Ham Sandwich Indicted!

Making salsa has become a summer ritual for me--it's a perfect way to preserve those delicious tomatoes that are piling up at farmer's markets, and the flavor combinations are incredibly flexible and open to interpretation. Our hot central Ohio summer has provided us with great peppers as well, and there's really not a better way to make use of them. This year, as I am living without a functioning kitchen, my salsa making happened during the last of a series of canning classes I taught at Oakland Nursery.  Over a dozen folks came out to chop, dice, and put up a dozens of jars of salsa and tomato jam.  Twenty pounds of tomatoes later, everyone went home with a couple of jars of delicious tomato products.  Just for fun, we also did a heirloom tomato taste test, taking advantage of huge variety of colors, flavors and textures available. Over the years, I've tried and tweaked several salsa recipes, but find myself using one from Mary Anne Dragan's Well ...

One of the random talents of the Ham Sandwich family is salsa making. My mom's mom made jars and jars of salsa every summer with the tomatoes and peppers my grandpa would grow in their backyard garden. Salsa making talent reappeared in my brother, who not only made salsa, but hot sauce as well , AND made a viable company selling spicy condiments to folks that are apparently referred to as "chiliheads." This weekend, I dug deep into my genetic code and tried my hand at making and canning my own salsa...boiling water bath and all. Surprisingly, it was not that hard, and was rather satisfying. The only investment I had to make was a box of mason jars and the canning kit with a funnel, jar and lid grabber, and spatula. (Wal-Mart is good for some things...) I'd already inherited grandma's canning kettle, and the garden supplied me with just about all the ingredients. The most time consuming part of all this is the prep: blanching, peeling and seeding the tomatoes, r...

I realized a little late that I probably should have been keeping a garden journal this season--the kind that details when things went in the ground, when they started blooming, fruiting, how many of each thing I planted, etc. Since I failed to do that, this blog will have to serve as the next best thing. Above is the start of a tomatillo growing. The plant has been covered in little yellow flowers for the better part of a month now, and they're finally morphing into actual tomatillos. Very exciting. The tomatoes are going like gangbusters, this is the pink tomato plant (exact species escapes me), listing a bit from the weight (and my jerry-rigged support system--I was apparently too lazy to get some cages. Eh.). The red cabbages have provided me with the most drama this year, as they were attacked by worms in late June. Since showering them with that Sevin dust (it kills everything under the sun and is ok to use on plants), the worms have not returned. Bastards. Their impa...