I'll have to come back and look and the Peach and Pear Chili Sauce more carefully later. I'm in the midst of applesauce and apple butter. However, basically that's a tomato-fruit salsa with a good amount of vinegar, so my instinct is it's OK. But as I said, I'll look more closely and find some recipes to compare with in a bit. Or Dave or Linda Lou or someone might feel inclined. The Ball Complete Book is a compilation of all the best from Ball (U.S. Division), Bernardin (Canadian Division) and Kerr (the "other" canning supply company which was subsumed by the bigger corporation). Bernardin Canada follows the same USDA standards as Ball but tends to focus less on the "standards" and offers more ethnic and "gourment" canning formulas. The Ball Complete (Bernardin Complete on the North side of the border) is dual metric and imperial measures. I like metric and find that handy. Keep in mind Ball's main interest is in making money via the jars and other canning supplies they sell. Publishing the Blue Book is a way to promote their product. They aren't trying to cover every possible recipe; it's not in their interest to expend huge sums of money for testing of a lot of esoteric recipes. So each edition gains a few and loses a few. (I don't know who Ball's recipe testers are, but a few of their offerings have been real stinkers taste-wise.) So that fact that a chutney or salsa or pickle or whatever isn't in the BBB doesn't mean there's no safe way to can it. It just means Ball isn't bothering with it. Keep in mind there are also reliable specialists out there. Linda Amendt's preserves are fun, though she's too fond of liquid pectin for my taste. Except for the curds, which I alluded to previously, she offers some great recipes and some very helpful tips and strategies. For sweet preserves there's also Linda Ziedrich (totally reliable) and Madelaine Bullwinkel is A+++ by me. The Jamlady cookbook is also reliable and like a textbook for the art of jams and jellies. Ziedrich's first book was on pickles and provides a wide range of pickling options from traditional fermented to quick pickles, canned, refrigerated and freezer. She has a peach-Pepper Relish to die for. I think it's still posted on some thread or other. Ellie Topp's Small Batch Preserving takes canning in new and interesting directions. Because she is a food scientist, she has the skills to devise recipes just a bit out of the mainstream. So those are some of the options. Gotta go. Carol

I'd like to write about my gardening experiences and somhow magically make them interesting...a tall order when I think how boring my life has been. But I guess if I could make it humorous it would be interesting wouldn't it? "A year in Provance" could have been pretty dry, if not for the author's ability to see humor in every little one of life's bumps. What would I like people to say about me after I'm Dead? Now that's an interesting question. When they file past my coffin, I'd like them to say, "Hey look, I think she's breathing!" Cheryl

Since I too am considering writing a first book, I find this is an interesting thread, and I appreciate the words of wisdom of zootjs and ketzel. Along these lines, I have a question for everyone: Is there a market for a new and comprehensive book on tomatoes? By that, I mean one that covers, at least to some extent, everything about tomatoes that a tomato enthusiast/aficionado/junkie/addict/head might want to know (and maybe more). I am considering writing such a book, and in fact already have prepared an outline and introduction. But before I put a year or two's work into it, I would very much appreciate any opinions anyone may have on the subject. What I have in mind is something that would cover at least the following subjects: 1. Biology and cultivation (including different species and cultivars), 2. Genetics and genetic modification (e.g., sad story of the Flavr Savr gene), 3. Origin and evolution (meet your cousin, the tomato), 4. World-wide diffusion and subsequent history (how did the tomato get to India and China, anyway? The English? The Portuguese? The Spanish? One author suggests early sea contact with Peru) 5. Adoption and use in different food traditions (e.g., how do tomatoes fit in with the religious aspects of Indian food tradition?), 6. Health aspects (e.g., effect on prostate and lung cancer, macular degeneration, sun damage to skin), 7. Commercial and economic issues (do they really eat 200 pounds per person per year in Egypt?), 8. Connections with famous people (e.g., Ronald Reagan), 9. Film and literature (nobody should miss Attack of the Killer Tomatoes or its sequels), 10. Myths (e.g., the Robert Gibbon Johnson story) and misconceptions, 11. Tomatoes and sex (no misconceptions there, and no conceptions, either, I suppose [smile]), 12. Enthusiast organizations and festivals (the most spectacular is in Spain), 13. Etymology of popular and scientific names (where did the name lycopersicum -- Wolf Peach -- come from?), and 14. Home growing and cooking (somewhat). I know of course that there are many books on how to grow tomatoes, and many recipe books, and I certainly don't intend to compete with such books. What I am thinking of is something that would not only contain quite a lot of information about a broad range of subjects relating to tomatoes, but also use tomatoes as a lens to look into some of the things mentioned (history, biology, even cosmology: for example, without supernovas, tomatoes could not exist). Needless to say, with such a range of topics, I could only cover most things in a fairly summary manner; the selling point would be its breadth, not its depth on any subject. I would make reference to other books for more depth on a given subject. Would you buy such a book? At Amazon prices? Would it be better to have lots of pictures, maps etc. and a higher price or fewer of such things and a lower price? There the various books on other food items, some of which have done quite well in the market, notably Mark Kurlanskys three books, on cod, salt and oysters, respectively. There is also one on the potato by Larry Zuckerman and one on the olive by Mort Rosenblum. Each of those is, however, somewhat less comprehensive than what I outlined above, which brings me to a second question: Should I cut back the scope and make it a bit deeper in the areas retained? If so, what should I leave in or keep out? Should I make it pretty much purely a history book with a particular twist, like KurlanskyÂs? Or would that narrow the audience too much? Just to elaborate for a moment, a historical work would start with the break-up of Pangaea, the latest supercontinent, which started drifting apart 200 million years ago. The breakup resulted in separate biospheres developing in the Americas and Eurasia, which meant that the tomato was unknown to the bulk of humankind until the the last 500 years. During that time humans have, from a biological perspective, re-united the divided parts of Pangaea. Before they did so, the tomato spread from its origin in the alto plano of the West Coast of South America to what is today Mexico and Central America, but not to what is today the US (why it didnÂt is an interesting issue I would try to explore) or anywhere else. In the last 300 years or so, it has been adopted into almost every food tradition on earth. How and when it did so is a story that, to my knowledge, has never been fully told, except as it relates to the US (in Andrew SmithÂs book cited below). Telling that story would allow me to bloviate on various subjects such as international trade routes and social history. As I write that last paragraph, it occurs to me that this story alone would be quite an undertaking, one that could not really be done justice in a single chapter of a broader book. But then ÂÂare the 30 million home tomato gardeners in the US going to buy a history book? Or will you want growing tips, recipes, cosmology, sexual innuendo and genetics and such thrown in? I suppose I could include some of those topics in a book that is primarily a history, but would a book that is primarily a history that grab your attention, or, more relevantly, give you an uncontrollable urge to buy it? Hey, maybe I could include OprahÂs favorite tomato recipes. I could put that in a chapter entitled, "the tomato and popular culture." I would appreciate any thoughts any of you may have. Thanks very much, Jonathan P.S.: I have looked at the following, none of which (it seems to me) is quite what I have in mind: 1. Tantalizing Tomatoes, ed. by Karen Davis Cutler (New York 1997) 2. The Tomato in America, by Andrew Smith (Columbia, S.C. 1994) 3. The Great Tomato Book, by Gary Ibsen (Berkeley 1999) 4. The Great Tomato Book, by Sheila Bluff (Short Hills, N.J. 1999) (The preceding two books have the same title and were published in the same year; rather remarkable.) 5. In Praise of Tomatoes, by Steven Shepherd (New York 1996) 6. Exploring the Tomato, by Mark Harvey, Steve Quilley and Huw Beynon (Cheltenham, U.K. 2002) 7. All About Tomatoes, by Walter L. Doty (? 1981) 8. Terrific Tomatoes, by Mimi Luebbermann and Faith Echtermeyer (? 1994) 9. 100 Heirloom Tomatoes for the American Garden, by Carolyn J. Male (New York 1999)

Although people will offer you rules and advice, Kipling realy was right. You must find your own way. Every rule that we will propound, some quite notable writer has defied with grand success. Even the research rule: Mary Renault would settle down and write a novel about ancient Greece deliberately without cracking open a single research text. Then, after the first draft was done, she'd research it down to the bone. She said that if she researched it first the story would suffer. There are writers who keep voluminous notes and travel to all the sites of the work before they begin. There are writers who have NEVER been to the venue of their best work. (Edgar Rice Burroughs never went to Africa, SF writer Isaac Asimov could not bear to fly in planes, and you can take it to the bank that Jules Verne was never twenty thousand leagues under the sea.) There are writers who write with pencils, with pens, on laptops, and with Palms. I know of one writer with a disability, who dictates her work to a computer fitted out with voice-recognition software. There are so many variations, that it is almost impossible to generate rules. If the only way you can write is to engrave the words with a stainless-steel burin onto the side panels of late-model GM cars, go for it. Brenda