Homemaking Organized Blog

Archive for October, 2009

I know I’m actually a bit late in posting this but hey! I’ve been busy.

So tomato season is over. We fluctuate in temperatures and haven’t gotten down to freezing…yet but we did already take down one tomato plant.

So where are you with your kitchen garden? Here are some tips I came across when trying to decide what to do with the tomatoes.

1. If your tomato plants still have plenty of tomatoes still on them and you just aren’t ready to give up yet even if winter is knocking at your door you can uproot your plants and hang them upside down somewhere like your garage or basement. Apparently some have gotten tomatoes well into December with this method. I was going to try it but it just seemed a tad messy for me and remember I’m the squeemish gardener.

2. You can pick all your green tomatoes and make up all kinds of green tomato salsas and my mom’s favorite fried green tomatoes. This did not ring my chime so I passed on this.

3. You can pick your big green tomatoes, clean and dry them and either put the all in a box or wrap them individually in newspaper and put them in a box in the garage or basement. Check them every other day or so and when you see some starting to ripen place them on the window sill.

We did this. We had a TON of tomatoes and handed them out with still more than enough for ourselves. We washed about half of them (before becoming exhausted) and wrapped those in newspaper. The rest we just put in a box. Funny enough the ones in the newspaper are ripening the fastest. Our windowsill is very colorful.

I’m also a freezing a few whole. Following this tip.

My daughter (who is 4) loves to cook/bake.  When getting ready for dinner I often think about what things she can do to help me cook. If I’m not organized about it it can get kind of whiny because she wants to help so bad and she say “let me do it!”

This week we had a little mini birthday party for a friend and she got to make the cupcakes. We used this great recipe from an older Betty Crocker cookbook called a Dinette cake. Supposed to be a small sized cake for a few people it’s perfect for making exactly 12 cupcakes.

The original recipe used shortening but for this recipe you use just oil. You make it with regular all purpose flour but can make it with cake flour too by just reducing the amount of flour by 1/4 cup.

I let my daughter do all the mixing and pouring into the cupcake liners. All I did was measure ingredients the and place them in the oven.

We iced them with a simple buttercream (butter, powdered sugar, milk, vanilla).

They were a big hit with the family and it was so fun for her to make.

The recipe was also published in a 1998 issue of Taste of Home magazine (love that magazine) and you can find it online here.

I’ve been spending a bit of time over at Vintage Homemaking trying to remedy what has admittedly suffered a bit of neglect.

A thank you out to the former subscriber who let me know she was unsubscribing because the content had lost it’s focus. She was right. It had and I have known it for some time.

I’m in the process of cleaning things up and updating articles.

Vintage Homemaking is not an easy subject to discuss. Much of what is written in the 19th century took for granted that the reader had servants or at least a bit of help. As the century came to a close and the 20th century was ushered in there was more written for the women doing it herself but homemaking or homekeeping was moving into a negative light as women sought out equality and independence.

Trying to find the relative in between those time periods can be time consuming so bear with me please.

Also expect a physical update in the coming weeks.

Thanks!