2 Recipes! Canning Cherry Tomatoes and Pickled Peppers!

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     As you know, if you have been following along, my goal in my garden is to be able to harvest food all year round!  Right now, my garden is in the transition phase between seasons.  We are cleaning out the beds from the summer garden and getting them ready for our Fall/Winter garden.  Currently, I can still harvest basil which is growing profusely and I am getting ready to harvest my large plant of it and dehydrate it to have a good supply of the dry herb in my cupboard.  I also still have bell pepper plants that are producing, but while they seem like healthy plants and the peppers taste good, they are very small.  (See the ones in the above photo?  No stuffed bell peppers for dinner around here!)  We still use them to add flavor and color to our food, but I don't know what I did wrong this year when it came to my peppers.  Maybe they needed more fertilization?  But, I am glad to have them.  
     So anyway, to fill out my need for veggies as we transition our garden, I have been going to our favorite local produce wholesaler.   They have had some great deals lately and I am going to tell you all about how I have been not letting all of that produce go to waste! 

     One of the things that our produce guys do is put together what they call combo boxes that cost about $35.  So, a couple of weeks ago, they put together a box that contained so many good items that I had to order it!  This box had celery (which I am going to regrow), potatoes (really big baked potato sized), a fresh coconut and a stalk of sugar cane (both surprises that they included for fun!), beets (I think I will use them in taco soup), romaine lettuce, a dozen eggs!, a pound of bacon!, a cantaloupe, a clamshell of blueberries, some special variety of brownish tomatoes ( I think they are called kumato), and about 4 or 5 containers of various varieties of cherry tomatoes,  (one of the stars of this post), and 2 pounds of seedless sweet peppers, (another star)!  To me it seemed like a smokin' deal.  But, it was more than we could eat right away, so I had to come up with ways to use and or preserve it all!  

     My first idea was to can the cherry tomatoes.  I had seen people talk about it online, but since I wasn't growing cherry tomatoes, I didn't think too much about it until these showed up in my box.  Everything I read said that canning cherry tomatoes is great because they are so good to add to soups or to make sauces with.  You don't need to peel them, you simply poke a hole through the skin with a toothpick before you drop them into the jar.   The amount of cherry tomatoes that I received in my combo box allowed me to can 4 1/2 pints of cherry tomatoes!    
      I don't know if I'd call this a recipe, but it gives the step by step directions for canning cherry tomatoes.
Hmmm, I guess that is a recipe.  
​  You can click on it for the pdf version to print!  

     Of course, I also made cute little labels for the tops of the jars that you can download. 

I made this label in two sizes.  You can get the 
1 -1/2 " size here.

The 2" size is available if you click here!

     When I saw all of the Sweet Peppers, plus the ones from my garden, I told Maddy that I thought I would make Pickled Peppers.   She replied, "Well okay, Peter Piper!"  LOL  (But I know that she was secretly happy because she loves pickles!)
       The reason that I wanted to pickle the peppers was:

• I thought they would be good in salsas, salads, on sandwiches...
• By pickling them, I wouldn't have to pressure can them, which seemed like a long process to go through for 2 pounds of peppers!  

      I had never pickled peppers before, so I searched around and looked at different recipes.  I decided that for the different uses I was thinking of pickling them for, I would jar them up in 2 ways: 

Slices for sandwiches and burgers...

Diced for salsa, soups and salads! I love that they are so colorful!

     When you pickle your peppers, be sure that you are using vinegar with at least a 5% acidity.  (My white vinegar was 6%).  That is what pickles and makes it so that you don't have to pressure can the vegetable.   But, you don't have to stick to 1 kind of vinegar either.  My recipe is a mix of white vinegar, apple cider vinegar and rice vinegar!  When all was said and done, I felt like my pickling liquid tasted really good! 
​

Once again, click on the recipe for the printable version!

     You will notice that I put a grape leaf or stem in the recipe.  That is because the tannic acid in grape leaves or stems will help pickles stay crisper.  I only used them in my pickled pepper slices, but not in the diced peppers. 
      As you can see, the 2 pounds of peppers I got in my produce box plus a few from my garden gave me quite a few jars of pickled peppers to add to my pantry!  Not quite a peck of pickled peppers, but about 5 1/2 half pints of diced peppers and 3 pints of slices!  

Of course, I made labels for these as well!  

     These are only in the 2 inch size, and I didn't differentiate between sliced or diced because I figured I could tell what they are by looking at the jar.  Click here to get the pdf of the label. 

     I was so happy with the way these pickles and tomatoes came out, I thought that they would make a great gift to anyone who loves farm to table type food, or pickles or home canned goods, etc. !  Here is an idea:

     I added onions from my garden, some fresh flowers, seed packets and plantable seed paper, some of my tiny peppers.  I think I am going to want to do more pickling to make this gift basket a reality for some of my friends and family! 

      How do you think you would use canned cherry tomatoes or pickled peppers?  If you have any recipes using them, I would love to see them!  Drop me a comment and or link in the comments!