Cherry Tomato Salsa & Green Cherry Pickles-come taste some at 2pm Saturday!

For the last few years we have had an abundance of cherry tomatoes. They grow like weeds in our garden. Reseeding in the garden. Growing wherever we put our compost.

We weed them, we give them away, and still our garden is full of these plants that produce very sweet beautiful fruits. I am one of the people on the planet who is sensitive to nightshades and cannot eat that category of foods-tomatoes potatoes peppers and eggplant-without painful sour muscles and joints. It seems to me that they must disrupt my digestive function because when I eat them it seems to aggravate my autoimmune problems too. But I know plenty of people who enjoy tomatoes, and I am blessed with plenty so I have had to find ways to preserve them. I was always told that Cherry Tomatoes must just be eaten, not cooked or saved. However, I just cannot waste that much incredible looking food.

So first I decided to make salsa to get the kids to eat them.

Luckily we also were blessed with peppers and garlic this year.

We were able to buy very nice onions at the farmers markets as well-from Skinny Dip Farm!
I wasnt successful growing cilantro, but I think I put some of my parsley in one of the batches.

 I just washed the cherries, pulled the little green ends off, and halved them. When all the ingredients were chopped and added to the bowl...

...I packed the salsa in sterilized jars...

 ...and put them up for winter. (Using standard canning practices.) Canning tomatoes is pretty safe because they have a pretty high acid content, but look in a book or on line for times and methods.

My second Cherry preserving project involves pickling. I did try using red and green cherry tomatoes and it looked incredible, but the red ones melted into nothing in your mouth-I was told. So I went ahead with pickling only the green ones.

There is a good recipe for Green Cherry Tomato Pickles HERE. I substituted a few ingredients to use what I had on hand rather than buying from stores. I was living on a farm and all kinds of food grows there.