EATING FRESH ALL YEAR ROUND

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We have told the kraut and canning stories many times in the hope that they amuse and that they help others to go forward bravely to learn new things. Doing something for the first time is usually a bit stressful. After each misadventure I think we become a little more philosophical. After all, it wasn't the end of the world. It wasn't a waste of tomatoes either. Nor was it a waste of time, because we learned something.

What did we learn about the water getting into the jars? I'm still a bit puzzled because we have checked many books since and they all say the same thing. Perhaps we were going too slowly and the inside of the jar had cooled too much and in came the water. Deanna will fill in the details.

Freezing

We freeze peas, spinach, green beans, and broccoli. We have frozen brussels sprouts and cauliflower but our taste for brussels sprouts can generally be fulfilled by eating them in season. Their season is October through December if I can protect them from the deer. We are not big fans of cooked cauliflower so it is usually a fresh-from-the-garden vegetable with only about a monthlong season in late spring.

Freezing is really pretty easy. Pick the vegetables when they are at their peak and process them as soon as possible. For peas and beans this may mean planting more than you will use so that you have enough in a single picking to process. These two vegetables produce over a two-week season. A 25-foot row provides enough in one picking to make it worthwhile to freeze. Over the two-week period the 25-foot row will produce two or three times as much as we can or want to eat, however. We could plant shorter rows and hold the peas in the refrigerator while enough accumulate to process but they will not be as good as they can be.

Spinach is very cooperative. When it reaches its peak you want to move fairly fast as it won't be long before it bolts.

The actual "processing" in freezing takes place in the freezer. I mentioned people telling me they had success freezing corn on the cob doing no more than putting it in the freezer. I believe them. The preparation before putting the vegetables in the freezer is solely for the purpose of getting rid of enzymes that will cause the vegetable to deteriorate. Maybe if vegetables are frozen directly from the garden, the enzymes don't have time to get involved.

We prepare vegetables for freezing first by preparing them just as we would for cooking: popping, washing, cutting, or whatever, depending on the vegetable. Then we put them in a strainer that can be placed in a pot of boiling water. We have plenty of ice to keep ice water good and cold. We plunge the veggies into boiling water, which is called blanching, for a minute or two. The books say longer. Then we lift the strainer with the vegetables out of the hot water and plunge them into ice water for another couple of minutes. It sounds like a Swedish bath, doesn't it? Then the vegetables are dried on a towel and put into a freezer container of some kind and put in the freezer. They are spread out in the freezer so they will freeze quickly. That's, it.

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