Gardeners often complain about a dearth of good advice on using and preserving tomatillos. The USDA and its Extension agents advise chopping the tart fruits into a pico de gallo–style salsa or canning them in water, but there the official recommendations end. In its papery husk, with its green skin ripening yellow and sometimes blushing purple, the tomatillo shouldn’t be treated like the tomato’s ugly little sister. This tangy little fruit—so easy and quick to grow, so happy to naturalize—deserves a place in every garden and special attention in the kitchen.
I’ve preserved tomatillos in many ways over the years. With their high level of pectin, they are easily made into jam, into which you might incorporate such flavors as lime, ginger, and even chile. With added citrus peel, tomatillos make a fine marmalade. Tomatillos are excellent pickled in vinegar; you can find a recipe in The Joy of Pickling. You can purée roasted or boiled tomatillos for use in smooth salsas. They are also excellent for drying. I love sweet and sour morsels of dried tomatillo in pilaf, especially, but you can use the dried fruits in any way you use raisins, cutting them to the size you prefer.
I never can tomatillos in water. Doing this would produce jars of tomatillo-flavored water with a few fruits floating at the top. You could use the fruits and liquid in soup, I suppose. But why not follow Mexican tradition and roast the fruits instead? Roasting removes excess water and concentrates flavor. You don’t need a comal to roast tomatillos; I use the oven. Here’s how I do it.
Canned Roasted Tomatillos
Peel the tomatillos, and spread them in an un-oiled roasting pan. Roast them in an oven heated to 400 degrees F for about an hour, until all are tender, some are browning, and some may even be bursting, leaking their juices into the pan.
Pack the hot tomatillos into pint jars, leaving at least ½ inch headspace. Shake the jars to settle the fruits. Divide the juice from the pan among the jars. Close the jars with two-piece lids. Process the jars for 40 minutes in a boiling-water or steam canner (or 45 minutes, at 1,000 to 3,000 feet elevation; or 50 minutes, at 3,000 to 6,000 feet elevation, or 55 minutes, over 6,000 feet).
Turn off the heat under the canner, and let the jars cool in the canner for 5 minutes before removing them.
The processing times I give here are those called for by the USDA for tomatillos canned in water.
Should you add salt to this recipe? You may, if you like.
Should you add citric acid or bottled lemon juice, as the USDA advises? Consider that tomatillos have a pH of about 3.8, about the same as apricots and yellow peaches. You will not get botulism from tomatillos. Tomatoes, in comparison, have an average pH of about 4.3. Acidifying tomatoes is a good idea if the variety may be low in acid, especially if you’re not concentrating the acid by prolonged boiling. Acidifying tomatillos should be considered optional.
Come winter, you can chop or purée your canned tomatillos—or leave them more or less whole—for sauces, salsas, soups, and stews. My favorite way to use them, though, is in guacamole. Their tart juice takes the place of lime juice, their high level of vitamin C keeps the avocado from browning, and the fruit both extends and lightens the dip. Most important, my salsa-verde–guacamole hybrid is absolutely delicious.
My walking onions are ready to walk! Over the summer, floral umbrellas formed at the tops of the hollow stalks, and soon bouquets of bulbils replaced the little flowers. Bulbils is a technical term for airborne mini-bulbs. The bulbils sprouted their own green stalks, which were soon topped by smaller bulbils, which in turn sprouted their own green stalks. Still smaller bulbils formed at the very top—though the stalks were no longer erect but curving in every direction. Now the bulbils of all sizes are not only sprouting but are forming rootlets. When the main stalk of the plant falls dead to the ground, as each soon will, the bulbils will grow fast from both bottom and top, rooting themselves deeply and sending up tall green stalks. If the winter isn’t too cold, we’ll be eating those green onions till next summer.
Pickled Walking-Onion Bulbils
Whenever I shop at Russian, Romanian, Bulgarian, and even Lebanese ethnic markets, I look for the ajvar, a jarred pepper-and-eggplant condiment from the Balkan region. Most of these stores stock multiple brands and many varieties—smooth or chunky, piquant or not, with varying proportions of pepper and eggplant, and sometimes with added tomato. Traditionally, people from the lands of the former Yugoslavia make avjar each autumn, by roasting peppers and eggplants over an open fire, peeling them, grinding or chopping them, and then cooking down the mixture with garlic, oil, and salt before ladling it into jars. Ajvar preserves the seasonal bounty for eating throughout the winter.
Line a roasting pan with foil. Rub each pepper with a little oil. Lay the peppers and eggplants in the pan. Roast the peppers for about 45 minutes, turning them occasionally, until the skins are shriveled and somewhat blackened and the flesh is tender. Transfer the peppers to a bowl, and cover it with a lid or plastic wrap.
When the vegetables are cool enough to handle, cut open the eggplants and scrape the flesh into a bowl. Peel the peppers, discard their cores, and scrape out loose seeds with a spoon. Add the peppers to the bowl. With your hands or a slotted spoon, lift the peppers and eggplants into the bowl of a food processor. Strain the juice remaining into the processor bowl, discarding any seeds and bits of skin. Add the garlic. Process the mixture until smooth.
In a wide, heavy pan (I use an 11-inch cast-iron skillet), warm the oil. Add the vegetable purée, and simmer it over low heat, stirring often, for about 15 minutes. Toward the end of the cooking, add the salt, vinegar, and smoked paprika to taste. The ajvar is ready when it is quite thick.
The Whipple is a dry bush bean that’s pretty to look at—it’s maroon mottled with white—and said to be richly flavored. The bean is getting a lot of attention here in Oregon because it’s particularly well suited to our climate; it tolerates summer drought well and it dries down early, in time for harvest before the fall rains might cause it to rot. The Whipple was “a stand-out performer” in the 
My Christmas Eve tomato harvest. These are Sungolds, the extra-sweet hybrid tomato with a flavor reminiscent of tropical fruits. The plant was still producing in late December because we hadn’t yet had a killing frost (our average first-frost date used to be October 15, but now if you ask me the date I can only shake my head). The fruits I was picking were delicious—sweet, tart, and not at all bland or mealy—until December 30, when frost hit. I’d long since pulled out all my other tomato vines, weeks after they had stopped producing fruit and had turned black and rotten. Cool, rainy weather, not frost, sickened and killed those vines. The most extraordinary thing about the Sungold is its resistance to disease. I hope I always have it in my summer garden, even though I have to pay for the seeds.
My favorite use for Purple Peruvians is mashing. Peeling them, though, is a lot of work, so I use my mother’s old ricer (that’s what she called it, even though she used it only for deseeding blackberries for jam). A food mill also does the job but cuts up much of the skins into tiny bits, which end up in the purée. As with Makah Ozettes, mashing Purple Peruvians requires more liquid and less potato than you would expect. Use all the water left in the pan from boiling the potatoes, and add plenty of hot milk and cream. Wait a minute or two, and check the thickness. You will probably need to add still more liquid.
The big, warty salmon-pink pumpkin surprised me when it appeared in my community garden plot this year. I couldn’t remember planting the seed. I must have, though, because rolling around my brain was the variety name—Galeux d’Eysines, or Scabby from Eysines. I found the fruit stunningly beautiful, and I was happy it was growing where so many people could admire it.
This year, my vine produced two fruits—the usual yield, according to the catalogs. The bigger fruit, pictured here, weighed more than 20 pounds. Its flesh was a beautiful bright orange, its seed cavity small, and its seeds rather few (and too big and tough to eat). I cut the squash in half, roasted one half, and gave the other half to a neighbor.
Every year the garlic harvest seems to come a little earlier than the last. This year I harvested on June 14, despite on-and-off rain. I couldn’t wait any longer; on some heads the cloves were already pushing outward, which will lead to early sprouting, and rust spots were beginning to appear on some leaves. The rain was likely to continue for at least another day. Here in western Oregon June is normally a nearly dry month, with an average of only an inch and a half of rain. But what’s normal anymore? Last year I harvested during a downpour.
Every year red orach comes up here and there in my garden, and usually it goes right to seed, sending up a stalk at least three feet tall that bears opposite pairs of two- to three-inch heart-shaped leaves. I could pinch back the top of each plant to encourage it to bush out, but I haven’t bothered. The small leaves are never bitter or tough, and they are perfect for adding whole to green salads.
Carrot Pickle: In a wide bowl, stir together the rice vinegar, sugar, and salt. Cut the carrot into thin sticks. You can do this by slicing it diagonally and then cutting the slices thin lengthwise, but the tool shown here makes the job quicker. Toss the carrot in the seasoned vinegar. The sticks will quickly lose their stiffness.
1 inch of the lower, thicker midrib from each orach leaf. Lay the leaves, one at a time, upside-down on your work surface. Top each leaf with a portion of the noodles, carrot, mint, and shrimp, and roll the leaf from the base to the tip. Place the roll seam-side down on a plate. Make the rest of the rolls the same way.
For garnish, borage blossoms provide an interesting color contrast.
Once again I found a bounty. I loaded the roots into a galvanized washtub and hosed them clean. And then I wondered how Robert and I would eat them all—and how we could do it while avoiding “a filthy loathsome stinking wind,” as John Goodyer described the roots’ aftereffects in 1621.1
The same day I roasted some of the roots—in the way you would usually roast vegetables, but slower, at 350 degrees F for two hours. The long cooking, I figured, might make the inulin-rich roots more digestible. It did not—but what a delicious dish! The chunks turned out crunchy on the outside and soft and candy-sweet on the inside. Robert thought they would make an excellent side for roast beef.2
Most of the roots were still sitting in colanders on the kitchen counter when my digestion returned to normal.3 Again they tempted me. I remembered how tasty 
In the end I was glad I’d cooked a lot, because the chips shrank substantially; they lost two-thirds of their weight. They turned out curled and brown, a sweet, salty, crisp, greasy delight. They still have gassy powers, but we haven’t suffered much as long as we’ve restricted ourselves to a handful a day. (This takes discipline. The chips are addictive!)