Putting Vegetables Up

Ah!  Gardening is so relaxing.  Why, look at this pastoral scene.  I'm sitting on a concrete bench in the shade in an area we call the grove, and I'm looking at the garden growing.  The sweet potatoes are vining, the cucumbers are blooming and producing.  The yellow squash and zucchini are yielding such that we can barely keep up.  Same with the snap beans.  The corn is tasseling in the background.

There are times that gardening is relaxing.  It is rewarding, to be sure.  But once you plant it and harvest it, the work is not done.  In fact, you've got to eat it, give it away, or preserve it, because you'll flat run out of room.  You can't sit around once it's harvested.  There's work to be done.

We're on the third picking of the snap beans, and I picked a fourth time today.  We plant Contender green beans and Purple TeePee beans (just to keep things interesting).  We washed them up and chilled them and while they were still fresh, snapped off the ends.

Green beans are one of those things that are just favorites of everyone.  Even if you aren't a vegetable person (we all are), if you have someone a little finicky, well, they'll eat green beans, especially if you cook them with some tasso or bacon or sausage to amp up the flavor.  We did cook some for the Mother's Day meal, but the rest of this portion of the harvest, we'll freeze.

To freeze them, you'll want to blanch them.  This stops the enzyme action from breaking them down.  It also keeps a great texture and vibrant color.  Except for the purple beans.  they turn dark green upon blanching.  We blanch for 3 minutes.

We immediately ladle the blanched beans into the kitchen sink, which is full of ice water & ice.  This stops the cooking process.

Once completely cool, we drain through a colander.

And then we bag them all up in quart-sized zip loc freezer bags.  This is the perfect size to pull out of the freezer and voila, you have a side dish that only needs to be warmed up.  Best part of it is, it is healthy, fresh, and delicious.

The second picking yielded ten quarts of beans.