Wednesday, August 29, 2007

storing garden vegetables

I usually don't store many vegetables from my garden, but this has been a pretty productive year. I suppose I often give up on garden work by mid-summer, but this year I have been keeping at it. (Good job, Kathy!)

So far if have stored:
frozen green beans
sun-dried tomatoes
basil pesto
dried soup peas

On my list to do soon are:
tomato puree
frozen roasted chile peppers
dried red chiles
frozen stuffed chiles
frozen grated zucchini
dried pinto beans

Basil pesto: Maybe my most important garden crop. I like to make sure we have pesto to last all season - until next years crop is ready. My recipe is here. This year we used a short cut and froze it partially prepared.

Peppers: I have MANY chile pepper plants this year and in this post and this post the comments list many contributed suggestions on how to store them. I will definitely use these.

Zucchini: I plan to experiment this year with freezing grated zucchini. (Got to do SOMETHING with it.) I have read that this works well for baking winter zucchini bread.

Dried field peas: These are the easiest! Just let them dry in the pod then shell and store at room temp in baggies. I harvested about a cup (1/2 pound) of Capucijner soup peas this year. The pictures are here. I will probably wait for cold weather to make soup with them.

My pinto beans are just starting to bud. Hopefully I will have a nice crop of shell beans, too.

1 comment:

Silli said...

I've been reviewing last year's posts trying to do some planning for the next few months. Did you try drying the zucchini and how did it turn out?
Thanks!