Monday, November 17, 2008

#31 Eat those green tomatoes (or whatever else you have around!)

At the end of October, the community gardens closed. We had to have all our stuff out of there. Well, due to the late Washington season, we had loads of green tomatoes. And we were headed out of town for a week. What to do with all those tomatoes? Well, ours were turned into green ketchup, fried green tomatoes, and a green tomato chocolate cake (plus baggies in the freezer to make more in the future-- it was that good!) and the ones that looked like they would keep were set out to ripen and then sliced and dried. I consider not wasting things to be a very green practice. My husband is particularly good at this-- it was him who came up with doing the chocolate cake, and also made a pumpkin topping for it out of some leftover pumpkin that we needed to use.
Pros: If you use what you have, it won't go to waste, and you save yourself from having to buy new food. Less for the landfill, and easier on your budget.
Cons: It can be a challenge sometimes to come up with ways to use things. Sometimes my kids don't appreciate my cooking when I'm trying to use things up.

2 comments:

Gigi said...

You have such great ideas Marisa! I'm amazed.

heaventrees said...

I don't know if you are into canning but you can actually can green tomatoes and then use them for fried green tomatoes in the off season.
Also, when you are trying to ripen tomatoes off the vine, put them into a brown paper bag and roll the top closed. Same thing for avocados that aren't ripe enough.