FREEZING VEGGIES IN TEENSY LOTS

[kappydell]

I have a raised bed garden and its space is limited, so there are no mass pickings and no mass preserving sessions.  Instead, everything is preserved bit by bit.  

For example, our usual picking of snap beans is around a cup (two handfuls) every other day.  Unless I want to eat snap beans every other day, something needs to be done to preserve them.  Enter the freezer.

Many years ago I learned about a style of freezing called "sheet freezing: which is used to keep frozen pieces of food from sticking together.  Instead they are spread on a sheet, and frozen individually, then stacked and bagged for longer terms.  It works on just about anything, including cut up vegetables, and I use it to freeze those beans.  I remove the bean tips, break them into eating size pieces, then blanch them as usual for freezing.  Since I am only blanching a little bit of food, I can just use a saucepan on the stove and boil them to blanch as I make lunch.

 

Then, after cooling, they are spread on a nonstick baking sheet with sides, or in a shallow cake pan, which is placed flat in the freezer. I actually hae a designated freezer pan that fits well in my over the refrigerator freezer.  I stir the food pieces a couple of times during the day, and when they are frozen hard into a freezer bag they go.  I move the larger bags to the big longer term freezers as they fill up.

 

Cup by cup, bit by bit, I fill that freezer bag, then start another.  This freezing tactic works for creating mixtures of frozen vegetables as well, and also allows me to remove less than a full bag of food to cook.  I keep a bag of diced green peppers in the freezer door where I can just take out a tablespoon or two at a time to toss into other foods as I cook.  How do they turn out?  Like the bulk bags of frozen bags in your grocers' freezer.

 

Easy, neat, frugal.  I like all three.  And when you have a smaller garden, it is a good way to preserve some of that goodness for later.

 

Edited June 3, 2020 by kappydell

[Ambergris]

I have done this, but green beans frozen one by each do thaw a lot faster during blackouts.  A LOT faster.  Also, freezerburn tends to creep in faster.  My current thing is to freeze a paper or rubber cup at a time, or a few cups at a time, and peel off the cups to chuck into a gallon bag.  DS1 prefers to fill sandwich bags, freeze them on the biscuit pan, and use the gallon or two-gallon bag as a file box to keep the sandwich bags collected.

[Jeepers]

I've done it that way with strawberry and blueberries too.