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| A typical day's harvest at the moment. |
Our refrigerator has finally filled up enough with fresh veg that it was time to start putting some away for the future. I started with the beans because they are by far the easiest. We are growing two plants each of yellow, green, and purple garden beans. That makes for a fist-full or so picked every day. I added about that much to my ramen at lunchtime today but there was still a lot leftover. So into the freezer the rest of them go! Each bean got lovingly rinsed, trimmed, dried, and gently shoved into a quart size freezer bag. No blanching, no muss, no fuss.
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Yellow bean on the vine. |
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| All clean! |
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| Bagged up, labeled, and ready for the freezer. |
Before I got too busy cleaning beans, I put a pot of water onto the stove to boil. Once I had the beans all bagged up, it was ready for blanching squash. Summer squash takes a little more prep before freezing. I had two types of squash to put up - the patisson strie melange and the yellow zucchini. I cut the patisson into chunks and blanched them for five minutes. I cut the zucchini into thin wedges so they only got three minutes. After their hot baths, they all dried a little on kitchen towels. Then I spread them all out on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper and put them into the freezer. Freezing them this way makes it so they stay loose pieces once frozen. I can take out just the amount I want for a meal and leave the rest frozen if I want. I can also add more to the bags later down the line if/when we get overwhelmed with fresh squash again. After a couple hours, I was able to break them up into individual frozen chunks, put them into freezer bags, and returned them to cold storage.
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| Two varieties of blanched summer squash ready to freeze. |
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| Bagged, labeled, and back into the freezer. |
I'm still happily enjoying my cucumber-a-day habit, but that's not enough to go through them all before they start to turn on us. So, I did a couple of things with our abundance of cukes - I made a creamy cucumber soup for dinner this evening and I made some freezer pickles. |
| This is starting to get out of hand! |
Many of our cucumbers have grown into Mobies (what we call the cucumbers that have managed to grow whale sized - Moby Dills!). Fortunately, we've had nice consistent rain this season, so none have turned bitter even as they grew humongous. They are all actually still quite sweet and tasty and made a wonderful soup. I took the four largest, peeled them (which I normally don't do but I'm following a recipe here), scooped out the seeds, diced them up, and put them in a pot with onions, garlic, a little lemon juice, vegetable broth, salt, pepper, and a dash of cayenne. Ten minutes of simmering later, I added some fresh parsley and whirled it all together in the blender. Into the fridge it went to cool. Just before serving, I whisked in some Greek yogurt to make a creamy, slightly spicy, cucumber soup. So good!
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| It might look like apples, but those are cucumbers! |
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| This is such a delightful, flavorful, cool soup! |
And finally, I used six more cucumbers to make quick freezer pickles. I sliced them up, added garlic and dill from our garden and a few red pepper flakes, and poured on a brine. They'll sit for about a week in the freezer before we can try them, but I've made this recipe before and they turned out well. That leaves seven cucumbers untouched, but that seems more manageable.
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| I love a simple freezer pickle! |
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| Sleep tight proto-pickles. I'll see you in a week! |
All of that took a couple of hours and now we have plenty of space in the refrigerator for more fresh produce. I expect it will start to fill up again very soon!
