Twenty - Food Preservation: Freezing

Renest had a great post about reconnecting with the skills our grandparents possessed, but that sadly, with modernization, these skills were almost lost with the next. I know with the green movement there are many cooking from scratch and growing their own gardens, but what happens when the garden grows well and we are left with too much?

We can eat scalloped tomatoes until we a blue in the face, or give away food to family and friends, but we can also can and freeze so that we can enjoy some of the wonderful local goodness when the snow covers the ground (wow, I don't even want to think about it).

Canning, sadly, seems like a scary endeavor to me. There are many steps and one slip can spoil everything -- literarily. I hope to have a post someday about my adventures with canning, but that may have to wait for next summer when our garden is bigger and our need is greater.

Instead, we will freeze. I feel that I have never learned to utilize my freezer. Now we are freezing milk and stalking up on things like bread when they are on sale, but that's about it. (Of course, there are always Amy's Bowls and a frozen pizza, but that's not quite what I mean.) So today I start. I am making a batch of tomato sauce from scratch and am going to freeze it. Yum!

First I have to skin and seed the tomatoes. There are simple directions here if needed. Then you make the sauce! I am going to make plain sauce so that I can change it up and add to it when I make unfreeze it for meals later. When it's done, I put it into a plastic bag and put in the freezer! Make sure you label it and put a date. It will last about three months. Here are some tips and recipes for a fresh tomato sauce from the Smitten Kitchen. Deb really puts my pictures to shame, but she is really in the business of food porn. :)

Putting the sauce in the freezer is also helping to make our freezer more efficient. From The Green Year by Jodi Helmer again, your freezer and fridge are responsible for up to 1/6 of the energy used in your home. I definitely believe that here in the apartment. Keeping the freezer full actually helps to increase its efficiency because there is less space to trap the warm air that enters each time you open it (though not true of a full fridge--overstocking a fridge is less efficient). Since we are not just going to run out and buy 100 frozen pizzas (though Guthrie would not object to that), we are going to add a couple of jugs of distilled water we have left over from a botched detox attempt (you can see a jug in the picture below).

Also, remember the milk carton ice block idea? Guthrie and I walked to a friends for dinner last night (thanks, Aaron!) and used the ice block to keep the cheese and wine chilled on the steamy trek across the park.

Peace!