Preservation Secret: Freezing Tomatoes and Bananas

Extended Shelf Life for: Tomatoes

When holidays with the family come to end, it's inevitably time to start diving again ^^

Fortunately, there's always a wealth of ingredients to be had and we've been at it for so long that I've developed a few tricks of the trade and preservation secrets.

For Tomatoes:

I love to roast my tomatoes for about 20-30 minutes at about 400 F. When you take them out of the oven the skins are easy to remove and a lot of the unnecessary, seedy liquid has drained from them. At this point, I run them through a food processor or our juicer (on the mincing cycle), bag them and freeze them. I'm increasingly passionate about this process and method, especially after reading that even farmers won't eat canned tomatoes because the acid and the tin can are not a healthy combination!

For the Bananas:

I'm working on preserving some (the peels primarily) in the form of vinegar. However, this is about freezing, and bananas are easy to freeze. I've done two-three different things for freezing bananas.

If I plan to make banana bread, pancakes or any other mashed banana treat I simply mash the banana in a large mixing bowl then transfer to freezer bags, each containing about 2 cups of banana mash, the generally required amount for recipes of such sort.

I've also frozen banana 'coins' so that I can easily make banana ice-cream which goes fantastically well with banana (n)ice cream sandwiches!

And finally, I'll occasionally peel the banana and freeze whole to use in smoothies, although making coins would work just as well.