Green Tomatoes

I think I may have mentioned before thatI have an absolutely BLACK thumb, as in I cannot keep any plant alive......except that does not apply to tomatoes apparently.

Back in the spring I bought four tiny little tomato sprouts at Walmart, in hopes that I may be able to grow some nice plants. My tomato plants produced one tomato super early in the spring and then NOTHING all late spring/summer and I was pretty sure I had killed all but one of the plants.

WEEELL, little did I know that as we were moving into our new home my tomato plants had decided that they would grow out-of-control!

Alex and i went over to the old house on Friday to dig up my tomato "plant".....which while I wasn't looking turned into three tomato "plants" with about a thousand green tomatoes on them. 

Now, it has gotten into arctic temperatures here in KS and it's already frosted, so I decided to go ahead and pick all these sweet little green tomatoes and take advantage of everything they have to offer.

I plan to introduce the husband to fried green tomatoes later this week but I also wanted to try pickling the smaller tomatoes. I LOVE pickles, I also LOVE tomatoes; green tomatoes already have such a great sour/tart zing to them that i thought they would be perfect to pickle and boy was I right.

I was inspired by the pickling recipe over at A Beautiful Mess but I've made a few amendments.

1TBS Salt

1 1/2TBS Pepper Corns 

1TSP Sugar

3 Cloves garlic

1 Cup Vinegar

1 Cup water

1TSP Dill Weed

The smaller and tiny tomates I pickled whole, while I sliced the medium ones. I packed quart sized jars with the tomates, added spices. Then I added the cup of vinegar followed by as much of the water as I could, topped with a lid, shook until the salt dissolved and left in the refrigerator over night and these puppies were ready to go!