Putting Up More Food

I might not be responding to comments this week. I may or may not have access to the internet. The problem with this week is that I have a fridge full of vegetables to eat and no time to eat them. So it is time to put things up for the winter again. No I'm not canning. If only I had a huge number of tomatoes or a large influx of cucumbers then the canner would come out.

But I did have a pile of Komatsuna. I keep thinking I would get the chance to eat it fresh, but the cherry tomatoes are stealing the show right now. It was time to get it into the freezer. A few of the plants had bolted, but no matter. The leaves are still quite tasty.

I separated the stems from the leaves. I cooked them separately since the stems take a bit longer. I chopped the stems into 2-3" chunks. Then boiled them for 3 minutes. They immediately got plunged into an ice bath. I use my salad spinner for this. It is easy to remove the vegetables when they are cool. Then I cooked the leaves for 2 minutes. After cooling those, I paced them into small individual serving containers and froze them. The containers take up way too much space in the freezer. I remove them once frozen and I put them into a ziploc.

Next came the chard. I had about 8 oz that I hadn't eaten yet. It got all cooked up too. The chamomile got dried for teas. I grated and froze (no blanching) the zucchini.

The tomatoes were more problematic. I elected to take much of the cherries with me. The plum tomatoes (Aliana and Black Moor) were peeled and deseeded. I've never done sauce this way before, but I figured I had so few tomatoes it would be fine. Boy did it take a long time. I think I'll stick to my Victorio strainer from now on. It makes it so much faster. The little bit of sauce was a bit amusing. Aliana is a yellow tomato and Black Moor is black as you might expect. So I had brown sauce. It was tasty, but not very pretty. I'm thinking it needs to be thrown into chili where it won't matter what it looks like.

The four little cucumbers weren't worth canning. However I keep a container in the fridge of premade pickle juice. So all I have to do is wash the cucumbers and toss them in. I'll do this until the container is totally filled.

The pile of beans were cooked up for dinner. The dinner sized portion was taken out and the rest was cooled down and put on a cookie sheet to freeze. Once frozen it will be put into a bag where I can take out however much I need.

The peppers were all diced and frozen. I don't blanch or cook them in any way before freezing. They just get tossed into a bag. I can take out little bits as I need them. I can only hope I get lots of tomatoes later in the season for salsa.

Whew! Now my fridge is mostly empty. Sometimes it just gets away from you.