Along with our potatoes, Thomas and I grow tomatoes on our balcony every year. And every year, the first winter frost comes before all the tomatoes have had time to ripen.

Luckily, green tomatoes are not only perfectly edible, but can be turned into delicious meals and side dishes in their own right.

One great option for smaller quantities of tomatoes is to pickle them. There are bazillions of recipes for green tomato pickles; this one is great as a side dish for pork and many other meat dishes:

Green Tomato Pickles Recipe

1 kg (2.2 pounds) green tomatoes
3 dl (1.25 cups) white vinegar
3 dl (1.25 cups) water
1/2 kg (1.1 pounds) sugar
1 piece of cinnamon bark
8-10 cloves

Rinse and dry the tomatoes. Use a blunt darning needle to poke small holes in them, so they will absorb the liquid.

Heat the water and vinegar in a kettle till it boils. Add sugar, cloves and tomatoes. Let this simmer for about 5 to 10 minutes, depending on the size of your tomatoes.

Remove the kettle from the heat and keep it somewhere cold overnight to let the tomatoes absorb more flavor.

Next day, bring the kettle to a boil again and let simmer for 5 minutes. Lift the tomatoes out with a slotted spoon and distribute them in sterilized jars. Let the vinegar-mix boil for 5 more minutes. Skim off any residue on the surface.

Pour the liquid into the jars, enough to cover the tomatoes and then some. Put on the jar lids and seal them.

Store them in a cool dark place – for example your fridge – they should keep there for several weeks as long as your lid and seal is airtight. If you pickle them in properly sterilized cans or jars, they should keep for months. But that’s the topic of a future post :-)

Happy pickling!

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Homegrown food is great. In a perfect world everybody would have acres of land to grow their own organic, healthy food. But for city-dwellers like me, that’s just not within reach.

I’m not complaining, though – you can fit a lot of growing things onto a balcony!

And while you won’t be able to grow enough food to squirrel away for the winter, you can at least get a taste of home-grown food :-)

Take potatoes for instance, which Thomas and I just harvested.

We have a terracotta pot we usually use, about 13 inches (33 cm) across, but you can use just about anything as long as it’s big enough. An old bucket, for example.

If you use a bucket, be sure to poke a few drainage holes in the bottom of it. You don’t want to drown your potatoes! Put your planter on a tray to collect run-off water, and put a few bits of wood or stones underneath to raise it enough to let the water out.

After the danger of sub-zero night temperatures have passed – around here that is mid to late April – fill your selected planter about halfway full with soil, put 3 potatoes on top, and add another two-inch (5 cm) layer of soil.

In a week or two, the sprouts will poke their heads up. Add some more loose soil on top of them. The next time they poke through, push soil up from the sides to form a little mound – but not covering the sprouts completely.

After that, add some more soil to the mound every once in a while, making sure your potatoes aren’t exposed to sunlight. Potatoes exposed to sunlight while growing will be a greenish color, and might be slightly poisonous.

Then just sit back and wait, water occasionally – not too much, though. Once every two weeks is usually about right if you get a little rain, too.

As a bonus, your potato plants will actually be very decorative, and if you’re lucky, you will get flowers on them too. We’ve never been that lucky with ours, but at least we get decorative greenery trough the summer, and enough really nice potatoes for a meal. Yay!

You should harvest your potato crop before the temperature at night drops below zero, although one cold night has never done any harm here. We usually scrabble around for the potatoes somewhere around late September/early October.

You can use a small shovel to dig for your potatoes, but we find it’s better to just use our hands – to make sure no potatoes get away ;-) If you want to protect your nails or don’t want to get dirty, you can wear rubber gloves.

Homegrown, fresh potatoes usually taste fantastic. We like to wash and prepare them as soon as we get them inside. There is no need to peel them.

They’re delicious steamed for a few minutes until they are just tender, and eaten with butter or a bit of salt. Drowning the flavor in heavy sauces or stews is a waste of these fresh, tasty potatoes.

Good luck if you decide to try this!

And yum ;-D

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2. Baking potatoes: halving time and energy spent