Thursday, August 7, 2008

I Am JUST LIKE Ma Ingalls. If She Had A Freezer.

So, I already told y'all at my other blog about the joy of buying and eating fresh veggies but I have decided that we like them so much there has to be a way to get that fresh veggie goodness in the winter. Tom's mother used to can fresh green beans and those were the best green beans I have ever eaten IN MY LIFE. But I just can't see myself canning vegetables. For one thing, I'm a little, tiny bit lazy. For another. Well, I'm kind of scared of the pressure cooker.

But I decided that maybe I could, just possibly, freeze some fresh vegetables for next winter. I had a vision. My freezer would be packed with bags of colorful, fresh vegetables and I would take out a couple and whip up some homemade vegetable soup and some fresh bread and some homemade peach cobbler and then I would go down and chop some logs for the fire and possibly skin a bear so we could have a rug to sit on in the front of the fire.

OK, maybe just the vegetables thing.

Being the inveterate librarian I am, I started with research and found this web site. And it didn't look that hard. So, Tom and I went to the Farmer's Market and bought 5 pounds of green beans, along with tomatoes, strawberries, cantaloupe and peaches. And, can I just say? Is there a smell better than the smell of sun-warmed peaches? We walked by that booth and HAD to buy some. If they could just bottle that smell, someone would make a kazillion dollars.

So, here's what I started with. Five pounds of green beans.









It sure looked like a lot less once I got them cleaned and ready to blanch. And, are you suitably impressed that I used the word "blanch"? I know I am.




Green beans blanching. Which I guess. Actually just means boil. For a short time.




I popped them in ice water.




I put them in individual freezer bags in about one pound portions, which is right for the two of us. And I froze them.



I'll give you an update on how they taste after I cook up a mess of 'em. But I bet they'll taste pretty good. Especially if we eat them in front of that fire sitting on that bear skin rug.

4 comments:

Barbara Barr said...

How impressive. Just stick with the Ma Ingalls and not Ma Kettle! :-)

Unknown said...

I love canning veggies in the summer. I already have 3 dozen quarts of beans for this year!

Unknown said...

Freezer "canning" is fairly easy and fairly fast. Glad you have discovered the joys of summer vegetables in the winter. They are wonderful!!

Heather said...

Oh, they'll taste wonderful! A tip to make blanching easier: put the beans in mesh laundry bags. That way you can do several batches in a row, and all you have to do is transfer the bags from pot to pot to Ziploc bag. It makes things ever so much neater.

P.S. I totally want to see the bear skin rug.