Tomato paste: you can open those little cans, use two tablespoons, and then store them in the refrigerator or the freezer. Then two weeks later, when the next recipe calls for one tablespoon of tomato paste, you can get out the can and find it to be a) moldy, or b) really frozen.
Oh, I've tried those toothpaste-style tubes of tomato paste. I once bought one at a snooty Italian market that was two years past its expiration date, a fact I only noticed much later (note--I really love that British term "expiry" instead of "expiration"). But I find I can't really get along without tomato paste when I'm making Italian things.
I am pretty fanatical about not wasting food. It isn't about money now that I'm middle-class and have enough to buy whatever food I want. It's that someone grew those tomatoes, and other someones then slaved at the tomato-packing plant, and real people trucked the cans to the grocery store. Maybe it's because we're gardeners, and that I come from a wheat-farming background. Being wasteful with food feels so much worse to me than other sins.*
What we really need is freeze-dried tablets of tomato paste, each equaling a tablespoon. Or bubbles of tomato paste in a strip of soluble gel pacs. Surely our society is up to this challenge? Any other ideas?
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*This writerly excess made me Google sins, and I find that my Lutheran upbringing didn't really qualify me to rant about cardinal sins as opposed to the more mundane vices. I had it all confused with the Ten Commandments. I can clearly see that some sins are more attractive than others, but I can also see that the finer distinctions are best left to the experts.
