One of my goals when I started this blog was to share what I thought were good ideas – particularly for country working girls. It’s not that I come up with many of those ideas by myself. Mostly, I steal them. That’s what a good idea is for, right? To steal? Well, that’s my philosophy anyway.

This happens to be one of those good ideas that is my own. I’m sure that someone else has had this idea before, but I thunk of it mine own self. You see I have this problem: if a recipe calls for less than a whole container, I won’t can’t throw the rest of it away. And so I have half a can of tomatoes in the refrigerator until they spoil. And then I throw it away. I know. Brilliant.

One thing that you almost never use all of, is tomato paste. For some reason, recipes call for one or two tablespoons of the stuff. And then you’re throwing away almost a whole can. Ack! Or, if you freeze the rest of the can, it is in one big hunk and there’s no way to divide it up for the next recipe.

Enter my cookie scoop. I realized my small cookie scoop is about one tablespoon. I used it to drop balls-o-paste on wax paper and then froze them. Voila – easy-to-use, pre-measured blobs of tomato paste. (Please ignore the fact that I don’t know how to make that accenty-thing over the ‘a’ in Voila!)

Ok. So maybe it sounds weird when I say it like that, but trust me. It works.