This morning has been all about preserving garden goodies. I started out with tomatoes. I’ve been roasting and freezing them lately so that I can make roasted tomato soup this winter. I harvested a huge tub of beautiful tomatoes.
Then I washed them, sliced them in half lengthwise, and laid them in glass baking dishes. I’ve found that it’s best to coat the inside of the baking dishes with coconut oil first (or some other oil that works well at high temps). Otherwise, cleaning the pan afterwards is a two hour job. Trust me on that one.
My counter runneth over.
And you can see a big bowl of whole tomatoes in the upper left corner. I used all of my baking dishes (and all my oven space) but only had room for about half the tomatoes. So I’ll be starting another tomato roasting session this afternoon.
I put all of those dishes into the oven – preheated to 375 degrees – and let them roast for about 90 minutes. The kitchen smelled nice.
While the tomatoes were roasting, I bagged up some peppers that I had frozen last night. Peppers are pretty easy to preserve. I chop them up, spread them on a cookie sheet, and put them in the freezer. Once they’re frozen, I use a spatula to get them off the cookie sheet and dump them into a bag. It starts as this:
Then they get chopped and frozen:
And ends up as this, perfect for sauces and stir fries this winter:
Once I finished with the peppers, I moved on to chard. I made another trip out the garden and filled that giant bowl with chard:
Apparently I also harvested a lady bug and a wasp, both of which were returned to the outdoors, since I doubted they wanted to be blanched or frozen.
I washed, chopped, and blanched the chard in four batches, and now it looks like this:
I haven’t counted lately, but I would guess that I have about 60 of those bags full of greens in the freezer. My hope is that between the cold frame over one bed of greens and the bags of frozen greens, we won’t have to buy greens at all this winter. Right now it seems do-able, but winter lasts a long time, so we’ll see.
Once I had finished the peppers and greens, the first batch of tomatoes was nicely roasted.
Once they cool a bit, I’ll put them in jars and freeze them. I prefer to use glass for food storage whenever I can, and roasted tomatoes work pretty well in glass jars. You just have to make sure they’re not too tightly packed, and leave them room to expand as they freeze. But it would work just as well to store them in ziplock bags in the freezer.
Now it’s time to get cracking on the second batch of tomatoes. I love seeing our freezer and pantry shelves fill up with food from our backyard. Fall is definitely in the air these days. We’re starting to see nighttime temperatures in the 30s, so I’ve got a fire under me to get the garden harvested as much as possible before it freezes.
Hope you’re all having a wonderful Friday!
Diedra B says
winter does seem to go on and on sometimes. I’m trying to get myself mentally prepared. And I suppose I should stock up on long johns too.
Anyway, thanks for the pepper freezing suggestion. I had found some peppers on the discounted cart at the store. It was about 5 for 99 cents. So I bought and chopped and froze them in a ziploc. But I didn’t like how soggy they were when I tried to cook with them. I had done onions too. Same result.
Does freezing first and bagging later eliminate the sogginess?
Frugal Vegan Mom says
This is so inspiring – I hope one day to have more freezer space (and more garden space!) and spend my days doing the same as in this post!
Frugal Babe says
Diedra,
Freezing the peppers on a cookie sheet first and then putting them into a ziplock bag just makes them easier to take out of the bag when you need them. If you freeze them in the bag, you’ll probably end up with a big lump of peppers all stuck together when you want to use them. By freezing them first, you can just dump out whatever you need and put the rest of the bag back in the freezer.
I just froze a bunch of onions (the ones from our garden that had soft/bad spots on them and needed to be cut up instead of just stored in a box). I didn’t put them on a cookie sheet in the freezer though, since they have such a strong odor. Instead, I froze them in ziplock bags, but flattened out so that the bags were less than 1/2 inch thick. So each bag is sort of like a flat brick of onion pieces. Should make it easy to break off a chunk when I need them.
I like frozen onions and peppers, since it’s an easy way to store them and makes it simple when I need to cook with them. But after they’ve been frozen they’re really only good for cooking. They wouldn’t be much good raw, since they won’t be crunchy like the fresh versions after they’ve thawed. For stir fries and sauces (where the veggies would get cooked anyway and lose their raw crunch), they work great.
Meg says
This is awesome! I will have to remember these tips for next year’s harvest! This year, I gave up with the garden after all the weeds took over.
Last weekend, hubby and I went to an orchard and got 135 lbs of apples for $15!
I started peeling/coring them this morning and have my first batch of crockpot applesauce simmering now. There will be apple cake, apple butter, apple crisp, apple pie filling, applesauce, apple chips, apple dumplings, etc. Some of the above items will be made into gifts this Christmas.
At the end of the season, would you take a picture of your freezer and pantry?
I am truly envious. Great work!
Darla says
So jealous of all your tomatoes! We planted over 20 tomato plants, but this summer in Oklahoma was horrible! It was 100+ degrees for 3 months flat and the temp didn’t even drop below 80 at nighttime. Way too hot for tomatoes to do anything. If we’re lucky we *may* get a handful of cherry tomatoes before the first freeze.
Laurel says
Why do I suddenly crave a great big salad? Nice work — looks wonderful.
Jaime says
Another vote here for a picture of your freezer and pantry! :)