Saving Tomatoes & Wood

Our good friends Ron & Bertie gave us a bunch of tomatoes (thanks Ron & Bertie!)...I quickly had to decide what to do to extend the life of these beautiful vine ripened beauties...

Of course, first I had to take a picture!  This first one is the artist in me, giving you a beautiful bowl of tomatoes with the sunlight shining upon them...love this shot!

This is the same bowl, having positioned myself differently, and using flash to bring light to the subject...I did this because I wanted you to see the full bowl!

So, what to do with all these tomatoes?

I made Mountain Man a glass of tomato juice, at his request.  Of course, it makes the process much easier if you have an electric juicer (unlike how the old timers would have made juice, which would have required something like a potato masher, a sieving cloth like cheese cloth, and lots of muscle).  All I had to do was clean and cut tomatoes...

...and push them through the machine.  Viola, instant fresh, delicious tomato juice!  I did add a little salt after Mountain Man tasted it, but he thought it was good enough to drink every last drop (not sure if this was to please me, or because he really liked it...but he didn't want me to make any more, even to freeze for the future!).

I then chopped the rest of the tomatoes that were showing signs of over ripening to freeze.  I simply chopped them and put them into freezer zip lock bags, pushing as much of the air our as possible.  I ended up with 2 - 4 cup bags full.  (I did note on the bags that the tomatoes were very acidic, I could feel it in my fingers as I chopped...I wanted to be sure I remember that when I used them for cooking, because I will add a bit of sugar and a little extra garlic to counteract that).  These need to be used in the near future, as I did not blanch the tomatoes, but I will be making another version of PastaLise, and with these fresh red and yellow tomatoes, I am sure it will be another dish to post about!

Later in the day, we went to collect more fire wood (saving wood for our future!).  Let me tell you, after the past few days of wind, snow, freezing temperatures, not so freezing temps but lots of wind, and more wind, I've been a little concerned about the amount of wood we have collected to take us through the winter.  I committed to assisting in any way I could to improve our "wood savings", therefore decreasing my concern, therefore increasing my happy attitude, therefore improving the overall mental state of our cabin (at least from my perspective), therefore making for a happy household...some of your surly know exactly what I mean! 

So off we went on Bear, ready to hunt wood!  This is our empty wagon (yes that is my coat on the seat, it was cold on the ride, but once we arrived at our retrieval site, I was heated up...of course, this could have nothing to do with anything other than this time in my life, which I am completely grateful to be in the mountains for because I am almost always hot, unless I am shivering cold...but this is another story...), waiting to be loaded up with good wood for winter burning.

This is our trusty Bear ready to take us back to the cabin with a load of very good winter burning wood...we believe this is maple (we are still learning our wood...please don't even take that comment somewhere it was not intended).

We've made great progress with our wood saving efforts, but you can be sure there will be much more scavenging before winter hits us!

Thanks for reading my blog, you are the best f/f/r/s/f's, see you tomorrow,
Lise