The Tomatillos that ate my Garden with a small foray into Tomato Butter

I tried growing tomatillos this year. It was a successful experiment. I grew two types, green and purple. This is what the purple looks like on the bush. I planted three plants--crazy too many.

This is what the inside of a tomatillo looks like.

This is what eight pounds of tomatillos look like. This is a lot of tomatillos. So I decided to make Salsa Verde and can it. Wouldn't you?

But before I proceed, let's just say there was an earlier harvest from which I made a small batch of salsa verde and then used about 40 more tomatillos to make this tomatillo-chile beef stew. It was very good.

Clearly, though, a larger effort was required if these tomatillos were not going to go to waste. So, here are the same eight pounds along with some onions, garlic and chiles going into the oven to roast. 

I neglected to take some photos at this point, but here's one of the roasted jalapenos right before its seeds are removed (I'm pretty wimpy when it comes to heat).

Once the chiles were seeded and stemmed, all ingredients were tossed in a pot and I stirred things up with an immersion blender--one of my absolutely favorite kitchen tools--until it looked like this.

Kinda boring, I know. It was brought to a boil and then simmered for about 20-25 minutes or so. Husband Mike then helped me fill the jars and do the water bath. I won't show you the pic of the jars going into the water bath, cuz you probably know what that looks like--jars going into a big pot full of water.

Here is what eight pounds of tomatillos look like when jarred as salsa verde. I got eight and half pints, although the recipe suggested I should get 10 pints.

It is very good. Let me know if you want the recipe. I really don't consider this a "food" blog.

I also had a small accumulation of tomatoes, too few to process and freeze but too many to use any other way. So I made tomato-garlic butter. It is sort of like tomato paste. The basic recipe is one garlic clove to one pound of tomatoes, but I usually add more garlic. It all goes into a pot and gets cooked down until soft.

Then I ran them through the chinois (big word alert!) to separate pulp from skins and seeds. If I had more I would have gotten out the regular food mill. The chinois requires more elbow grease.

 This is what I ended up with. It simmers low on the stove for hours............

Until it looks like this on a spoon. I ended up with one cup of tomato butter, which I promptly used in the crock pot butter chicken for dinner tonight. If I had more, I would freeze it in small quantities (plastic snack-size bags are good) and save it for later use.

There are more tomatillos out there waiting for me.