Good Things List No.100: Preserving with Small Tomatoes, Bathroom Drawer Organizing, and Favorite Book
Good things to do, buy, and read: Use what you have preserving, containers for an organized bathroom drawer, and my favorite book of the month.
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Welcome to September! I remember writing last month that smoke season was starting, but thankfully, that first week of August was the worst for us and things were fairly clear for the rest of the month!! Which was great for doing things outside, but not so great for getting the inside projects done I thought I’d do, lol.
I’m certainly not complaining! We paddled local lakes as well as one in central Oregon where we rented a cabin for our family for a weekend. We took our grandson to the county fair (first time I’d been in more than 20 years!), watched t-ball games, and ate almost every meal out on our new side porch. And I got a lot of time in the garden, watering, puttering, and finishing projects like our road hedge.
Those are all good great things – here’s a few more for the list!
Psst: if you like the Good Things List, then you’ll love Notes From The Farmhouse – it focuses on creative projects, simple living, DIY, books, and the everyday beauty of a handmade life – all the things there’s not room to talk about on An Oregon Cottage! Check it out here.
Good Things List
Got small tomatoes? You can still make salsa!
I can’t remember if I’ve shared here or just over in Notes From the Farmhouse, but my heirloom and paste tomatoes this year were hit with early blight and stopped producing a few weeks ago (sadness…). The paste tomatoes faired better than the bigger heirlooms, and I have that bowl you see in the top right of the photo above to make something with. They are small and have only a handful of green tomatoes left, though. I literally got less than 20 heirloom tomatoes total, which is a record for me in 30 years of growing food. The blight was just so much more than my normal techniques to fight it could deal with.
The Juliette grape tomatoes and Black Cherry tomato plants, though, have very little blight (literally right next to the blighted plants…) so I have – as you can see – bowls of small tomatoes.
What to do?? Make salsa with the small tomatoes, of course!
While I can buy okay spaghetti type sauces (no where near the flavor of my freezer roasted sauce, though) for decent prices, it’s salsa that I find hard to buy. The small, better tasting containers are expensive and the larger, cheaper salsas are so weird tasting to us. And we use a LOT of salsa through the year.
So, a few weeks ago I treated the few paste tomatoes I had and all the small tomatoes just like larger tomatoes in my popular thick canned salsa recipe. I weighed all the tomatoes to get the right amount for the recipe and then whirred it all up in the food processor, just like I normally do, and continued with the recipe.
The result was fine! Could I see more skins than normal? Yes. Did it bother me? No. Because it’s the flavor I’m after and it was g.o.o.d. I now have the bowls of small tomatoes in that first photo to make into another batch, which should give us about 20 pints for the year. Whew – disaster averted.
BTW – I will have enough for a batch of my must-make addictive tomato chutney using the small tomatoes (they’re just whirred up, too) and I already made a batch of my favorite roasted vegetable tomato sauce with a few paste tomatoes, a couple bigger ones that we hadn’t eaten, and loads of grape and cherry tomatoes. I just didn’t remove the skins like I’ve done with the bigger tomatoes (always optional anyway). It was still a good sauce, though definitely sweeter which I didn’t really like as much as with normal tomatoes, so I may cut down on the balsamic if I have enough to make another batch or add more veggies like peppers and zucchini to cut the sweetness.
Sadly, this will be it for preserving tomatoes this year – no dried tomatoes, Rotel, canned roasted tomato sauce, or fire roasted diced tomatoes. I have plans for next year, though, to plant in another area that I hope will get more sun and produce a ton!
An organized bathroom storage drawer
Our bathroom storage is in an old china cabinet I upgraded with paint and new hardware. I love it, even though it’s not as much storage as built-ins would’ve been. It’s one of my favorite things in the remodeled bathroom.
However, that little drawer? It’s shallow and not very deep and from the beginning I simply threw things in it with a general sense of organization (like pills on one side, tooth brushes on the other). Over the years, though, it got bad. Like, you needed to wade through a lot of things to find what may – or may not – be in there that you were looking for.
So I finally (really – what took me so long?) went on the hunt for small storage boxes to fit this space. And oh, gosh, what a deep dive you can get into with that! So many drawer divider options with so many different sizes. I finally settled on this set of 13 clear organizers with silicone feet because it offered the best number of the box sizes I thought would work (many seem to have a ton of the smallest square size wihch isn’t great for razors, toothbrushes, and pill bottles).
And look at that neat and tidy drawer!! I was happy with the result and how the 13 boxes fit into the drawer. There are two areas without the boxes – the large acetaminophen bottle on the lower right and the area above the toothpastes on the upper left – but everything stays in place with the silicone feet.
This is such an illustration of it being the little things that bring joy – it’s just so nice to open this drawer now!
This is the drawer storage box set I got.
August Favorite Book Read
The Calamity Club, Kathryn Stockett. This is the author’s first book since The Help more than a decade ago. It’s set in the 1930s in Oxford, Mississippi. I’ve seen online where some people had trouble getting into reading the physical book and all I have to say to that is get the audiobook – it’s amazing! It’s been a long time since I’ve heard such a good audio – the two narrators, one reads the 11-year-old girl’s pages and the other the 24-year-old, are wonderful, doing really inspired accents and giving all the other wonderful characters spirit and life. But the reader for the 11-year-old stood out to me with her inflections that I just don’t think I would’ve read that way from a book. She literally came alive. The story is good and kept my attention, but there were things I didn’t think worked well and the ending was so abrupt with many storylines unfinished that I might have liked the book a lot less if it weren’t for the excellent audiobook (and I can’t remember if I’ve ever said that before!). That ending might keep this from my year end best list, though.
That’s it for another addition of the Good Things List!
If you’d like to see more of what I’m enjoying, you can check out all the Good Things Lists here. I’d love to know what you think – if you’ve tried any of these or what you’d recommend. Leave a comment below with your thoughts!
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