Preserving Your Harvest
One of the easiest things to do when you have more fresh produce than you know what to do with is to freeze it. A surprisingly large variety of fruits and veggies can be frozen “as is” or you can wash and chop them into a form that’s easy to pull out and cook with down the road. Continue reading
Preparing foods ahead of time makes it possible for you to save money on your grocery bill.
You can find fruits and vegetables on sale during the summer and into fall months when they’re in season and cheaper. It helps to know which are freezer friendly fruits and vegetables so you can plan ahead to fill your freezer.
Not all fruits and vegetables will freeze well fresh from the garden. Fruits can often be frozen without much preparation but the same can’t be said about vegetables.
Most vegetables will require you to blanch them for about 5 minutes and then dip them into ice water to stop the cooking process before they can be frozen.
Start by choosing fruits and vegetables you plan to freeze at the peak of ripeness. The food should be firm and without bruises to ensure the best taste when they are used in the future. Don’t be afraid to sniff the fruit to see how it smells which may indicate how it tastes. Continue reading
Freezing fruit and vegetables is a great way to make your produce last a lot longer than the shelf-life. It also protects your produce from spoiling and keeps it handy for when you wish to use it, avoiding having to spend a lot of money for out-of-season produce. Frozen fruit and vegetables can be stored in your freezer for up to one year, giving you a lot of time to use them up.
To freeze vegetables, it is a good idea to blanch them first. You can blanch the vegetables by immersing them in boiling water for up to five minutes. By blanching them, you are killing any bacteria that may be present. Some bacteria will be killed by the freezing, but many can tolerate very cold temperatures and flare up when you defrost the vegetables. Continue reading
Freezing foods allows you to enjoy them again at a later time. An important step is ensuring that the food will be able to be eaten when it is thawed. Here are some tips for properly freezing foods.
One of the greatest miracles is refrigeration. No longer did people have to only fix what they could eat right away. Salting and sugar curing did help protect meats but still foods went bad quickly. Many more people probably died from food poisoning than we know about from the days before refrigeration was utilized.
At even colder temperatures, food can be frozen. In this state it is kept for much longer. You can prepare something today and then eat it again in two months without any problem. Refrigeration allows foods to be kept at a temperature that would kill bacteria and also prevent them from growing and spoiling food. Continue reading
