FAIRBANKS - The time for making jam, fruit butter and syrup is largely over at our house. I still have applesauce and compost jelly to freeze and can, but the ingredients are polite enough to wait their turn until more tender fruits and vegetables are taken care of in August.

This month is the time for putting up relishes, especially those which make good use of an over abundance of green tomatoes, cabbage, bell peppers and cauliflower. When I was a kid, I didn’t appreciate pickled things very much, largely because I thought pickling was reserved for the likes of herring, hard-boiled eggs, beets and cucumbers. That seemed grim enough, until I met kids at my Lithuanian boarding school whose parents had sent them off to the nuns with boxes of pickled carp, calf’s foot, eel and giblets.

It was not until I met up with piccalilli, courtesy of an English roommate, that I realized you could use pickling as more than just a way to preserve an excess of various foods. Piccalilli taught me that pickling could be a value-added process — preserving an over-abundant harvest, while also making it extra flavorful and thus providing interest to an otherwise bland meal.

There are probably as many piccalilli recipes as there are cooks and canners. My favorite one includes cauliflower, green beans, cukes, zucchini, carrots, onions, peppers and nasturtium seed pods, melded into a wonderfully fragrant relish by the addition of English mustard powder, turmeric, yellow mustard seeds, cumin, coriander, sugar, honey and vinegar. Unfortunately, the publishers of the River Cottage Series obviously have more to do than bother to answer a letter from a non-personage from Fairbanks, so I could not get permission to publish it. (But e-mail me and I will send it to you.)

This year, because of the depredations of various moose, I have no excess beans or nasturtium seeds. Instead, I have had so much cabbage and cauliflower come to maturity at the same time that the freezer is full of bags of blanched cauliflower and containers of cabbage sausage soup. I still have more to harvest. There is an abundance of green tomatoes, too. What to do?

As I usually do when I am in a food pickle, I contacted Roxie Dinstel at the Cooperative Extension Service for help finding a piccalilli recipe that would use those particular products. What you see in the recipe sidebar is what she provided me. She also sent me a recipe for chow-chow, which is a lot like piccalilli but with slightly difference spices and, in my experience, a looser sauce. I have to spear out the contents of a chow-chow jar and let the juice drip off, while each ingredient of piccalilli comes out with a thick, sharp and savory flavored sauce clinging to it.

The “Penguin Companion to Food,” states chow-chow is an American term based on Pidgin English derived from the Chinese. According to “The Compleat Squash,” chow-chow is a sweeter condiment. Piccalilli is a concoction popular in Britain and countries that used to be under their dominion; the word is apparently a permutation of the word pickle, and was in use about the time the Victorian era started in 1831. Dinstel found something on line that indicates the main differences between chow-chow and piccalilli are the number and type of vegetables and size of the pieces. Whatever you call it, there are recipes for each in the sidebar.

This year I ended up using my vegetable excess in a way besides piccalilli and chow-chow, courtesy of reader Susan Sprinkle. She said in an e-mail that her mother Vivian makes a killer relish called Green Tomato Relish, although I would rename it Green Tomato, Sweet Pepper, Onion and Mustard relish — Vivian’s title is not descriptive enough of the delicious result. According to Sprinkle, her boyfriend eats it by the spoonful. I made it three times while testing it for this article (which is why I now have a cupboard containing 57 half pints of the stuff) and quite like it — although I am not sure I would eat it by the spoonful. It is not for sissies, since it has a mustard base, but it is quite tasty — and it used up some of the green tomatoes.

One final note: these are not cheap relishes to make, so if you want to make it for holiday gifts as a way to save money, think again. Just for Vivian Sprinkle’s relish, I went to the fair (for the green tomatoes) and Fred’s (for spices and everything else edible) and Samson Hardware (my favorite place to go for canning jars) to price what it would cost for one batch of relish if you started with no vegetables in your garden or spices, sugar and canning jars in the house. Assuming you already had a boiling water canner and other accoutrements like a jar lifter, it would cost $84.52 to make 19 half-pint jars of the stuff. However, since all I had to buy was the sweet bell peppers, this recipe actually saved me a lot of money in terms of no vegetables going to waste. (If you want to make something cheaper for gifts, pick low bush cranberries and make Drunken Cranberry Relish. E-mail me for the recipe.)

Green Tomato Relish

(This recipe comes courtesy of Vivian Sprinkle, of Cleveland, Ohio, via her daughter Sue Sprinkle of Fairbanks.)

12 green tomatoes, about 5 pounds

3 large green bell peppers

3 large red bell peppers

5 large white onions, about 4 pounds

1 eight-ounce jar of French’s yellow mustard

4 cups of sugar

3/4 cup of flour (use one cup if you want a thicker sauce that will not drip off the fork)

2 tablespoons salt

2 tablespoons celery seed (not salt, seed)

4 cups vinegar

1 tablespoon turmeric

Grind the green tomatoes, peppers and onions and let them drain in a colander or a bag made of linen or cheesecloth suspended from your kitchen spigot. While these vegetables are draining for an hour, mix the sugar and flour together in a large pot — if you do this when the ingredients are dry and before you add anything else, you won’t have lumps of flour in the final product. Then add the spices, mustard and vinegar to the pot, and mix in the drained ground vegetables. Boil until it thickens, which takes about 15 minutes — stir the entire time, especially toward the end when things tend to burn.

Pack the hot relish into pint or half pint jars; in the meantime the flat lids and screw tops should be simmering in water. Fill jars to 1/2 inch from the top. Remove air bubbles by running a thin spatula all around the inside of the jars. Wipe the rims of a jar with a clean damp cloth, and put on the flat and screw lids; repeat until you have closed all the jars. Submerge them in a water canner that has enough boiling water in it that there is at least one inch of water over the top of the jars. Cover. When the water returns to a boil, set a timer for 10 minutes, and remove the jars when the time is up. Place them on a towel, so they are not in direct contact with a counter top or table, and leave for 24 hours. I usually count as the sucking sound that signals a vacuum occurs, but you can simply wait until the 24 hours are over and run your finger lightly over each lid — there should be no bubble in the middle, but, rather, an indentation.

This recipe consistently yielded 19 half pints for me. If you are going to use pint sized jars, halve the number of lids you simmer beforehand.

Important note: If you are a regular canner, you will notice there is no instruction to boil the jars before filling them. According to Dinstel, the University of Georgia has conducted tests that show if you process in boiling water for at least 10 minutes, you can skip the presterilization of the jars — although you must still have the lids simmering until not long before you use them.

Roxie Dinstel’s piccalilli

6 cups chopped green tomatoes

1 and 1/2 cup chopped sweet red bell peppers

1 and 1/2 cup chopped green bell peppers

7 and 1/2 cups chopped green cabbage (the first time I made piccalilli, I used purple cabbage. It washed out to grey and looked dreadful)

1 and 1/4 cups chopped onion

1/2 cup canning salt

4 and 1/2 cup vinegar

3 cups brown sugar, packed

3 tablespoons whole mixed pickling spice

Combine the vegetables and mix with the salt. Let stand overnight. Drain and press in a clean thin white cloth to remove all liquid possible. Combine the vinegar and brown sugar. Place spices loosely in a clean cloth; tie with a string. Add to vinegar mixture and bring to a boil.

Add the vegetables, return to a boil and boil gently for about 30 minutes, until the mixture is reduced to about half its original volume. Remove the spice bag.

Pack the hot relish into pint canning jars, filling them to 1/4 inch from the top. Remove air bubbles by running a thin spatula all around the inside of all the jars. Wipe the rims of a jar with a clean damp cloth, and put on the flat and screw lids; repeat until you have closed all the jars. Submerge them in a boiling water canner that has enough boiling water in it that there is at least one inch of water over the top of the jars. Cover. When the water returns to a boil, set a timer for 10 minutes, and remove the jars when the timer goes off. Place them on a towel, so they are not in direct contact with a counter top or table, and leave for 24 hours before storing.

Yield: about 6 pint jars

Roxie Dinstel’s chow-chow

1 tightly packed pint of each of the following:

sliced cucumbers

chopped sweet bell peppers

chopped cabbage

thinly sliced onions

chopped green tomatoes

chopped cauliflower

sliced summer squash

sliced carrots

1 1/2 cups salt, for the soaking

2 quarts water, for the soaking

2 tablespoons celery seed

4 tablespoons mustard seed

1 quart distilled vinegar

2 cups water, for the cooking

4 cups sugar

4 teaspoons turmeric

Soak cucumbers, peppers, cabbage, onions, squash, cauliflower and tomatoes in salt water over night (1 1/2 cup salt to 2 quarts water). The next day, when you are ready to can, cook the carrots until they are tender. Drain the carrots and drain the vegetables that have been soaking all night. Then, mix the soaked vegetables and carrots with the celery seed, mustard seed, sugar and turmeric and boil for 10 minutes.

Pack the hot relish into pint canning jars, filling them to 1/4 inch from the top. Remove air bubbles by running a thin spatula all around the inside of all the jars. Wipe the rims of a jar with a clean damp cloth, put on the flat and screw lids; repeat until you have closed all the jars. Submerge them in a boiling water canner with at least one inch of water over the top of the jars. Cover. When the water returns to a boil, set a timer for 10 minutes, and remove the jars when the timer goes off. Place them on a towel, so they are not in direct contact with a counter top or table, and leave for 24 hours before storing.

Yield: about 6 pint jars.

Linden Staciokas is a freelance writer who also writes a weekly gardening column for the Sundays section. Contact her at dorking@acsalaska.com.