This looks delicious! Do you think I could freeze the salsa verde?

I’ve lived in this house for almost 7 years. When we moved in there was hardly any garden, so I went about destroying the mono-culture grass and fixing this baaaaad situation.

Since I was trying to put in a LOT of garden at once, I had many spaces between new, small perennials. So I thought, “Tomatillos! They’re fun and tasty, and they’re tropical, by jingo, they’ll just fill in and then politely die back in the fall.”

Now, years later, I have volunteer tomatillos allllll over the place. They’re fun and tasty…..everywhere!

Good memory:
Last Fall the Weed Slave (I employ a teenager because I am mildly handicapped) and I were cleaning up the gardens for Winter and, of course, hacking down bushes and bushes of tomatillos. I grow organically and have a lot of edible plants, and one of the things she (the Weed Slave) has come to expect is that I will have her smell and taste leaves and bits as we work.

Soooooo, the very non-gardening husband came out to ‘supervise’ (our belief is that there is nothing better than watching other people do manual labor)and Saskia held up something like a little green chinese lantern and said, “Eat this!”

He did, too, but the look he gave her first was to make you fall down laughing.

My tomatillos are a lot smaller than yours, though. But tasty and fun.

Depending on the variety, tomatillos can reseed themselves and run rampant–I think that you must have gotten a tenacious variety. I am tempted to see if you can save me some seeds after we get our backyard terraced to see if we can get them started as invasive weeds in our yard, too! That is the kind of invasive I like!

Yes, another food blogger from Ohio. There is also Restaurant Widow in Columbus, but I don’t know of any others.

Tomatillos are a long season plant, so you are right to avoid planting it in your garden this late in the summer–you are north of us, aren’t you?

The best bet is to start seeds indoors or buy plants already started to plant out in May in your garden, and then from what Judith did (and she is even farther north than you and I are), is she let some of the last fruits naturally seed themselves as the plants died back.

I don’t know if she got a particularly cold-resistant variety or what–that is why I may try and get some seeds from her and experiment and see if that is the case–if so it would be a boon to northern gardeners all over the country who like tomatillos.

The first time I made the raw salsa of tomatillos was for my Pakistani clients–and for them, I called it chutney. They loved it. (I used to be a personal chef) and when they no longer used me as a chef, I gave them the recipe for it. Their whole family and group of friends loved the stuff and I made it in huge batches to the point where the folks at the grocery store thought I was totally insane because I would buy up all the tomatillos in order to have enough for them and me.

Have a good visit back home in India!