How I Turned a Potential Waste Into a Frozen Bonanza
SAVE MY GRAPEFRUIT!
Thinking Outside the (Grapefruit) Box
I don’t know about you, but I hate to waste anything, particularly food.
This was the first time in 20 years or so that the grapefruit on my Texas Ruby Red tree fell off in bunches and didn’t stay on the tree till picked.
I gave some away, but since I was used to eating it most of the year, if not all year - leaving the grapefruit on the tree is a perfect way to preserve them, which doesn’t take up refrigerator space.
Near the end of the year while the tree is growing new grapefruit the old ones start to get a little dry. So as not to waste any, I peal them and separate the sections. Then I pull off the membranes to the sections that have become tough and eat the rest.
Did your mother teach you to cut the grapefruit in half with the ends on the outside? Then use a grapefruit knife or serrated grapefruit spoon to separate the sections? And you could never scrape up all the fruit left in the half shell. What a waste! That always bothered me.
While I was working at a job with and without children at home, I learned to make all my lunch salads on Sundays. Then the night before taking it to work in order for it to not get soggy I would add the protein and the dressing.
Suddenly I made a discovery about the grapefruit. Mom would never have thought of it. I cut the grapefruit the other way, from stem end to the opposite end. I learned to quarter the halves, peal away the rind, then pull the sections apart and cut them up with my grapefruit knife. I used to use a quarter of a grapefruit and put it into my set of 6 small lidded Tupperware containers, enough for the week. Later I started using the whole half of the fruit. I do that today unless I want to cut up more and use a larger container.
It’s a good thing I became adept at preparing the fruit in this manner, as when I have to do several at a time I am able to do it fairly quickly. I take the rind, slice them into smaller pieces, and scatter them under the fruit trees in my garden, my backyard farm. Let them break down and feed the soil. One of these days I will see if I can candy them.
Because I had so many grapefruit in shopping bags and the bucket, I needed to take care of them before they spoiled. The idea was to keep a container in the refrigerator to draw some sections it from daily. But what about the rest? Without checking with Chef Google, I just decided to try freezing them. It worked for the pommegranate.
I set up my processing station on a stand in front of the television in the family room. I had a large stainless steel bowl, a soup bowl and a saucer. At the ready were my serrated tomato knife and my grapefruit knife. Then I rinsed off 3 or 4 grapefruit and got to work, listening, half-watching my programs while I did this. After all, it’s not the most scintillating activity. About 7 or 8 grapefruit at a time were all I had patience for and could manage.
My fingers got sticky, there was juice on the table, the stainless steel bowl was full of cut up rind and some seeds, and my hands were tired. What were the other two dishes for, you ask?
I use the saucer to do the cutting in half and quartering and saving whatever juice falls into it. Yes, I rinse the fruit off first. Then I do the peeling over the soup bowl, as it is wider, again, to capture all the juice, which gets poured into the container. Or, I might just drink it. The bowl is also where I cut the sections into chunks.
I filled two 4-cup containers for the freezer, and another just for the refrigerator, from which I could take some out before each meal, keeping up on my Vitamin C. I then switched to quart-sized freezer bags, which accommodated 7 to 8 grapefruit, depending on their size, and is easy to store.
How did it come out? Right now I’m eating the defrosted sections in the first freezer batch. WOW! I can’t even tell the difference between fresh and frozen. Just plain yummy. Can you guess that I love grapefruit?
That’s what the Frugal Kitchen Warrior does. She solves kitchen situations. It may take years to come up with something new, but then turning back the clock to the time before the idea is impossible. Why didn’t I think of it sooner? Perhaps just because I had no need. What’s the phrase, “necessity is the mother of invention”? In this case, it definitely was. A no-waste outcome.
