Green Tomato Bacon Jam

A savory freezer jam made with green tomatoes, sweet onion, and crispy bacon. This is AMAZING mixed with ground beef for burgers.

A note to the vegetarians who have visited this blog before: thank you for coming back! I beg your pardon, but today's vegetable recipe is really directed at the omnivores and carnivores that stop by (and thank you omnivores, if you've been here before, for returning!)
If you're new here, welcome! I blog about feeding my family seasonal produce from our CSA farm share, our garden, or good deals I find. I like to cook based on what I have available, so I created my Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient (vegetable, or fruit, or fungus) which you can find in the pages across the top. For more recipes using green tomatoes, please check out my Green Tomato Recipe Collection.

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When I started this blog I didn't fully appreciate the versatility of a green, unripe, tomato. I liked to eat fried green tomatoes and hadn't ventured from there. Then a friend shared her Slow Cooker Green Tomato Garlic Chili recipe and I thought I'd dabble in more green tomato recipes. I've got 10 posted--so far!


I decided to make jam with green tomatoes from sheer curiosity. I saw sweet green tomato jam recipes, and savory red tomato and tomato bacon jam recipes, but I didn't find a savory green tomato bacon jam recipe. I started with this recipe and swapped out the red tomato for a bit larger volume of green tomatoes and onion.

If you grow tomatoes or know someone who does, keep this recipe in mind as the nights get cooler (as tomatoes don't ripen if it's too cool at night).  Sure, you can pick tomatoes and ripen them on the counter, but aren't you getting a wee bit satiated by ripe summer tomatoes?  Are you looking for a little something different?  My answers to those questions are yes and yes, so I'm sharing this today.


Make this jam when your tomato crop is in danger of succumbing to frost.  Store the excess jars in the freezer. Next time you're making burgers, mix 1/4 cup of jam in with a pound of ground meat (I've used beef and turkey so far) then continue with your usual burger making.  I prefer to make quarter pound burgers because I get plenty of protein and sure don't need the bigger burger, and I can make 1 pound of ground meat easily feed our family of 4 on burger nights.

Apple Cinnamon Muffins #MuffinMonday

Buttery chunks of sweet fresh apple in a wholesome whole grain muffin.

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There's nothing better than a local apple, grown for flavor--not the ability to step off the truck looking enticing. I'm delighted to get an apple share with my Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share. Just like berries in Spring, and melons in summer, we look forward to the changing of the seasons with the arrival of apples heralding the advent of Fall.

This time of year I am the proverbial Ant of Ant and Grasshopper lore. I spend my days off harvesting, chopping, mincing, slicing, roasting, dehydrating, freezing and canning the local summer abundance. I do this for three reasons. First, I hate to waste food so permitting produce to spoil because I haven't gotten around to eating it is unacceptable to me. Second, I like to eat locally sourced food--and there's nothing more local than my backyard!  Third, I'm a frugal sort. If I'm overrun with tomatoes in August, why not put them up now so I avoid paying money later when I want to make my Creamy Tomato Soup for my daughter's lunch?

Chorizo and Green Tomato Chili

Green tomatoes simmered with ground pork and chorizo sausage makes an amazing green & white chili. Served over spaghetti noodles and topped with cheese, this is a great Fall meal.

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This post is sponsored by the Ohio Pork Council. My goal is to share a recipe using ground pork, but I've got much more for you today. First off, I've got a little video I put together about the many uses of ground pork. When I visited the Surber farm I knew I was going to do a post about ground pork later in the summer, but I didn't know that Connie Surber was going to give me such a wonderful content about the uses of ground pork! I'm really glad I happened to have my phone on video, to record her conversation, although I apologize for standing near a wind chime. I'm still learning this video stuff, and if I knew how to make the images of my recipes into clickable links within the video I'd've done that. Instead, scroll down to the bottom to find links to my recipes that appear in this video.

I credit my spouse as the inspiration for this chili. I knew I wanted to make something special with the chorizo given to me during my visit with the Runyan family of Oakview Farms, so I asked my husband if he'd be game to try a Chorizo Chili. He'd just returned from a 2 week trip eating at a dining facility on a base in Alabama, so he was up for anything other than institutional food. Since he's a fan of Cincinnati chili, he asked, "can we eat it over spaghetti, with cheese?" and BOOM! I was inspired.