Peas Kor
If you’re like us here at Torley Manor, then your freezer doesn’t get used too often except for the occasional pint of Soy Delicious and/or roll of GimmeLean, and of course the obligatory tray of icecubes. Beyond that we aren’t usually much for the pre-prepared frozen foods, so we have plenty of room to freeze veggies from the garden for the long Pittsburgh winter.
This year we are getting an early start with a shipment of peas from my parents’ garden out in Quakertown. The two of them had eaten and frozen about all they could for the season, thus sending us off from our visit home with a grocery bag full of peas. Took 1/3 of the bag to Dirty Pete at work. The rest I sat back in the cafe and shelled tonight. We yielded 4 boxes. Not bad at all.
I know a lot of people when they think of storing food from the garden, they think of canning, which can be a bit more of a process. But with things like peas and string beans you can easily just freeze them. However, it is recommended that you prepare them first. For peas, simply remove them from the pod (tho’ you can freeze them in the pod if you want) and then you will need to blanch them, which is basically a process of cooking them very briefly.
The best way to blanch them is to get a blanching pot. Basically this is just a large cookpot that has a smaller strainer/collander style pot that fits inside it. In the larger pot, put water on to boil. In the collander pot, put your peas (or beans or whatever). When the water in the large pot boils, submerge the smaller pot in the boiling water. For peas, leave the peas in for about 1-1.5 minutes. Remove the peas and then immediately either rinse under cold water or dump into a pot of cold water for 1-2 minutes to stop the cooking process. Then pour the peas into freezer boxes (small takeout containers also work well for this, just make sure they make an airtight seal). Make sure you let everything cool off completely before sealing up and putting in the freezer.
Last summer we were able to fill the freezer up with frozen string beans and ate well throughout the winter (we are just finishing up the last boxes of last year’s crop, just in time for this year’s crop to arrive). Even if you don’t garden yourself, its worth buying up a extra big stash of goodies from your local farmer at the farmer’s market and stashing some good local produce in the freezer for those long winter months. Trust me – its much better than eating the frozen veggies from the supermarket or the veggies shipped in from halfway round the world in February.