Summer Freezing

The garden is keeping me busy in the kitchen.  Since I’ve been getting multiple questions on how I preserve some of our garden goodness, I thought I’d share.  My other long-winded posts on the back burner are not complete or remotely edited.

There are 2 types of freezer cooking, and I do both.  The one kind is making casseroles or meals and freezing them so you just have to pop them into the oven.  The other kind is freezing what I’ve heard some cookbooks refer to as “building blocks” to meals.  These can be sides, or just raw vegis frozen ready to throw into a meal.

The second type is what I’m working on these days.  For instance, here’s what’s going on with the tomatoes:

I wash them, slice them in half, lay them in a 9×13 pan, drizzle with olive oil, and roast at 350 degrees for roughly 2 hours.  I’ve done more, I’ve done less.  You basically want to cook them until they shrivel and look like this:

I suppose you could do it less, but I like a really concentrated sauce.  When they look like that, let them cool a bit, throw them in the food processor and puree them up, skins and all.  I’m pretty lazy about skins.  Then measure out 1 cup portions into ziploc baggies (buying the freezer kind really does make a difference.  In a pinch I’ll use regular ziplocs but I always have to use them first because the food in there will get a freezer flavor after a few months).

This building block is a great add on to a beef stew or soup.  It doesn’t make it taste tomato-y but does give a richness that you try to place.  It can also be put into homemade spaghetti sauce, lasagna or marinara, or whatever else you use tomato sauce for.

Corn:
Our sweet corn is ready, and I think it’s the best corn on the cob I’ve had in years.  We don’t grow sweet corn commercially.  At this point the vast majority of our corn is made for ethanol.   The guys always do one section of one field for sweet corn that we all eat and share.

So besides having corn on the cob, we freeze a lot for the whole year.  It’s my mother-in-law’s recipe for creamed corn, and it is so popular in my house that guests that we have frequently will often request it before they come.  It’s super good.

Husking an insane amount of corn and slicing off all the kernels is a job, so we kind of have a party of it.  Knut’s parents and his sister and family, as well as his grandma come over for the morning.  Linda, my mother in law, is often the one who cuts the raw husked corn into 9×13 pans.  We fill them up pretty good.  At this point with what my family eats, I make 5 pans for the year’s supply.

When a pan is full of corn, you add a whole stick of butter cut up, and a whole pint of half and half.  I didn’t say this was a healthy recipe.  I said it was a really good one.

Set your oven to 350 and bake for 1 hour.  When the corn has cooled, dish up into quart sized freezer bags.  To reheat you can just put the thawed corn into a pot and heat up, or reheat in the oven.  We reheat on the stove 95% of the time, although in the oven is very yummy.

Other vegis are easier.  For instance, with our peppers, we just wash and dry them and throw them into a big gallon ziploc.  If you cut them when they are not completely thawed it’s easy to remove the insides.  We do this with bell as well as jalepenos.  Green beans are easy as well, as I just wash, dry, and snap them.  Well, I’ve handed over the snapping beans job to Silje and David.  They do a nice job of it.

I didn’t get enough peas to freeze, so we’ll have no garden peas this winter.  I can almost hear the sighing disappointment I’ll hear from Knut when he sees store bought peas on his plate.  He’s a bit s-p-o-i-l-e-d or as we say in my family a “honeylamb.”  When I do have peas, I use the technique that my mother in law taught me, and that’s to blanch them (that means boil them for a very short amount of time) and then spread them on a cookie sheet to freeze.  When they are frozen hard on the cookie sheet, scrape them off and transfer them to an ice cream pail or gallon freezer bag for storage.  This method freezes the peas separately so you can scoop out the amount you need instead of thawing a whole bag at once.

This post might explain why I have so many 9×13 pans.  They don’t get used every day, but this time of year, if I have any less than 6 in the house, I’m in trouble.  I like the glass ones to have on hand for the other type of freezer cooking.  They freeze a great lasagna, and you’re not supposed to freeze meals in the pans with non-stick coating as it will ruin your finish.  Glass baking pans are great for that, as long as you don’t put your meal straight from the freezer to the oven!

Some other day I may share the chocolate chip bar recipe I also made yesterday to sustain us through the preserving day.  It’s Knut’s cousin/farm partner’s wife’s recipe and it’s a layered cookie bar with the top layer being a brown sugar meringue.  Yum!