
Some of you may remember my high, high hopes for the tomatillo plants of gardens past. Indeed, I have planted at least one tomatillo each of the summers that we have lived in Vermont, only to be disappointed when the husks formed on the plant in early summer and then failed to grow any larger than an average sized pea. So, it was much to my surprise when the volunteer tomatillo plants in our community garden plot began to prouduce actual, real, fat green tomatillos. In abundance. Apparently, tomatillos need to be planted in pairs to produce, which is exactly what we accidentally did when moving the volunteer plants from one side of the garden to the other earlier in the season. We gathered eighteen pounds of tomatillos from just a few plants this
past weekend and honestly, I don't think that we got even half of what
the total harvest is likely to be.

So what exactly is to be done with eighteen pounds of tomatillos? Salsa verde, of course. Annie 2.0 happened to talk to our community garden neighbor the morning of the tomatillo haul, and he mentioned that he would be going out of town for the better part of a week. He invited us to pick all of the peppers and cilantro that we wanted. Annie gathered up a few pounds of poblano chiles and super spicy tiny little red peppers of some kind (a Thai chile variety, I think). And we got to work.

Most of our canning jars from previous years have been gradually absorbed into our drinking glass collection; we tend to break stuff and I don't even bother buying actual drinking glasses anymore. Even if that wasn't the case, we probably still would have needed new jars because as it turns out, eighteen pounds of tomatillos makes a lot of salsa.

As in, nineteen pints and two half-pints of salsa. I suspect that it will last us a little while. Although considering how good it is, perhaps not.
I'm actually typing this with my left hand while eating chips and salsa with my right.