As you might remember last summer, Chateau Sutton-Goar was a flurry of canning and dehydrating during the "harvest season." My worst fear--besides that of moving to a climate with a longer growing season--was to go to all that work and NOT USE what I canned and/or dehydrated. I am happy to report that today I have used up the last of the dehydrated bell peppers (which have really been handy and are REALLY spendy at the store), my favorite salsa has been gone for months (okay, not so happy about that one), and we're down to the last few jars of pasta sauce, pizza sauce, canned tomatoes, and green tomato salsa. The chutney, on the other hand, is alive & well. We've used maybe one jar, and have given away another 5-6 jars to people who probably have no idea what to do with it either. I don't think we'll be making any more chutney until we figure out a use for it.
What we'll repeat:
* my favorite salsa - lots
* green tomato salsa - the amount will depend on how many green tomatoes we end up with, which my guess will be "an insane amount"
* the carrot salsa
* canned tomatoes, which do taste better than the store bought ones
* pizza sauce
* pasta sauce
* dried tomatoes, which are a great substitute when recipes call for sun-dried tomatoes, and blessedly can be dried without being peeled
* dried peppers
* seasoned tomato sauce
* red onion relish
What we might repeat:
* green tomato jam, which mellowed nicely and was a big hit at brunch
* green tomato relish, though I think we still have a lot
* canned red peppers, which I forgot about & which we haven't yet tried
* creole sauce, which Andy likes better than I do, but we're not sure if it's necessary in life
* Indonesian satay sauce. It's good, but again, not sure we need more of it
What we will never do again:
* pickled garlic
* horseradish pickles, which we haven't yet tried but were such a pain to make that I don't even care if I love them
* pickled pumpkin, which was fine, but is just a bit too odd even for us
* green tomato chutney, because we'll probably still be trying to use up what we have in 10 years
Not bad. I think the only thing we've really disliked was the pickled garlic, and that still wasn't a total waste because I have friends who absolutely love it. I'm not going to make it again or anything, but it's good that it didn't go to waste.
Now, if I could just get the garden to pick up the pace a little.....
2 comments:
As an overview of your sucess, your list really shows how well you did last year.
How nice to know which things were worth repeating. That is worth such a lot.
Good luck with your activities this summer.
Wow! We pay mega-bucks for pickled garlic from the snobby cheese shop in Cambridge. It's pickled then stored in oil (which I believe is a botulism risk unless you know what you're doing), so we haven't tried making that at home. I might have to hit you up for some recipes, especially if the sun doesn't come back to Blighty; the green tomato harvest might be epic.
Oh - and one of my favourite childhood treats was toasted cheese (is that grilled cheese in the US?) with chutney (which my brother pronounced 'chutterny'), but only from my parents' friends' place. They had a gas grill, and it makes the toast and the grilled cheese taste totally different to electric equivalents
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