Bits and Pieces

I'm learning about storing veggies, or in some cases refreshing my memory. Freezing is easy. Clean the veggies, chop them, blanche and cool them, put in clean containers. Label with name and date. Use within a year. The difficulty is my small freezer.

I have tomatoes on my kitchen and livingroom windowsills, livingroom table, in my fridge. A month ago, it was yellow squash. Some of the tomatoes I'll cook with basil and other seasoning then freeze to use in soup. Some I hope to can.

I dry dill and oregano. That works really well. I couldn't find oregano at any nurseries this year, but I grew and dried enough in 2005 to carry some over.

I won't dry the chives this year; they end up being tasteless with a texture like toothpicks. I'll freeze them in icecubes. Maybe I'll use dill, chives, basil and garlic to make flavored oil and/or vinegar using a canning recipe I found in a book from the library.

Most of the basil will go into pesto. The recipe I use can be found here:

http://www.pallensmith.com/index.php?option=com_recipes&Itemid=113&func=detail&id=296

In case you're wondering, blanching is dropping a measured amount of the fresh vegetable into boiling water and leaving it boil for a prescribed amount of time, often it is four minutes. In the "wild", enzymes cause the fruit to slowly decay, drop to the ground and dry, releasing seeds for the next generation of plants. Boiling (heat) denatures the enzymes (and maybe other substances) that cause the vegetable's gradual degradation even when frozen. It doesn't cook them, unless you blanche too long. This turns them to mush (cooking), and you obviously don't want that. A site I use for information on growing, cooking and storing each vegetable is:

http://www.urbanext.uiuc.edu/veggies/

I didn't get photos of my lily or dahlia in time. Some of my other flowers:



http://www.flickr.com/photos/happydancer4