Freeze Drying Foods

Basil is one of my favorite summer herbs, but I find it painful to have to buy basil to use in winter recipes when I grow it all summer. That’s why I freeze fresh herbs, so I can enjoy that fresh flavor if I don’t have an indoor herb plant at hand for my recipe. In this article, I’m going to share advice on how to freeze basil a few different ways.

Whether you like to use your homegrown green beans in a good old-fashioned green bean casserole or in modern stir-fries, learning how to freeze green beans for later use is important, especially when the garden is producing them like crazy. Thankfully, freezing green beans from the garden is an easy process, but there are some essential steps to follow for success. In this article, I offer simple step-by-step instructions so you can enjoy the fruits of your garden for many months to come.

 

Garden designer Alison Jenkins in her Somerset smallholding

Yes, you read that right – snowman hands. When I started teaching food safety practices to children I wondered how to teach them about proper hand washing. We all know how important it is to thoroughly wash our hands before preparing food, after touching raw meat and poultry or any other potentially contaminated surface. We can easily explain to children (and adults!) that singing happy birthday twice, while scrubbing hands, equals the prescribed 10 to 15 seconds that we should do while washing. However, how do you explain how much soap to use to create a good lather?? The answer: snowman hands! Use enough soap that your hands look like a snowman’s hands after rubbing them together! I have found great success with this tip while teaching children (and now my own children) to wash their hands properly. And guess what – it takes a good 10 to 15 seconds of scrubbing soapy hands together to create those snowman hands! Bonus to the singing of happy birthday while washing hands! So next time you are washing your hands, use enough soap to create snowman hands. This will help prevent the spread of food-borne illness (and those nasty cold and flu bugs too!).

Food Insecurity and Food Deserts are terms used in the news to describe society’s status with food.

Not going out for sit down dinners just yet? Did the pandemic increase your food delivery orders? Do you think about your food being safe during delivery? Has your twenty-piece entrée arrived with five pieces missing? Ordering food to be delivered right to your door is still a higher practice compared to two years ago.

One of my favorite native hydrangeas to use in the landscape is Annabelle Hydrangea (Hydrangea arborescens ‘Annabelle’). It is best grown in morning sun and afternoon shade. The white flowers bloom in late May through June on new growth. Prune it back in the late winter or early spring before the new growth emerges to encourage heavier flowering. After the white flowers fade and begin to dry, they turn a soft green color.

SO MANY GREEN BEANS, so little time. That’s how I always feel around now: how to keep up with the glut of one of my favorite vegetables. I don’t like them canned (all olive green and overcooked!) and they can lose crunch or get ice-encrusted when blanched and frozen plain, so I put mine up in canning jars in the freezer, doused in homemade tomato sauce. Read how I freeze green beans and many more garden-fresh goodies.

You can win one of two, three-book sets that I’ve purchased to share as prizes—no, not my old food-splattered copies, above, but new ones. Promise! All you have to do to have a chance in the truly random drawing (I’ll use the tool at random [dot] org to pick a winner) is comment below, and be a subscriber to my email newsletter. All the details are at the end of this post.Your comment should simply tell us what you like to put up for later from your garden or the farmer’s market—and it can be as simple as a sentence or include a recipe or a link to one; up to you.Tips and Tricks:Immediate ideas and tips on coping with the harvest can be had from these articles:What’s in My Freezer at Harvest Time: a Roundup of Ideas Making Pesto: Garlicky Green Ice Cubes Growing and Storing a Year of Parsley (good for many other green herbs, too) Dan Koshansky’s Hand-Me-Down Refrigerator Pickles Vegetable Curry-in-a-Hurry ‘Love Apple

In March, I outlined tactics–such as making sure things are well-watered before a dip in temperatures–and offered links to detailed frost-minimizing strategies in this story that would be a helpful read if you’re gardening in a blue zone as I am on the current National Weather Service map.This weekend, I pulled out all the stops (and empty pots, tomato cages, bed linens, garden carts, you name it…) like in the slideshow below, and got help to wheel my big potted Japanese maples–whose leaves are very sensitive to frost–back into the barn, where I overwinter them, but had set them free a week ago. Oops.(Click on the first thumbnail to start the slideshow, then toggle from side to slide with the arrow keys on your computer, or using the arrows next to each caption.)Always be sure to remove covers before the sun hits the plants the next day, even if another night of frost or freeze is forecast. Which means out I go before supper to re-cover everything and hope aga

Though some herbs stand up through the first frosts (like parsley and sage), I’m packing them away now in various forms in the freezer (that’s what all those plastic bags are: herb stashes, usually as cubes or dense rolls of leaves I can slice off chunks of later. My tactic. My herb-freezing career began with garlickly green ice cubes of traditional sweet-basil pesto, like the ones above. I make eight ice-cube trays full. I could keep winter squash around in storage here in the house for months, and I will with some of the most beautiful fruits. But I bake a lot of them now, cut in half or smaller on rimmed cookie pans, skin side up, and when the flesh is tender then puree and freeze it, meaning I’m more inclined to grab a portion for supper than if I have to start from scratch that night. Pureed squash is also great in soups and even on pasta or brown rice, or at least here it is.(Question: I have a bumper sweet-potato crop; anybody ever mashed and frozen those?)Gooey green-