Trailer Trash Tuesday- Too Many Tomatoes

Let me introduce you to my fridge.  As you can see it is very small and I shove as many things in there as I can. What can I say? This is trailer living at it's finest.  Recently, the bottom shelf on the door decided it had had enough and bailed on me.  So, now I have even less space than normal in there.  Those shelves are expensive at $25 bucks a pop. Ouch.

We were really blessed this year as far as tomatoes are concerned.  My BIL gave us a bunch of tomato plants toward the beginning of the summer and they just took off.  We have big tomatoes, medium tomatoes and small grape tomatoes.  I'm told tomatoes don't normally do well in this area but we must have them in a prime spot.

I have too many for our family to eat on our own, but not enough to can.  Luckily, this last Saturday our church had Super Saturday.  It is a day where women can pick a craft or two or more and just spend the day working on it and enjoying the company of other women. They also have a lunch and I signed up to bring a salad and a dessert.

I made a regular salad with the grape tomatoes but felt like I needed to do something else.  So, I looked in my teeny fridge and saw what I had on hand.  I had mozzarella and tomatoes. I then remembered that the Pioneer Woman had posted a recipe called Caprese Salad. I headed over to the grocery store and picked up some basil. I had all the other ingredients on hand.

The planets aligned for the briefest of moments and soon I had this:

OMGoodness, this was amazing.  I even heard much raving about my Caprese Salad at the luncheon.

Unfortunately the planets went out of alignment for my dessert and it wasn't as great as it could have been. My cursed oven wasn't cooking fast enough and the pumpkin cake I made was taking forever.  So, I made some vanilla pudding and put whip cream on top of it.  The whip cream melted on the way to the luncheon and looked horrendous.  The cake did get done in time and although it wasn't pretty, it was tasty. Here is the link to what I made but with regular icing, so easy, as long as you don't have an RV oven.

I was happy to use up all the tomatoes, but I just went out yesterday to the garden and got all of these...

I think another Caprese Salad is on the menu, or maybe tomato soup. Decisions, decisions. All I know is there is no room in my fridge.

Trailer Trash Tuesday

Trailer Trash Tuesday is to highlight the joys and nuances of living the trailer trash life. 

Don't I just look the part? 

No? I suppose I don't.  I guess I am a living breathing example of not judging a book by it's cover and if I am not a prime example, then my home is a textbook example:

While the outside isn't much to look at, we have made it a home.  It is our safe place from the outside world, a place to feel loved, a place to learn, and a place to have fun.

When me made the long move up from AZ to OR we joked around about being like the pioneers.  We even had one of the trailers we were pulling break an axle and had to stop for several days before we were able to continue on our journey. Like most things, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise.  We ended up having to sell our broken trailer and bought an enclosed one instead. This covered trailer ended up saving many of our possessions from the elements of OR.

So, when we were faced with needing to buy a trailer in which to live, we found it amusing that we ended up picking one with the name of Pilgrim.  The similarities of pioneers and pilgrims were not lost on us.  We both left our homelands in search of something better.  We seem to still be on that journey. We just got stuck for five years.

Our lovely Pilgrim home has many interesting features.  One that I was surprised about was our propane oven.  This little beauty measures in at 15 inches wide and from the rack to roof is about six inches.  It also hates cookies. Don't even think about trying to stuff a full sized chicken/turkey in there or a sheet cake pan.

Whenever I want to bake, I have to stoop down with a lighter, turn and push the knob on the farthest right and reach my arm way in the back to light the pilot light.  Then, I have to carefully turn the knob while pushing it in to light the rest of the element.  The propane element is located where you see the bluish light in the lower middle part of the oven.  The pilot light is way in the back.

Yesterday, I decided to roast some squash that we had gotten from DH's work and then cook a pizza.  The problem arose when we ran out of propane after the squash was done.  After changing the propane, the element and pilot light went out.  The oven was still super hot and we had to light it again.  It was quite amusing watching the hubs try to light the silly thing with an oven mitt on.  He eventually succeeded with my help. So, he was proclaimed hero of the day and made it so that the kiddos didn't just have to eat their veggies but got some pizza for dinner too.

While it is a pain in the butt to light my oven, I am still grateful for it.  I am sure that pioneers and pilgrims had a much harder time cooking and preparing dinner than I will ever have.  After all, it is still better than cooking like this:

Moral of the story; be grateful for what you have.  There is always someone who has or had it harder than you do.

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