Happy Place!

First of all, Ralph was released from the Critical Care unit of the hospital, into a rehab facility last night. Mom is getting him settled in. He is greatly improved over my last report. He has to be in rehab at least five days, including last evening.
I got all the grandkids passed on. Becky got Kimber and Dakota back, and took Nickole for a week. Gavin went home, deciding he had been away long enough. It is quiet, quiet, quiet here.
Not that I have had a huge opportunity to relax. The garden has been going strong, and I have been in full bore preservation mode. The fungal wilt, and beetles have hit the tomatoes hard. Several seemed beyond recovery. What do you do with heavily burdened tomato vines that are naked of leaves? The tomatoes tend to scald in the sun.

This was a great opportunity to make green tomato relish! I have used one recipe before, from "Farm Girl Fare", that I really like. It is sugar free- no sweeteners at all. I am also trying one today based off of a "Taste of Home" recipe for a sweet green tomato relish. Me being me.. I find it very difficult to stick to a recipe. The ToH recipe seemed like it had a tremendous amount of sugar in it... so I cut back on both the sugar and the vinegar in it. I added a couple of seasonings not called for in the recipe. In short, I made it my own, with their recipe as a baseline. Farm Girl Fare's recipe called for a boiling water bath. I am pressure canning them to ensure their seals. (I'm afraid of just using a boiling water bath on most things, though I do on my jellies.) The unsweetened green tomato relish is in the canner right now- five pints. The sweetened batch is cooking in my Instant Pot.
My daughter Becky and DIL Paula had both told me how much they loved their Instant Pots. (An Instant Pot is an electric pressure cooker.)  Mr C got me one for my birthday. At the time, I thought it could be used for pressure canning. That is not true. One cannot use it to pressure can.
HOWEVER... it remains one of the handiest gadgets in my kitchen. I use it to cook the food to be canned. It doesn't heat up the kitchen, as it is well insulated. It can have temperatures adjusted, and timers set. It sautes, it slow cooks, it pressure cooks. It boils eggs that peel like a dream. I have even heard you can bake in them. It has been my handy-dandy daily helper in dealing with garden stuff. And then, when I need to cook supper and I am so worn out from all the harvest preservation... it cooks a meal in minutes.

Unsweetened green tomato relish

The garden has been quite prolific in pepper production as well. I have been drying and crushing the peppers as they get picked. Tom broke several overladen cayenne bush branches off... and I didn't want to waste THOSE peppers either, even though they were green. So I dehydrated the green cayenne as well. I kept them segregated from the ripe ones, and now have almost a pint of green cayenne flakes.  The Tabasco peppers are our hold up on making our tri-pepper blend. They aren't getting ripe as quickly as the others. Drying peppers as we go makes this an easy fix!
I have also been dehydrating other fruits and veggies, such as tomatoes, celery, and onions. Some of these will go into my own *Dash* blend. (Mrs. Dash is trademarked... as is Rotel Tomatoes.)
Dehydrated powdered tomatoes are like sunshine dust.
Anyways, here it is a bit past 1 in the afternoon. I WAS going to say I am *done* with tomatoes for the day. But I went to check on the second batch of relish in the canner... and saw the deck rail covered in RIPE tomatoes. I brought those in, and got to looking for my garden basket to set them in... I found it, half full of mostly ripe tomatoes. And the five gallon pail Tom uses to pick the produce has several inches of ripe cherry tomatoes in it. So... Not quite as *done* as I would of hoped!

Good thing I ENJOY doing this!