Yesterday I finally tackled all the produce I’d accumulated over the past several days. There were loads corn, about 4 pounds of fresh from the garden green beans, several zucchini, a few summer squash and 1 full quart of jalapeño peppers.
My neighbor at the Stafford Springs Farmer’s Market (JoAnn) is a font of information about preserving things/gardening etc. So JoAnn told me the easiest way to figure out blanching produce for freezing. She said to bring a large pot of water to a rolling boil, drop in the produce, as soon as it comes back to a full boil, remove the produce and immediately put it in ice cold water. That is so much more simple than the stuff I was reading online.
I prepared all the ears of corn and then I used my Bunt pan to cut the corn off the ears. I held the ear upright by putting the end of it in the Bunt pan flute hole. then proceeded to slice the corn off and it dropped right into the pan. No mess all over to clean up! We use corn pretty frequently here, but I’d say we’ve got about 4 months worth of corn stashed in the freezer now. Not only is it all fresh from the field and really sweet, but it cost me a whopping $5. Four months worth of frozen corn from the store would have cost me WAY more.
The green beans were also blanched, iced down, dried off a bit and placed in freezer bags too. And for the cost of a seed packet back in spring, I’ve got about three months of beans in the freezer. The zucchini was grated and placed in freezer bags for later use in zucchini breads (I’ve got a great recipe!). Now the summer squash, I did something a little crazy. I really, really don’t like squash. But I have discovered that I can sneak it into some things and never know it is there. I put half of a small summer squash in our spaghetti the other day and never tasted it! So I diced the summer squash into bits and into the freezer bags it went. Later, it will be used in soups, stews, chili, and spaghetti. We get the nutrients and I don’t have to taste it!!
Now we come to what I did with the jalapeños. We use them frequently in this house. They go in taco, dip, meat for tacos, chili, and a few other recipes. I can’t however use a full quart of the things before they’d go bad. So I diced them up into tiny bits and stuffed an ice cube tray full of the diced peppers. I know peppers don’t freeze well, but here is my hopefully ingenious thought; I finished filling each ice cube compartment with water. So I’ll have little cubes of peppers that I can pull out of the freezer and drop into the pan, the water is minimal and necessary in the recipes I’d use the pepper in anyway. Now, let’s hope it works.
It was a lot of work, but in the long run it will save us money and since everything was frozen within a very short time of it being picked, we should get all the nutritional benefits of fabulous summer produce. Oh, yeah and it was all purchased locally or grown in our backyard garden!