One kitchen gadget we use almost daily is our little compost pail. All our food scraps go in it. When it is full, it is dumped into one of the two 5 gallon plastic pails in the entry way. Once those are full, they are dumped into our compost drum, where it makes fertilizer for the gardens. We’ve been using that system for years and it works out pretty well for us.
The other day Alice and I were slicing tomatoes for the dehydrator. We make 2 or 3 gallon jars full of “tomato chips” per year (depending on the tomato harvest,) which we use all winter in our salads and sandwiches. I don’t think we bought a single store tomato in the past year.
Our system for dehydrating the tomatoes is to core them and cut off all the bad spots, then blanch them to remove the skins. Alice handles that part of the job. I get the naked tomatoes, and slice them up into 1/8-1/4″ slices, and arrange them on the evaporator trays. Once the machine is full, I plug it in, and empty it about 24 hours later.
As we were part way through the tomato processing job, I happened to look inside the compost pail. There were orange carrot peelings with some bright red tomato peels on top. “We have pretty garbage,” I told Alice. “It is beautiful,” she replied. “Not as beautiful as you are,” I said. Then we both stopped, looked at each other and laughed. Alice knew exactly what I meant, and accepted it as the compliment I’d intended. I wonder how many women in the world would like to hear that they are more beautiful than the kitchen garbage? The life we live out here causes us to occasionally make some odd comparisons. I wonder if I should patent this for a future beauty commercial. “How pretty is she? She is more beautiful than the kitchen garbage.” It does have a certain ring to it.