Can’t wait for the tomatoes in your garden to get ripe? Enjoy fresh summer veggies with this Green Tomato Pasta Salad recipe!
{This post was sponsored by Indiana’s Family of Farmers. All thoughts and opinions are my own. Referral links are used in this post.}
My friend Katy, from Indy with Kids, made the trek down from Indianapolis with her family to check out our farm. While everyone wanted to see the cows, Katy loves to garden so we spent most of the visit talking about our (extremely large) garden and some of the troubles we have been having this year. Check out her highlights from the visit here.
The space where our garden is now used to be a horse arena. Between the clay soil, and all the pressure from horses exercising on it, the dirt was very compacted. We have worked very hard to get the ground to the point where it can grow vegetables now!
This year, we expanded our garden. Our garden plot this year is around 50 feet wide and 160 feet long…. and we just added some extra space for pumpkin plants! We have almost a quarter of an acre of land in our “garden.” Our plan was to sell fresh produce at our family’s veterinary hospital. (After all, you can only give away so many zucchini and tomatoes to your friends!) But this year we had problems with drought, then with too much rain too fast, and now with bugs and fungal diseases. So Katy and I had a lot to talk about.
We chatted about these green beans, and why they are dying. They have some fungal damage, from staying too wet when we got 4 inches of rain in 48 hours. (Luckily, the fungus doesn’t seem to have spread, and we should still have plenty of beans coming soon.)
We talked about the cucumber and watermelon plants that are dying because of a stem fungus that damages the stems from the outside in, and a borer worm that eats the stems from the inside out.
We talked about the poor little seedlings that withered away and died in the week-long 100 degree heat wave we had in June. We did a lot of replanting after the drought, the heat, and the rain. Now we are heading into another 100-degree heat wave, so we really aren’t sure what will survive!
One thing that is doing well is our tomato plants. We usually buy tomato plants, but this year we started most of them from seeds inside. (Once I figured out how to keep the cats and the toddler out of the seed trays, we were home free.) The tomato plants (all 30 of them) are doing great! (Last year we were overwhelmed with 19 tomato plants…. so the next 2 months are going to be interesting…)
We also checked out our sweet corn. This is our second year growing sweet corn. Just like the rest of the garden, the corn didn’t get quite enough rain early on. It also had some wind damage. Lucky for us, corn is pretty hardy (especially early in the growing season), so it is still hanging in there!
The kids had a chance to pick blackberries from our thornless blackberry bushes, and Katy and her kids got to take home a bunch. Check out the blackberry cobbler they made here!
After we talked all things garden, we took the kids to the Gibson County Fair. The fair is such a big part of our farm life! Families prepare for the fair all year long – doing 4-H projects and raising animals. And the week of the fair is busy with the hustle and bustle of moving into the 4-H barn, showing animals, riding carnival rides, and of course eating lots of fair food. It takes a lot of time and energy from the entire family, but it is so much fun!
Green Tomato Pasta Salad
And after all that fried fair food, I just want a salad. Since our garden is so late this year (and every year), I don’t have many veggies to put in a salad! But I do have green tomatoes…. and I just can’t wait for them to get ripe any longer! This pasta salad is similar to my Garden Pasta Salad. If you like cucumbers and red tomatoes, you’ll definitely want to check out this recipe.
You can use any kind of pasta that you like in this pasta salad. I like tricolor rotini. The colors are so much fun in a summer salad, and the spirals in the rotini hold onto the sauce, so you get even more flavor in every bite.
This does make for a crunchy pasta salad. John was a little surprised! Green tomatoes are pretty crunchy when you eat them raw.
You’ll want to cook the pasta to at least medium doneness. (I love this pot for cooking my pasta. It does take a while for the water to boil, but it’s so easy to handle and strain the pasta when it’s done!) I usually prefer my pasta al dente, but in this pasta salad that doesn’t work so well. The vegetables are already pretty crunchy, so you don’t need the pasta to be crunchy, too. And after undercooked pasta soaks in the vinegar sauce for a little while, it gets tough. If you’re not sure, just leave the pasta in the hot water for an extra 1-2 minutes.
What is your favorite garden-fresh vegetable?
Enjoy!
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Printable Recipe Card for Green Tomato Pasta Salad
Green Tomato Pasta Salad
Ingredients
- 1/2 cup white vinegar
- 1/2 cup canola or vegetable oil
- 1-1/2 cup sugar
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 12 ounce box tri-color rotini cooked until soft
- 2 medium green tomatoes chopped
- 2 red bell peppers seeded and chopped
Instructions
- Cook rotini according to package directions, cook to at least medium doneness. Drain pasta.
- While pasta is cooking, prepare sauce and chop vegetables.
- In a small bowl, whisk vinegar, oil, sugar, and salt. Whisk to combine (the sugar may not all dissolve right away).
- In a large bowl, combine hot pasta, tomatoes, and peppers. Pour dressing over pasta and vegetables and toss to combine.
- Cover and refrigerate for 1-2 hours. Serve chilled.
Enjoy!
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