If you read the soup post before this one you would know that I went out to the garden and picked some vegetables for soup.
We were expecting a freeze so I knew I had to pick what was left on the vine. There were not a lot but enough to make soup or a side dish.
I had a few left that I did not need in the soup and had no plans to cook right away so what should I do with them?
This post is what to do with those vegetables that you don't want to waste but are not enough to do much with. Save them for soup or a side dish.
We simply blanch them and freeze them.
All my canning, dehydrating and freezing are done by the Ball Blue Book because I get nervous when people do not follow the proper way to store food.
I highly recommend to pick up a trustworthy canning book.
What we do to blanch is look up the vegetable that we want to freeze and read the time needed to blanch that vegetable. I want to freeze my small amount of beans that was leftover and did not use in the soup I made. So I put on a pan of water, I washed, stung and snapped my beans and then put a pan of ice water to the side because when we blanch food, we immediately immerse it in cold water to stop the blanching.
The beans have been dropped into the boiling water and the timer was immediately set to three minutes. I keep spooning the beans down to make sure they are blanching.
Since I was not blanching anymore, I poured the beans into a colander.
Then put the beans in the ice water for the same amount of time I blanched them, three minutes.
The last few seconds on the timer, scoop out the ice..
And drain.
I put mine on a clean towel to blot out some of the water..
Then put them in a freezer safe container. These are the BPA Free plastic containers that I use.
Make sure to Mark and date what is in the container.
Those of you that know we are doing the 1943 history project for one year know that this is not 1943. We are continuing to do our study as usual but when it comes to wasting food, I must step aside and do something like this because it makes sense. In 1943, people would have canned their green beans at harvest time then left the later beans on the vines to dry and used some of the dry beans to cook with in the winter and also to plant next years garden.
So I did that too. Here are my dried beans I left on the vine. The green ones I picked for soup and blanching were beans that just kept making but it was about to freeze so all of them had to come off the vine. We have had a lot of rain so our dried beans on the vine look a bit spotty but the beans are still ok.
Here are 24 bean seeds out of just three dried beans for next years planting.
I hope something in this post helps, Grandma Donna
