Mother Earth

Some friends of ours bought us a subscription to a wonderful magazine called Mother Earth News (I think that's the name of it). Each month has articles pertinent to exactly what I'm trying to figure out at the moment.

This month was what to do about the extra tomatoes. Actually, it would have been helpful to receive this month's edition a little early because I had quite a lot of food that went to waste because I didn't know how to preserve it - mostly corn. Anyway, there was an article about preserving tomatoes. It said if there isn't enough time to do anything else, they can be frozen whole. There was also a recipe for stewed tomatoes that could be frozen. I did both this week. So I have several frozen whole tomatoes, which was a snap to do, of course. And I made up a batch of stewed tomatoes, poured them in zip lock bags, labeled them and froze them. To freeze them whole, all you do is wash them, pop them in the freezer separately (to keep them from sticking together) until they are frozen, then put them in a zip lock bag. This week, I'll do more of the same because the tomatoes are still going strong.

I'm definitely going to have to get a big food dehydrator because one article told me that I can dry just about any fruit or veggie. The benefit of drying is that the dried food takes up less space and most of it doesn't need to be stored in the freezer or refrigerator. The food can be rehydrated when it's time to eat it, or it can be eaten dried like a raisin. Supposedly, the rehydrated dried food retains it's fresh flavor.

Howard Garrett's book was wrong about when to harvest a watermelon. His book says to wait until the vine is brown and dry, which is what I was waiting for as my watermelons got bigger and bigger. Then I discovered that one of the biggest ones had burst open. It didn't look like it was done by an animal and none of it was eaten. It looked like it just had burst open from over-ripening. So I picked one of the other biggest ones and cut it open. It was so ripe that the center of it had turned mushy. I scraped out the mushy part and threw it away, but the rest of it was delicious, so I cut it up and put it in the frig. I picked two more and brought them home. I intend to cut them open and if they are still good, I'll blend up the meat into juice and freeze it.

P.S. I'm rereading my blog (and, boy, in hindsight, do I sound ignorant).  Just wanted to say, those whole frozen tomatoes are still in my freezer.