washed them and removed the stems and any bad spots, but otherwise shredded them whole and as is; green tomatoes are much more solid than ripe tomatoes.  The sweet peppers were cleaned and seeded.  I ended up with 2/3 of the mix being tomatoes 1/3 being a mix of sweet peppers (green, purple, red, yellow) onions (mostly red onions as they don’t keep as well as the yellow ones so I like to use them first) and a few jalapeno peppers: caps removed, the rest (including seeds) run through the shredder.

The shredded vegetable mix went into a colander in the sink to drain for an hour while I set up the canner and sterilized jars.  When drained, I used a pint jar as a rough measure of how much vegetable mix I had as I transferred it to a stock pot; I had four pints of raw vegetable mix.  This will cook down some, so the 5 jars I prepared will be more than enough.  I used the four pints as a scale for reducing the 12 pint recipe: divide everything by 3.

To the mix in the stock pot I added 1 TB Mustard seed, 1 TB Celery seed, ¾ cup Truvia, and ¾ cup vinegar.  The recipe I use calls for salt as well, but we don’t use salt in most things, so I skipped that.  I heated the mix and allowed it to simmer for 10 minutes, stirring frequently, to be sure it was heated through before packing it into the hot pint jars, leaving ½” headspace.  Tap the jars solidly on the counter to settle the contents and look for air bubbles; use a skewer to remove the air, tap again and adjust the head space.  I ended up with three full pints and a half-pint left over that I put in a jelly jar and placed in the fridge for immediate use.