Spinach, Blanching and Freezing

My spinach is ready so I cut a small amount to show how to blanch and freeze it. It's a lot more efficient to do this in larger batches, but I cut just a small amount to show how you do this. It's very easy, and a simple text explanation would probably suffice, but I know that pictures and step-by-step directions are helpful.

After cutting you want to wash the spinach well. Spinach has all kinds of nooks and crannies for dirt to hide. After washing your sink well, place the spinach in the sink and move it around in cold water.




Start a pot of boiling water and after the water starts to boil, pour the spinach into the pot




It will shrink down to almost nothing. Boil it for one minute, then remove it from the pot and dump into cold water to stop the cooking process.

Now you want to drain it, and drain it WELL. First I drained it in a colander


I even went as far as placing it on a CLEAN towel and squeezing more water out of it.

Now all you have to do is place it in a freezer bag, or freezer container of some sort. I like to use my FoodSaver vacuum sealer




ALWAYS label your freezer bags/containers. The few times that I haven't, I have regretted it. Six months later you don't want to pull something out of the freezer and wonder "What the heck is this, and how old is it?"



So, as you can see, blanching is easy. The only thing that varies is the amount of time you hold it in the boiling water. Things like broccoli/cauliflower take about 3 minutes, but something thin like spinach only takes a minute.

Blanching slows or stops the action of enzymes in the plants. While the vegetables are living, enzymes cause vegetables to grow. If vegetables are not blanched, the enzymes continue to be active during storage causing off-colors, off-flavors and toughening of the vegetable.

I grew a lot more spinach this year than I usually do, just to try freezing as much as I could. Spinach doesn't grow well in hot weather and normally I get to eat it only for a few weeks. I hope to extend the spinach-eating this year!

Spring 2010 Garden Update

As you can see above, I cut my first salad this past Wednesday, May 5th. I use May 1st as a target date; last year it was about April 28th, the year before it was about May 5th. As I have stated before, I like to harvest my first salad at about the same time most people are thinking of breaking ground and buying seed. I'm fairly competitive, even with my gardening. I think they should come out with a full-contact gardening Olympic event.

Here I am cutting my first spinach, lettuce and pulling a green onion for salad



The two rows of green in the pic are two different plantings of spinach. I grew a lot of it and hope to blanch/freeze some of it.

You can't see it in the pic but in the back row is garlic, in between the two green rows are a couple rows of onions. I'm going to plant more onions from sets because I end up eating so many pulled early for green onions for salads.

My taters are popping through the ground too. Yukon Gold was the variety I planted this year. I've had pretty good success with that variety, and can't wait for my first 'new taters.'

Every year I try something new, and this year it is kale and collards. They popped through the surface just in the past couple of days. I just discovered collard greens this year, and really like them. I cook them with a piece of bacon added to the pot, then add vinegar to them when I am ready to eat them. That's how I learned to like spinach when I was a kid, the vinegar really made it good.

I also have Bibb and a Black-Seeded Simpson lettuce that are ready to be cut. You have to plant lettuce and spinach early, they don't do well after things heat up outside. I usually plant these early veggies about mid-March here in central Ohio.

Sugar Snap peas are an edible-pod pea variety and I planted two 10-foot rows of those, each row on other sides of a trellis. I trellis them with a couple of 2x2 posts with wire strung between the posts. What I don't eat fresh I blanch and freeze, then vacuum pack.

I have grown herbs for a number of years now, but increased my planting this year. Usually they are limited to my small herb gardens, but planted a couple of 10 foot rows of basil, and a row each of cilantro and parsley right in my veggie garden. I think I might be able to sell some of them at a local farm market(?) Even if I can't sell them, fresh herbs are a great gift and I will give a lot away to friends and neighbors.

Purple basil is something I discovered last year. It can be used as any other basil, but I infused vinegar with it and it looks beautiful. The vinegar turns a beautiful purple/pinkish color and has the basil taste also. So I am growing it again, but this year I am growing a row that is about 6 feet long.

Most of my perennial herbs are doing well again this year; sage, oregano, lemon thyme and lime thyme, chives (and some garlic chives.) I planted tarragon last year, for making tarragon vinegar, and didn't realize until this spring that it is a perennial also. It came up with a fury and my tarragon plants are already a couple of feet tall!

Tarragon:



I planted a LOT of sweet basil this year. I like to use it fresh in cooking, but a good way to use it is to make pesto. I make large batches of it then put it in ice cube trays and freeze it. Then I put the cubes in freezer bags. I can already taste it spread on a piece of homemade Italian bread, or a dollop of it in a pasta dish.

Here is one of my two little herb gardens as it looked the other day. I will plant a few more things in the spaces that are open. The 2 potted plants are my babies, my bay trees. You can't beat fresh bay leaves for cooking and you won't go back to store-bought, dried out bay leaves once you have tried the fresh ones.



The fall is when you are supposed to plant garlic, and I usually do plant it then. However, it just didn't work out this past fall, and I planted the garlic early this spring. If you plant in spring, the bulbs are much smaller compared to autumn-planted garlic. I had some HUGE garlic bulbs the past couple of years, and I am kicking myself for not planting it last fall. Oh well, there's always next year...

Just for kicks and giggles, I planted a line of Mammoth Sunflowers in the back row of the garden. That should look pretty nice, and they produce quite a few seeds for eating, roasting, etc

The temperature is supposed to go down to an overnight low in the high 30's this weekend, so I am going to wait to plant the maters and peppers. I can, however, plant broccoli and cabbage any time now, they tolerate cool temperatures very well.

My grapes (Concord and Catawba) are growing well too, and showing small flowers/bunches already. I need to spray them with Mancozeb soon, this will help prevent what I think is called black rot. The grapes will form normally, then almost overnight a black spot appears on the end of the grape and the whole grape dies, and dies quickly. One day you notice a spot on the grapes and in a couple of days your grapes are gone. It broke my heart when that happened a couple years in a row until I discovered Mancozeb.

I think I am losing my favorite tree, my sour cherry. Last year the leaves formed then a large number of the leaves just wilted, and I didn't get any cherries from the tree. This year it appears that the same thing is happening. I need to get a picture to the extension office or some other experts for their opinion of what is happening.

So the garden is progressing. I'm eating out of the garden already, but still have things to plant as soon as I can, and when the weather permits. Things are getting pretty exciting for this gardener!

Freezing Broccoli

I cut broccoli tonight for the first time this year. It really is growing well this year; one of the heads was at least a foot across!

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Last fall I bought a FoodSaver vacuum sealer and it is really going to come in handy with freezing vegetables. I have already used it to freeze meats, and did some pea pods with it a couple of weeks ago.
The first thing that you need to do before you freeze broccoli (and many other veggies) is to blanch it. This is simply dipping it into boiling water for 3 minutes, then plunging it into a clean sink full of very cold water. The cold water stops the cooking process immediately. Blanching stops the action of the natural enzymes in the vegetables, enzymes that could cause discoloration, off-flavors and toughening of the vegetables.
The vacuum sealer is fun and easy to use too. The bags come in rolls and you cut off the amount that you need. Then you have to seal one end of it:

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Then I place the amount that I will use in one or two meals, any more will probably end up being wasted.

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Then the remaining open end of the bag is placed over the sealing strip of the sealing unit.

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Then close the lid and turn it on.

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In just about 20-30 seconds it sucks all of the air out of the bag and seals the open end with heat.

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I always mark the bags before I freeze them with the date and contents.

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Without much air in the bag, the contents will last much longer and without much danger of freezer burn.

We be jammin' (Strawberries)

I love berries. LOVE them. Strawberries are far from my favorite berry, but they rock because they bear fruit so early in the year. For probably 20 years now I have been making jam and always look forward to picking them in late May/early June. I usually make 15-20 pints of jam and freeze anywhere from 5-10 one-gallon bags of them also.
I have been picking strawberries since the mid 80s at a nearby place called Jacquemin Farms, http://www.jacqueminfarms.com Kerry Sullivan (married name, she's one of the Jacquemins) told me the farm started out as a way to save a little money for college. It's quite an operation now, and they have ventured into many other farm-market products. I'd give my left leg to have a place like theirs!
My son Weston and I went to Jacquemin's this past Saturday and picked about 15 lbs of strawberries. I hope to get there at least twice more at that rate.
Here's Weston doing what he does best when we go there:

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Which leaves me to do the picking

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Actually Weston does a pretty good job, once he fills his stomach.

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I freeze about half of what I pick, freezing is easy. There is one trick that I have learned, though. If you place them in freezer bags you will end up with a solid block of strawberries. However, I place them on a cookie sheet and freeze them on the sheet first:

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After a couple of hours in the freezer I place them in the freezer bags and they don't stick together. This makes it easy to use only a few at a time, or as many as you want, versus using a sledgehammer to break up the frozen block of berries.

We be jammin
I use Sure Jell Light to make strawberry jam, with less sugar being used you taste more of the berries instead of all the sugar. It's a lot more expensive than some other pectins, but it is extremely reliable.
A microwave oven is a simple, fast easy tool to use to sterilize your jars and keep them warm until you pour the jam into them

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Place about a inch of water into each clean jar and microwave them until the water is boiling. Then I use my microwave's "Hold Warm" option to keep them warm until ready to use.

First, crush the berries, a cup or two at a time, in a bowl until you get the required amount of crushed berries. It was 6 cups for Sure Jell Light's recipe. I use a coffee mug to crush them, using a glass would be dangerous if it broke, but you can use almost anything

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I don't crush my berries much, the boiling that comes later breaks them down enough already, and I like chunks of berries in my jam. This is what they look like after I crush them slightly:

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Jam and jelly recipes call for EXACT measurements, so I use a butter knife to smooth off the remaining sugar in the measuring cup:

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In the recipes you will read what is described as a 'full rolling boil'. This is a hard boil that does not reduce when stirred, and looks something like this even when stirred:

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I sterilize my lids in a small separate bowl in boiling water for five minutes, then keep them on the burner turned to low to keep them hot until ready to use:

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The green rod in the picture is a magnetic lid lifter (sounds like an Acme product that Wile E Coyote uses!) which is an invaluable inexpensive tool.


When the cooking has completed according to the pectin recipe instructions, quickly ladle the jam into jars, leaving an eighth of an inch of headspace(the remaining empty space in the jar)

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I dont think today's recipes call for this next step anymore, but I still do it. I turn the jars upside down for about 5 minutes

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Then I turn them over and label them. I do this the easy way, with a Sharpie, writing directly on the lid, but sometimes I get fancy and make nice labels with my computer.
We eat a lot of it at home, but jam makes GREAT gifts, and I give many of them away during the year.