squirreling it away #2: vegetables

🐿️🥕🫑🧅🥦🍅🌽🧄

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What’s up, squirrels? It’s almost September, and I bet you are drowning in that late summer produce. Tomatoes and zucchini come to mind as the obvious culprits — if you are growing them in your backyard garden, you are feeling especially annoyed with their innocent bounty. But there’s so much more that comes rushing into the markets at this time of year: corn, peppers, green beans, leeks, carrots, onions, and garlic are what I’m seeing lots of these days. And then comes fall 🍁🍂 with lots of other good stuff to chop and freeze — there’s just so much that you can do with a freezer full of that stuff your doctor is telling you you’re not eating enough of. 

I am perfectly aware that 50% of my previous ‘Squirreling It Away’ issue was about freezing vegetables, but those were cooked before freezing. I’m talking about freezing raw vegetables here. Especially for the times when cooking them just isn’t gonna happen, and you’re tempted to throw them in the trash or at least the compost. (Don’t worry, this happens to the best of us, usually when things have gone too far for too long.) But never fear, your vegetable surplus can be saved with very little effort. 

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If you’re like me, you have a hard time making separate vegetable side dishes or salads if prep time isn’t 5 minutes or less. Depending on the day, it can just be too much to both think of and prepare another recipe outside of your main dish when there is chaos all around or inside you. So why not stuff those micronutrient-dense little darlings into a freezer bag and pull them out for a later use, whether it be for a pasta sauce, a stir-fry, soup, or whatever?

“But, Sarah, don’t I have to blanch them and put them in an ice bath? That sounds annoying, and I don’t have time for it.” Fussy. No. Not for what I have in mind here. Freezing changes the texture of food, especially if it hasn’t been shocked into submission through blanching etc. But you can get away with less desirable textures after freezing —  as long as the texture of the vegetables does not matter for the end result of your recipe: chop chop, and freeze that shit. That being said, when the texture of the vegetable matters going from frozen to thawed, it is important to go through those blanching - ice bath - freeze on a baking sheet steps. I will do this for broccoli and green beans. But I’m not interested in that today, and I’m sure you aren’t either. Sometimes, ain’t nobody got time for that. 

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🍝 Red Pasta Sauce Veggie Bags: 

Okay, so I love pasta. I love red sauce. I love sneaking in a shit ton of vegetables into my red sauce. However, my red sauce is a true labor of love. It takes hours and hours to cook, and there is so. much. chopping. Last year, as I was learning what it takes to care for and feed an absolutely ravenous 18-month old, I quickly figured out how to prep the sauce for my little bottomless pit without spending all day in the kitchen. It would have been literally impossible for me to make more than one cut before having to run after my daredevil of a son (if you’ve met him, you know this kid was born to make me nervous), and I’d think why would I even attempt this in the first place? 

So nap time became vegetable chopping time, and I made sure that what I was chopping was going to be used for his favorite dish: “meat pasta.”