Good stuff:

  • Fresh tomato sauce, cooked and frozen
  • Conserva di pomodori (homemade tomato paste), salted and oil-topped in fridge, no-salt in freezer
  • Sundried tomatoes
  • Bruschetta in a jar (only make one recipe though, we won’t eat it fast enough)
  • Basil pesto, frozen (trade/give away most of it, we eat it but produce far more than we can eat)
  • Kimchee kraut (for me, he’s not a kimchee fan)
  • Apple butter
  • Dried and ground chiles (from last year)
  • Zucchini — shredded and frozen for zucchini bread
  • Zucchini chips
  • Dried mushrooms — made from the get-rid-of-’em cheap bin ones from the grocery store. Well worth the $1 and the time on the dehydrator for adding oomph to sauces and soups and stuff
  • Dried cherries — purchased from Costco, pitted and dried. Luckily put away or they would already be gone. Much cheaper than buying that quantity myself, and no sugar added. I should make muffins.

Stuff that may or may not be worth the effort:

  • Zucchini sott’olio — delicious but five days worth of work for a small jar. I am all for slow food, but I have limits. Also takes up space in the fridge. Might be worth doing one jar a year, or several jars all at once, but not more than that.
  • Dried pepper chunks — we still have some from last year. They are delicious, I just keep forgetting we have them.
  • Apple liqueur (?). Still resting, check back in a few months. The liqueurs are tasty but we don’t drink them very fast.

Stuff that doesn’t work:

  • Fermented condiments (hot pepper paste, basil paste) — we don’t eat them fast enough, and there’s plenty fresh most of the year
  • Roasted plum tomatoes, canned — canned is great but we have so much fresh-frozen tomato sauce we’re probably not going to get to these
  • Regular dried eggplant and dried zucchini, they don’t get used