Fried Green Tomatillos
How often do you discover a new vegetable? I’m generally not too adventurous but this year I’ve made a few delicious discoveries thanks to Lost Pond Farm CSA. CSA stands for “Community Supported Agriculture” and the idea behind it is that a group of consumers give money (and sometimes labor) to a farmer at the beginning of the growing season in exchange for a cut of the farm’s production. In our case, we signed up to get a weekly delivery of about a quarter bushel of produce, enough for a family of two for a week.
We never know what we’re going to get but it’s always in season and it’s always fresh. I’ve been working with Pete Johnson for awhile through the Local Growers’ Guild and I love his passion for organic growing and special varieties. So far I think my favorite item has been the blue potatoes. They’re pretty recognizable as potatoes but they’re a fantastic shade of blue and also exceptionally tasty. I’ve also enjoyed being introduced to new and different produce options. One week we received tiny Mexican cucumbers that are just a little bigger than jellybeans and taste like they’ve been pickled. Another week it was a plant somewhere between broccoli and kale that provides the texture of broccoli heads while withstanding hot Indiana summers. (Around here, you can get broccoli and brussel sprouts in the fall or in the spring if you start ‘em early but they wilt during the summer.)
More recently, we received a bag full of tomatillos (pictured above). They’re similar to tomatoes but fairly small, fairly tart, and you’re supposed to eat them before they get too ripe. You also have to peel the husks off first, which is kinda fun although they get a little sticky. I have only found a couple of tomatillo recipes, many of them variations on salsa verde, but decided to stick with fried green tomatillos, especially since we’re here in the South. The recipe is pretty simple - mix cornmeal, eggs, herbes de Provence, salt, and pepper as a batter. Dip the tomatillo slices in and fry them in oil. The batch I made this evening wasn’t quite as good as I’ve had in the past (I didn’t include quite enough spices) but they were still pretty good.
I must confess, though, my tastes are alread turning to autumn. This afternoon I made applesauce bread with the last bit of applesauce from 2007. It’s about time to cook up some of this year’s orchard crop. Applesauce, apple butter, dried apples, frozen apples, apple cider, apple soda…. Mmmmm. I’m excited to see what other exciting fall goodies will be in our CSA basket this fall. Only time will tell.
I think Will and I got into soda-making last year when we read “The Tightwad Gazette” and started thinking about the myriad ways we could save money if we just put some energy into it. Or perhaps it was when we started paying attention to the amount of corn syrup contained in the food we eat and looking for an alternative. Well, mostly I think it just sounded fun. We started with a 
I decided this weekend I was ready to try again and invited my cousin Lia to come and help out. (Little did she know it was an invitation to do all the work. Mwa ha ha ha.) We decided to make a gallon of ginger beer and a half gallon of root beer. To make any sort of soda, the basic idea is to make a sweet herbal tea or juice mixture and then add a little yeast and let it ferment for a few days to create the carbonation. Technically, the carbonation means that it’s very mildly alcoholic but I think we’re talking something like 0.01%. Once it’s fizzy enough, you put the soda in the fridge to stop the fermentation. Actually, the soda will keep fermenting in the fridge but at a much slower rate. You do have to drink it within a couple of weeks or it’s liable to fizz all over the place.
Our first step for the ginger beer was to cut up a bunch of ginger. (I let Lia do the dirty work). Our recipe said to combine 1.25 oz grated ginger, 1/2 gallon water, 1.75 C sugar, and the juice from half a lemon and to simmer for 25 minutes. The next step was letting it cool so we got started with the root beer. I decided to try using 
For the ginger beer, the next step was to mix our ginger “tea” with half a gallon of cooler water to get the final mix around 75 degrees F to make the yeast happy. We mixed 1/8 teaspoon of yeast with 1/4C of water and let it proof for a few minutes before mixing it all in. The recipe book 
This evening I went over to my friend Bobbi’s house to help her dehydrate some peaches. I am still a novice food preserver but I am really excited to learn more about drying food and Bobbi has been doing it for awhile. Her persimmon leather is particularly tasty but she works seasonally and the fruit-of-the-month is peaches. She buys seconds (the ugly, small, or slightly blemished fruit) from Olde Lane Orchard and dries, freezes, cans, or jams them although her preference is drying.
We started by washing the peaches in a sink full of water. (Kind of makes you want to bob for peaches, doesn’t it?) Eliza, Bobbi’s daughter, had requested that we do a batch without skins so our next step was to drop each peach into boiling water for a few minutes to loosen the skin. This is the same technique used to get the skins of tomatoes for people who like their tomato sauce smooth. Bobbi and I are both of the opinion that it’s easiest and most nutritious to leave the skins on most everything but we were curious to see how it went.
The peeling part wasn’t too bad once we let the peaches cool a little. The clingstone peaches seemed to peel a lot more easily than the freestone peaches, which may explain why they’re still a popular variety even though they’re a pain to cut up. However, skinned peaches are incredibly slippery and I think it was sheer luck that none of them landed on the floor. They also seemed juicier than normal when cut, perhaps because they were partially cooked by the boiling water.
We sliced them into roughly even chunks and put them on the dehydrator trays to dry. In an ideal world, all the pieces should be exactly the same size so they dry at the same rate but in reality some of them get a little drier and some not quite as much and life goes on. Drying at low temperatures preserves a lot more vitamins and nutrients than canning or freezing and if the moisture content is low enough, it can be stored for many months.
Bobbi’s dehydrator is much nicer than mine with adjustable heat and a timer so you can turn it on and set it to magically turn itself off in X number of hours, which is helpful since drying times for fruit tend to be pretty long - say 20 hours. I left just a couple hours after we got the dehydrator loaded so I won’t be able to report back on the results for a few days but I’m sure they will be tasty and probably look like this batch that Bobbi did last week. I’m looking forward to trying out a few recipes from “
Step two is to make a boiling brine mixture. We used a basic recipe from 
Step four is canning. You can skip the canning if you plan to keep your pickles in the fridge and eat them fairly quickly but if you want them to keep for months, you need to can them. Since pickles are pretty acidic, they are less likely to harbor bacteria than low acid foods like green beans. This means you can can them using the boiling water method, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like - boil the cans in a big pot for 10-20 minutes (depending on jar size and altitude). This sterilizes the content of the jar and also pushes most of the air out, creating a vaccuum seal. If we were dealing with low acid foods like green beans we would have used a pressure canner, which increases the pressure as well as the temperature to make it as inhospitable to bacteria as possible.
That’s it! Making pickles definitely takes some work but it’s a lot of fun when you make it a party. Stephanie is always a blast to hang out with and being a dill pickle addict, she kept the energy high. Lindsey had just moved to Bloomington on Friday and was excited to stock her pantry with her own pickles. She is also already planning to recreate the 
