Sending you an email. Denise

I am so glad that so many of you know what I am talking about. In my usual mad scientist way I think I am going to try every way of preserving tomato slices. At this point in the year though, I have seen so many of my ideas go awry that I won't presume to pre-judge any of the methods before I have actually tried them myself. I have a recipe book here for canning all types of tomato preserves. I would imagine that tomato preserves are fairly delicious in place of ripe august tomatoes. Olga, I have a friend that spent two years in the peace corps working in Moldova, and she was amazed at how everything there was pickled and preserved. How do you ferment the vegetables, what kinds of ingredients do you use to accomplish the task. Oh, and pickling and preserving in the western world tends to stay away from pickling and fermenting things, in my experience, pickles and tomatoes are the only vegetable that is really canned over here, because of the desire for most vegetables to keep as close to their ripe flavor as possible, hence quick freezing for most home grown produce. I can't find a recipe for processing just the tomato juice itself, to keep in a jar until I am ready to rehydrate my dried tomatoes, If I just took the juice of a tomato, and filled a jar with it, then used that juice to rehydrate the same variety of tomato it came from, would that work? Most of the tomatoes I have growing are not paste tomatoes though, so I am going to have to find a way to preserve all of the brandywine, black, hybrid, and cherry tomatoes other than making a sauce. I would imagine that preserving non paste tomatoes would take a lot longer to reduce down to what was needed for sauce/preserves/catsup/ketchup/jelly. But I'll be the first to admit this will be my first year canning tomatoes myself, and I know nothing. When I was growing up I watched my parents do it for a few years, and then they just started to buy ragu... *facepalm* Most of what was grown consisted of early girls, romas, and jet stars, no epic historical heirloom tomatoes to be had.

I agree - no matter what you choose it will look great. My first inclination was to have them face each other. And I still think that would be a great option - but I think it will also emphasize the right side and left side of your quilt. I think alternating rows will emphasize the rows, whereas I think alternating squares will give a more all-over pattern. So, I think it depends on what feel you want to accomplish. Be sure to show us what you decide to do!

Um... that's not quite the story. Since my name is on the subject line: There was a horse drawn wagon in my picture book. We had an automatic icemaker, and sometimes my folks froze blocks of ice in plastic containers, but when we were having a big party or going camping, my father would get a block of ice at the ice house, which wasn't far away, and he'd take me. He'd tell the story of the ice man whose horse knew the way to connect the blocks of ice with the horse drawn wagon in my storybook. When he was a kid they had an ice box. My mother only knew electric refrigerators, even out in the country. Sometimes, equestrians would ride down out of the hills, where there were some horse estates and trails, but that's as close as we got to horses where we lived. The milkman came in a panel truck and brought the milk inside and put it in the fridge. There was a breadman, I don't think daily, also in a panel truck, but one that opened up in the back with a display of breads and pastries, but my mother had a car and preferred to go to the bakery or supermarket. There are a few reasons primarily responsible for refrigerators not lasting so long nowadays. Electronics help meet energy savings goals, but are notoriously delicate. People want all kinds of gizmos, like crushed ice dispensers, which have never had a lot of longevity. The ice maker is the most likely place for failure. With all the plastic parts, which make shipping lighter, can be molded rather than wrought, and don't require metal ores (though petroleum is also a scarce resource), and overseas workforces who work for fewer dollars than North American workers, fridges are way cheaper in terms of buying power spent than they were ever so long ago, and far cheaper to replace than repair. People move a lot and move their appliances, which is hard on them. Landlords used to supply fridges.